You’re asking lemmy about centrists….. that’s like asking MAGA about liberals. (Or asking lemmy about liberals)
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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Or asking liberals about liberals...
DAMN LIBERALS, THEY RUINED LIBERALISM
I think this is probably unanswerable because it's subjective. No one can agree on where the center actually is.
Election trolls love to espouse the view that the Democrats, the left most of the two major American political parties, is actually a right wing party. I'm sure the usual idiots will be along in a moment to proselytize.
Obviously however, if there are two points on a horizontal spectrum, one will be on the left and the other on the right.
As if I summoned you from the ether, here you are.
A lot of the centerists you call far right are also getting called far left by the right. Centrists tend to pick and choose left or right or neither on each issue individually and don't pick sides.
Believe it or not, there are right beliefs that are not far right Nazi beliefs, the mundane day to day stuff. Genuine belief in lower government control and lower taxes for example. Unfortunately we didn't see any of that come true with this presidency.
And to be clear, I am a leftist, but one who believes in human free will. As long as you genuinely believe in doing the right thing and not harming others, we can debate all day on what exactly that looks like, but the minute it turns into the usual grift, I'm out.
Most people want the same things - they just disagree how to get there.
Which makes it important to think and speak about goals, not measures. If — for example — people screaming for deportation of (to them) undesirables would instead think about what they hope to achieve with it, at least some of them would end up with problems close to them they need solved for a personal better life and those could typically be solved by other, less hateful, means.
Yes, the problem for the right is that their non-Nazi beliefs are wildly unpopular so they have to boost the signal with racism.
I often mention there used to be some sanity in the right but they have been abandoning principle since way before trump. I feel like you sorta need to go pre nixon to get back to where they should be. I know I for one will not accept the republican party as just a political party at this point as I feel they violated the constitution as a party. If conservatives find themselves and put up a new shingle and show a commitment to principles again I might accept them as legitimate.
I think the main issue is that Left & Right really shouldn't be a thing.
You can be Pro-Gun and Pro-Abortion, it should really be issue specific.
The two party system fucks us, or the US at least, which then fucks the rest of us
it's not a US specific thing.
It's a human being thing. People just want a reason to dismiss you and hate you, rather than talk to you. Political beliefs are just the latest thing people get upset about.
decades ago it was race or religion. but folks are less racist and less religious, politics has replaced it as the go-to reason to dismiss people as awful and evil.
and on lemmy, well, centrism is evil because everyone here thinks they are the sole source of all correct and good views on politics and anyone who disagrees with them is right-wing because they are good and right-wing is evil. as you can see from most of the comments here.
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Even further for many things there is a question of absolute national do it anytime and letting local juristictions decide. So folks can be like absolutist about something or more locality while being for something. So basically being pro or anti can be a bit more in between itself.
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You're better off asking somewhere where actual centrists congregate, rather than Lemmy where there essentially only different flavours of left-wing.
But critical to any understanding of this topic is that the terms are all relative. There's no "true" centre just like there's no "true" left or right - these terms only make sense in relation to each other and to established norms. A centrist is therefore someone who has views that are somewhat in the middle of mainstream politics for their context.
Leftism has always suffered from a lot of internal division and purity testing, so when you ask in a very left-wing space like Lemmy, centrists will always be accused of being right-wing, but so will anyone who isn't a raging communist - they've failed the test so they're with the others - the right-wingers.
This is the correct answer.
I'm probably further left leaning than the vast majority of people I know, but I'm for sure not as left as what it feels like your average person on Lemmy is.
Why I hate being left sometimes
I probably consider myself Center-Left but much more left than center
I’m about as far left of everyone I know, but according to the kids here- I’m a bootlicking boomer centrist. So…. It really depends on where you are nowadays.
I feel 100% the same
I feel that way. Left of center but if I go a direction its going to be left of where I am.
I feel the exact same. But even suggesting you're more towards the center would get you attacked on some places like Lemmty.
Just the video shows
I don't mind being attacked like that. helps with my block list.
Do you have any particular views you're in the center on that you feel strongly about?
I am a immigrant.
I feel countries should have strong immigration laws, and that immigrants should integrate into the country they move to if they plan to stay (at least somewhat, not completely)
I've learnt the language and way of living of where I migrated too but most don't.
Basically I mostly agree with the Denmark model on immigration. https://youtu.be/W2b5z1FJTs8?is=fz9Kfp2XvT4mvkpb
Many EU countries have handled migration badly, which just fuels the far-right, and then everyone suffers anyway.
I'm pro LGBTQ, pro-abortion, Socialist, pro-wealth distribution etc.
So I'm mostly left, but not on everything.
Makes sense
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Have you ever noticed how many terms there are to describe the left? You can be communist, socialist, tankie, liberal, leftist, progressive, and all the various flavors of each.
If you're right-wing, you're just part of "the right" no matter what your beliefs are. Weird right?
It's almost like there are people out there who want to promote right-wing solidarity while promoting as much division ans discord to their opposition as possible.
There actually is a lot of hard-right infighting, as well. It's not an exact symmetry to the left, but groypers vs. TPUSA or whatever happens. It's certainly not that they're uber-geniuses that have silently infiltrated the whole left; there's a grain of truth to the toothless hick stereotype.
The fact is, activists tend to be difficult, and shitposters difficult at least online, and, if you get enough difficult people in the same place, they will cause drama.
the problems is the folks in those camps are directly opposed to each other.
and they all argue that each other is not left, because of that.
they have no common set of beliefs.
I think the left does it to themselves, the video on my OG comment jokes about this actually. I hate it
A true centrist is someone who considers both left and right positions carefully, then sides with the right.
Centrism is rarely a coherent ideology and to most people it's seen as the "default" or "starting" position of politics. In reality, issue by issue, there is rarely a coherent 'in between' position. Centrists tend to be politically naive, and navigate the world by intuition (they call it common sense). The Right dominates people who think this way.
You just described the entirety of .ml and that pseudo-progressive movement on lemmy pretty succinctly.
The only thing I’d add is how it’s all a made up front to look like they are active and committed to a belief, but when it comes time to do anything meaningful at all, they cannot be bothered.
Their entire ideology can be summarized as: just a bunch of words on the internet.
Sorry, no. Politics is about tradeoffs. The defining tradeoff of politics is how you balance individual freedom from interference, with public services like public transport, sanitation healthcare. Most people would prefer to be left alone by the government and to be able to get on with their lives, but most people would also like there to be a social safety net and convenient things like buses and trains which can only really be tackled with government involvement.
But in order to have sanitation, say, you need people to drive bin lorries, and so you need to convince people to drive bin lorries (maybe by paying them, or maybe by punishing people who are allocated to driving bin lorries by the government and don't do it) which involves a curtailment of freedom - either because the government is taking money off its citizens, or punishing people who don't do what it says, or whatever. There will always be jobs that people want to be done but don't really want to do if given a completely free choice.
And so, there is a tradeoff: how much does the government interfere to make those jobs get done? Whether it's charging taxes or job allocations, the better you want public services, the more the government interferes.
And because it's a tradeoff, there is a continuum of reasonable positions. It's not that you can only consistently think we should have Marxist-Leninist communism, the state tells you what job to do and if you refuse you are sent to the gulag, or an anarcho-capitalist hell-state where nobody ever collects the garbage because nobody wants to pay for it.
And that's only the most important tradeoff - there are infinitely many other tradeoffs where fulfilling one shared goal impinges on another and how you resolve it can be expressed on a continuum. People tend to have a broad direction on all of these - left wingers prioritise public goods over individual freedoms (but still think both are good), while right wingers prioritise individual freedoms (but still think both are good). Even the MAGA "healthcare is communism" morons still think that there should be healthcare and transport and so on (they just disagree about how it should be provided and paid for and what form it takes). Even the communists think freedom is good as long as it doesn't interfere with some greater goal.
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It doesn't have to be an ideology.
People don't fit neatly into boxes or necessarily have to subscribe to an ideology fully.
Centrilsts might be politically naive yes, but that doesn't just make them Right wing automatically?
you're trying to be rational and thoughtful here.
that makes you an evil centrist, clearly.
the people on lemmy here don't want to discuss things, they just want to label you as awful for not being as politically hardcore or pure or whatever as they believe themselves to be.
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I'd say a centralist is someone who wants things centralized.
But yes, some people describe themselves as centrist when they mean "I don't view my positions as extreme but neither do I care to justify them".
And some people describe themselves as centrist when they're politically apathetic.
And some people describe themselves as centrist when they have a grab bag of views and don't feel they fit neatly in the right or left wing.
And some people describe themselves as centrist because they're contrary and can't bring themselves to agree with anybody.
And, very rarely, there are people who describe themselves as centrist because they are in the process of changing their mind.
I consider myself left of center. Because the us is dominated by center (dems) and far right (rep). Our center appears to be in between the actual center and the far right. Or right of center. That makes me seem like some uber liberal by our media standards for wanting universal healthcare, progressive taxes, and regulation so that we live in a safe and pleasant environment. Now like news nation has tag lines like fox news used to. fair and balanced. news for all america. what they are talking about is the media center or basically giving both the center view and the ultra right view. So they call themselves a center viewpoint but its a right viewpoint.
A centrist is someone who believes that there even is a such thing as a center. Everything is relative, and those who call themselves centrist are more often than not just pushing the Overton Window to the right.
what do you call leftists who call each other centrists because the aren't left enough for each other?
That's just good ol' fashioned Leftist Infighting™.
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