Astronomers tell us the stars we see in the night sky died many millennia ago. Their light has spent eons crossing the emptiness of space. To us, they still seem to glitter and shine, but were extinguished long ago.
Oh, c’mon dude. Stop muddying the waters. If you are afraid to own up to the Leftist or Progressive or Populist label, go join Hillary out in the woods somewhere. You can’t call a pig a horse and expect anyone to believe it.
Centrism and it’s evil identical twin, “pragmatism,” are the smokescreens pseudo liberals hide behind to obscure their enthusiasm for the status quo drift to the right.
Hillary: Single-payer “will never, ever come to pass.”
Schumer: "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
Totally agree. When you stand in the middle, you’re going to get smacked down by a rushing vehicle moving towards your left or right.
The point of this insidious and contentious system our founders created for us is to end up in the center–not start there. The center only holds because there’s friction between the left and the right. How stupid is this question?
Although this article is a very accurate synopsis of big parts of the political landscape of the past three decades, it needs to address the broader context of “the center” and “centrism” wherein the corporations and politicians they own keep moving the center further to the right, to the extent that if Richard Nixon tried to seek the Democratic Party POTUS nomination during the 21st century, like Sanders, Kucinich, and others, he would be marginalized as “too far left to be electable”. The GOP would attempt to have Nixon deported if he came anywhere near them today.
Can you imagine the outrage from Democrats and the GOP in 2017 if things like anti-trust, endangered species, OSHA, EPA, Amtrak and other progressive Nixon era legislation were brought before them ?
Self-avowed Centrism is just another way of hiding from the public, your Right Wing beliefs.
Hillary Clinton was a perfect example.
As Jim Hightower so aptly said, “There’s Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.”
With the US now being politically polarized there really is no significant centrism. Joseph Lieberman and a few others have tried to establish a formal centrist political entity but I doubt if that will succeed. Whether someone is left or right or center seems to depend on the observer, almost like time in Einstein’s theory of relativity. There are people on the left who see Obama as a centrist whereas there are people on the right who see Obama as being pretty far on the left. The same is true for the Clintons and so forth. And as the right has shifted further right this is now more true than ever.
“Bipartisanship” is the other code word that frequently means “the two major parties decided to do what is best for themselves and their donors … and screw the people”.
My definition of centrism goes like this: Elected democrats pull to the center in order to ideologically serve the “majority”, which must include some fair proportion of conservative thought. Elected republicans, OTOH, have no compunction to serve even a majority of republican rank and file because their basic ideology of “individualism” leads them to believe individual citizens have the constitutionally protected, rightful liberty to exploit the majority. Democracy isn’t so much “majority rule” as the majority is served. Republican officials see themselves as individuals elected to make decisions regardless of the needs of the majority. I make this basic distinction between Left and Right: Democrats proclaim democracy for everybody while republicans embrace individual greed, criminality, racism and elitist misanthropic warmongering for profit via the exploitation of natural and human resources.
If you call it “centrism”, Hillary and “centrist Democrats” will use that language to take over the movement. Why don’t you call it Progressivism? My problem is the word, “centrism”, not the principles behind what you describe.
We have a centrist leader. His name is Bernie Sanders. Did you ever hear Bernie talking about seizing the means of production? No! He just wants capitalism to play nice and respect human rights and needs,
Okay
…my answer to this question …to this article …NNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOO…how is that for not being in the middle …
So…that I got that off my chest…I will explain …if anyone thinks we are going to fix …say CLIMATE CHANGE …by sticking to ghe middle …then you are delusional…first of all we r not goung to fix it for we humans …anyway…but we could try to make theright choices for THE PLANET AND OTHER LIVING BEINGS…Like what…one might ask …
Like…shutting down every single nuclear power plant in the world…it takes approximately 40 yrs to do so…to decommission …then we could turn our economy inside out … by getting rid of the fidiculous …wasteful productsactivities… …that r killing thid planet … ecom
Hillary was a Goldwater Girl. The Goldwater that wanted to use nukes on Vietnam. Where does that come from? Here’s a guess.
The Central Ward of the Insane Asylum in Central City, Centrisistan.
" Rabbi Joe " is a old, Jewish jerk. You can put 10 lbs. of pancake makeup and 3 tubes of lipstick on him and he’d still be an old, Jewish jerk. There’s not a sincere bone in his body. Remember his vote against a public option and being a consigliere to OhBummer? What a guy.
Tony Blair is just worthless.
