Centrism

From WEST COAST REACTIONARIES: Consequence Time

Centrists and milquetoasts, your era is over. Your question is, do you want a society of honest labor, god, and traditional European/American values? Or do you want a society of transsexual Africans forcing you to pay a white privilege tax? Embrace one of those two, or embrace actual, brutal nihilism, and all that entails. This soft core apathetic mild embrace of nothing is not long for this world.

He says that the centrists’ time is over, yet the empirical evidence suggests it’s not. A someone who reads many articles a day and is ‘plugged’ into the digital ‘Zeitgeist’, centrism is thriving as measured by social media shares and page views. The author’s understandable opposition to centrism may make him more inclined into believing centrism is dying, but it’s not.. The author may be conflating the positive/descriptive (the world as it is based on facts and empiricism) with the normative/prescriptive (how the world ought to be), assuming that the latter implies the former. ‘Centrism is bad, therefore it’s dying’.

It was really easy to be very cynical, “radically centrist” and practice a sort of softcore comfortable nihilism ten or fifteen years ago. Go to the mall, buy a house on a mortgage, and complain about how the mainstream left or the mainstream right are essentially mismanaging the end of history, because there is no point, but the beauty of this arrangement is, there didn’t have to be a point, as long as there is a suburb to run away to, and good living conditions to come home to.

I think he may be confusing nihilism with indifference, apathy, or the belief in predestination. A nihilist has no values, but someone who resigns to the fact change is impossible, may still have his own values and preferences, but doesn’t seek to impose them on others, and he may not believe that his values are superior unless otherwise suggested by the preponderance of empirical evidence to be so. A centrist who is intellectually honest may change his values, preferences, and opinions when the facts and empirical evidence changes. Inaction and or a positive/descriptive approach to understanding is not the same as being a nihilist. Centrism may be simply the path of least resistance. Why get all worked up about things if the status quo tends to prevail, but second, the status quo may be right in certain instances. Take the national debt and bank bailouts, for instance, which many predicted in 2008 & 2009 – some of these prediction motivated by emotive partisanship – that it would cause hyperinflation and a debt crisis. Instead, the opposite happened: treasury bonds yields keep falling and the dollar is stronger than ever. The ‘status quo’ not only prevailed, it was correct in terms of being the best descriptor and predictor of reality. In other instances, such as the post-2013 SJW backlash, the status quo failed, and I was correct in early 2014 in seeing that trend, and is an example of where I depart from the status quo in supporting the backlash but, furthermore, one can argue that the backlash is merely the pendulum swinging back to the middle, or a return to centrism. Also, being a centrist and or adhering to an empirical-based approach doesn’t necessarily make one a welfare liberal. Based on the empirical evidence, we have an entitlement spending problem that needs to be addressed, a view many conservatives agree with. Then I transition from the ‘positive’ in which I describe the spending problem to the ‘normative’ in which I offer solutions. In confronting reality, there is room for both the prescriptive and descriptive, and one need not summarily reject centrism.