America sucks. Israel sucks. Capitalism is collapsing. Kill all slave owners. Fuck the police. Fuck centrists. Fuck landlords. McDonalds tastes like piss. I think rich people should be in gulags. Crackers can’t cook. The Dems let Trump win. You probably can’t even read this because your education system is gutted.
David Adler, from the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics & International Relations, published a study in 2018, that demonstrated that in surveys of their views “centrists” were meaningfully, contrary to conventional rhetoric, more anti-democratic, least supportive of democratic institutions, and most supportive of what he classifies as “authoritarianism”.
(That catch-all term again, I know)
It’s not very long (it’s mostly survey results and graphs) and you can read it here.
I do think that you could argue that this is a manifestation of their ideology being predicated not on a fixed ideology or particular material reality, but on an almost gnostic belief in their own position as being simply ‘the right one’ and therefore all others being inherently worthless or even malevolent. It’s essentially the divine right of kings but for self-defined superior wonks.
The benefit of having an ideology that’s so rootless and immaterial is that you can shift to whatever position is neccessarily to maintain the status you create for yourself. The downside is that its immateriality means that it’s a mirage, an illusion of a position, and so any alternative beyond its current makeup cannot be valid, but also the illusion cannot exist without defining itself against them.
All outside perspectives become an existential threat and can only be proclaimed to be untrue and from bad actors. Your material experience of the economy is wrong, everything’s great! Views beyond my centerist consensus can’t be real people, it must be disinfo spread by bots! Jewishness is definied by my narrow defininition the ‘correct’ amount of support for Israel in this moment! Yes, we wrote articles for 20 years about the worrying influence of neo-Nazism in Ukraine, but they’ve all just stopped being Nazis and are democratic patriots! History is sacrosanct until it differs with the personally beneficial version I was taught! We believe in science until listening to scientists on the climate or Covid would negatively influence my lifestyle or stock portfolio! And so on.
Always a pleasure to see concepts well-explained. Thanks for this, much more precise than whatever stumbling articulation I was trying to get to haha.
I think mine is a little bit stumbling and inarticulate myself actually. I’ve had too much coffee today and not enough sleep last night.
Yeah i always regret interacting with Lemmy only via my phone, I feel like it limits how well I’m going to be able to express/ articulate, but in any case I appreciated how you framed it—was useful to improve / expand my thinking on it.
No problem. Happy it helped!
Here’s a relevant George Carlin joke/quote about this exact psychological concept that has always stuck with me:
Ha, spot on. A good analogy for the centrist mindset.
I’m glad you liked it. Unfortunately, I feel that it’s broader than that and speaks to general human nature. I think the issue becomes when some people weaponize this conviction that they are at just the right level of whatever scale they’re measuring against.