The enlightened centrism is strong in this one. No, the US don’t have a conflict of left vs. right. The conflict is between the right and everyone else. And most of the right are just rubes who think they being part of some kind of movement but in reality are just being fleeced by a bunch of grifters
Not just the right vs. everyone else, the right vs. everyone. The right is also fighting itself.
I’d say the curve it’s much flatter on the left side. As in right side is shouting tankie, meanwhile there are like 2 tankies and the right wants to set the whole barn on fire to get them both.
Not left or right, but above
Doesn’t directly bringing up “enlightened centrism” (I assume sarcastically) from a non-right position indicate disdain for centrism? That would be a conflict between whatever you are and both centrists (for not being where you are - right of you, but to them, still left of the Right) and the Right.
Also, if you’re aware of the Three Percenters and their claim that only 3% of colonial America supported the revolution, it means that even if they’re off by a factor of 10, with 30% for the revolution, and 30% against, it leaves 40%, a plurality of people, who have the sentiment from this meme where they just want to be left alone and not forced against their will into a conflict that indroduces instability and violence to their lives.
Letter from Birmingham Jail, MLK Jr.
“Enlightened centrism” is not the same as centrism and yes that label is meant to be sarcastic. There are basically two kinds of enlightened centrists. One are right-wingers who want to avoid the social stigma of being far right. The other one are people who close their eyes to the blatant attempt by the right wing to destroy democracy and pretend everything is normal. That’s what basically the corporate media are doing.
Uh… fucking cope hard. The Nazis won’t care about your enlightened centrism when they arrest you for being brown and/or the wrong kind of white.
This is bullshit
Trying to pretend that there’s a concerted far-left effort to create civil war in 'Murica is patently absurd
Sure, there may be a handful of nutters, but they pale in comparison to the number of far-right who are actively lusting for the blood of the people they hate and fear
It also tries to downplay political division “in real life”. In real life, the American president is a fascist serial-rapist pedophile directing a masked police force to deport legal residents without due process, illegally deploying the national guard against citizens, and grifting shitcoins and accepting bribes in plain sight.
Yeah fuck this post. The only ones driving it are the far-right. You’d have to be ignorant to be blaming liberals for the crap going on today.
Trying to pretend that there’s a concerted far-left effort to create civil war in 'Murica is patently absurd
Idk man, I spent altogether too much time over in .ml, and now my view on what is “far left” has changed quite drastically. And that group certainly seems hell bent on starting a civil war.
There are absolutely far more MAGAs, but the tankies are, unfortunately, still far left.
If you think lemmy is immune to outside agitators, then you’re kidding yourself
I’m certain that there are interested groups trying to whip up a few lunatics so that “the left” can be pitted against the right, and blamed for violence, but there’s no doubt that there’s a far larger audience of people in the US who are eager to lean into fascism and spill blood when they are encouraged
If you think the next US civil war will be fought between Nazis and Marxist-Leninists, you don’t understand American politics very well. The US in 2025 isn’t Stalingrad in 1942.
Nitpick: They’re Marxist-Leninists, not Marxism-Leninists.
Ideological polarization is actually pretty low among average Americans. It’s mostly felt among the highly politically engaged and politicians. So to that extent, this image seems accurate.
This can be attributed to a method of gaining and maintaining political power called divide and conquer. Poisoning the discourse with targeted manipulation in (social) media, while treating politics as kind of bizarre and grievous reality TV show, where everyone is trying to throw the biggest pile of verbal shit on the other.
People need something else to focus on. When everything is politics then politics is everything and it’s stupidly difficult to get people interested in doing anything positive.
I mean, everything is politics whether anybody likes it or not, because politics is just what you get when you have a hierarchical power structure.
And this is what I mean. Everything is very much not politics but if you politicize everything then by definition it becomes so. People need to stop doing that.
What’s an example of something that’s not politics but is politicized?
Wait does bellend mean at the end of a bell curve?
Bellend means penis tip cos it looks kind of like a bell
I would have never guessed
Double entendre.
No its what german dogs do.
Maybe if you mean this as the left vs the left… sure.
you will, with that attitude
When I have centrist views about anything (not just politics but more trivial matters like pop culture), I’m reluctant to share them online because extremists on both sides interpret you as an extremist on the opposing side
Centrist views such as? grabs popcorn
No seriously, what do you happen to be sitting on the fence about?
I don’t care from which side to peel banana
This will be fun to watch.
That’s still an oversimplification. In reality political opinion varies across a spectrum; it’s not just hard left, hard right, or no opinion. My own views for example are a little left of centre with a leaning towards liberty (i.e. away from authoritarian). So of course I get called a nazi by the hard left, and a tankie by the hard right, both of which are utter nonsense.
You’re not wrong. But in your meme you painted all the people calling for civil war as extremes when for a while it was a pretty average sentiment among the right for decades. They were just doing it more quietly twenty years ago
Centrism doesn’t mean sitting on a fence. It means most of the time understanding that both sides are right and wrong at the same time, I often see the problem identified correctly but the solution that is prescribed is absolutely incorrect.
Here are some centrist positions.
We need to stop unfettered immigration, so closing the borders is great, locking up and kicking out immigrants who have committed legal offenses is good, and we should expedite that process but we shouldn’t be kidnapping or profiling people. We shouldn’t be giving economic assistance to illegal immigrants. I know it doesn’t happen at the federal level but it does happen at the state level.
Banning guns won’t solve the violence problem, guns don’t kill people people kill people. American violence is caused by inequality and lack of mental healthcare. Solve that instead of taking guns away.
We should have higher taxes, universal healthcare and stronger safety nets but also much less regulation because most of it is actually designed to protect the incumbent corporations. Free the markets as much as possible, but never bail out a single corporation that fails, bail out the employees.
Increasing the minimum wage does nothing.
Instead of relying on underpaid immigrant labor the US should stop giving cash and tax subsidies to farmers and instead directly subsidize their wages by paying the employees directly. This is my middle of the road solution, we should actually consider nationalization of farms. One of the few things where that could work right now because I think nationalization in general leads to terrible mismanagement. But farms are already inefficient, corrupt and mismanaged and also living on the government tits so we might as well.
Justifying things as “scientific” when the science is social science and the results are not reproducible is intellectually dishonest, and is rampant in discourse about various topics nowadays. The academia brought upon themselves the mistrust they have garnered. This is good because universities have become job training centers and they were never meant to be that, so maybe we’re due for a little creative destruction.
I could continue, but I got shit to do.
We need to stop unfettered immigration, so closing the borders is great, locking up and kicking out immigrants who have committed legal offenses is good, and we should expedite that process but we shouldn’t be kidnapping or profiling people.
This is literally what modern fascism is made of. It always starts with “expediting the process” and “immigrants who committed legal offenses,” but these terms are so malleable that you will relatively soon end up at the kidnapping and profiling stage. And let’s not get into how so-called “unfettered immigration” (which is actually pretty fettered when you look at the process) harms exactly nobody if handled properly, as many examples (e.g. Germany) show.
but also much less regulation because most of it is actually designed to protect the incumbent corporations.
What kind of regulation do you want gone?
Justifying things as “scientific” when the science is social science and the results are not reproducible is intellectually dishonest, and is rampant in discourse about various topics nowadays.
Social science is science and underpins many aspects of modern society such as urban design. Do you have an example of this in action?
Increasing the minimum wage does nothing
Yeah but the problem with so many right/“centrist” positions is that they’re factually incorrect.
I’m open to changing my mind, but you need proof rather than just saying that I’m incorrect. I have yet to see compelling evidence that raising minimum wage makes any difference at all in the long term. A lot of studies have been made to prove that it doesn’t cause job loss but none that prove that it changes the levels of inequality or pulls people out of poverty in real economic terms.
Proof: It’s literally what the Mexican government did in 2018-2024. Lifted millions of people out of poverty even as the economy mostly remained the same and/or shrunk. See: https://apnews.com/article/poverty-mexico-president-andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-social-welfare-c7ec7f184ce8163e84fffa1b9f47aed8
Everything you said here i agree with, yet none of this shit you said is centrist
Literal fascism and/or communism
I identify as a fascist communist that leans libertarian
Daniel Sloss has a funny bit about exactly this.
https://youtu.be/O-qcXpapsoY Sadly it’s so true
