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Liberals are not 'the Left'... (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

most people in conversation about US politics don’t use liberal that way. The word has evolved from the meaning you prescribe to it.

Hm — it feels like more of an uneducated misappropriation than an evolution of the term. Funnily enough, when the "right wing" types use it with a negative connotation, it really doesn't paint them in a good light — they are speaking negatively of things that they posture themselves as being in support of.

If someone (consciously or unconsciously) decides they will peg their beliefs on the center of the Overton Window that is fundamentally a different thing than taking a set of ethics, morals, and policy knowledge and building a political perspective from the ground up.

Sure, I agree. Keep in mind that the latter can still place one in the Overton Window, though.

Centrists by and large are ideological cowards

Why? They just have beliefs that put them in the center of the left/right dichotomy. Is one a coward for not being polarized? This point is almost moot, though — centrism is rather nebulous and ephemeral.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Centrists by and large are ideological cowards Why? They just have beliefs that put them in the center of the left/right dichotomy. Is one a coward for not being polarized? This point is almost moot, though — centrism is rather nebulous and ephemeral.

Because it is the mechanism centrists use to arrive at their political beliefs that is cowardly. They don’t tend to start from a perspective that arises from their empathy and curiosity for the world and build their politics based on that, they look at the spread of opinions people have around them and just go right down the middle where they can disappear into the crowd without having to do the hard work of creating an actually ideologically rigorous belief system that adheres to reality and evolves with it.

A rightwing fascist emphatically cheers on the genocide of Palestinians (and Jews for that matter confusingly), a leftist emphatically declares genocide is a wrong and a human rights violation. One of those is a dangerous world view that needs to be resisted with force and the other is a world view of harm reduction and solidarity with all humans. What makes most centrists so cowardly is that they take both of those viewpoints as reasonable starting positions and average them to emphatically supporting "some genocide!" and it is incredibly pathetic.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

[Centrists] don’t tend to start from a perspective that arises from their empathy and curiosity for the world and build their politics based on that, they look at the spread of opinions people have around them and just go right down the middle where they can disappear into the crowd without having to do the hard work of creating an actually ideologically rigorous belief system that adheres to reality and evolves with it.

This is essentially a false generalization, or, more generally, just conjecture, unless you have proof that it is the case that that is what centrists do (arguably, it's virtually impossible for that to be the case).

What makes most centrists so cowardly is that they take both of those viewpoints as reasonable starting positions and average them to emphatically supporting “some genocide!” and it is incredibly pathetic.

I don't really understand your point here. Are you claiming that a centrist supports some amount of genocide?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I don't really understand your point here. Are you claiming that a centrist supports some amount of genocide?

Yes