I think it's a bit inaccurate to call me a centrist. Sure, I'm center on some things, but I have lots of extremely non-center views like being pro pretty much open borders, banning factory farms and thereby eliminating almost all meat consumption, and thinking almost everyone has a moral obligation to give away most of their wealth to charities saving poor African children or animals from factory farms. I don't just blindly defer to the center. On this subject, however, it seemed reasonable given: 1) Biden's often strong performance in speeches 2) many people reporting his competence behind the scene and 3) the poor track record of predictions that Biden would fail catastrophically in a forthcoming debate. Scott elaborates more here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-replacing.
It's worth noting that while I was wrong about this debate, unlike many of your compadres, I would have been right in predicting Biden's decent performance in the 2020 debates.
"What is it, if not the absence of thought, that allows us to so easily recognise the pair as quintessential centrists? One immediately plausible answer is that if we take all their views and average them out, we end up with something in the middle. There’s not really any way of rigorously doing that though (how left wing exactly on a ten-point scale is 1 billion Americans?), and if we were to spitball the numbers, I’m not so sure that BB would even end up in the middle. No, the reason we can so easily perceive their centrism is because their centrism is not an intellectual quality, it is a vibe, and that vibe, fundamentally, is loyalty."
I exclusively write in Moldbug speak. As I write a few paragraphs on:
"There are 333 million people in America and not many politicians who ‘matter’. By all rights, it should be an easily solvable logistical challenge to produce a reliable supply of Obamas: candidates who are pleasingly racially ambiguous and, to quote the current President in more lucid times, ‘articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.’ Even Obama, with his weird communist past and beard, wasn’t as good at being Obama as America, considered in terms of its wealth and population, deserves. Since then, things have very clearly gone downhill. However, for the natural loyalist, the thought that the system is so bad that it can’t select someone who isn’t literally demented to represent itself is unthinkable, even though there have been no reasonable grounds for doubt on this score for at least two years."
Note that I do not think Joe Biden was demented in 2020, though I thought it was clear he was already in cognitive decline and that the 4 years of his presidency would necessitate ever escalating gaslighting that would degrade, maybe fatally, the body politic.
> extremely non-center views like being pro pretty much open borders, banning factory farms and thereby eliminating almost all meat consumption, and thinking almost everyone has a moral obligation to give away most of their wealth
Heh, surely you realize you just proved the article's point? How is this not 100% pure WEF/Trudeau/Democrat style "centrism" of the type found all over the western world? Yes these views are extreme relative to the median voter, but they are very much the median view found at the heart of the system itself. The argument being made here is that centrism doesn't reflect an average position but pro-regime loyalty, and you seem to be demonstrating that in spades.
'Almost everyone has a moral obligation to give away most of their wealth to charities saving poor African children or animals from factory farms'.What would you say to someone thinking they have a moral obligation to get their children the best education/health,fund medical and technological research,reduce climate change and amass resources to the most productive people/companies to colonize space/cure diseases etc.
It seems like you saw people on the left and right repeatedly spout insane takes, ignored all that, then got really excited when a bunch of centrists got something wrong. I don't know if it's representative, but almost all centrists I know were skeptical about a lot of Covid stuff. Science (TM) loyalty struck me as very left.
It's also very risky to share centrist takes in an era where the left is in control of the culture war. Being generous to your perspective, centrist takes might help signal level-headedness to the other sane people in hiding, but it certainly doesn't put you in less social danger.
I'm not saying centrists are cowardly, I am saying that they are centrists by virtue of their being higher quality human beings, but that they would also be centrists in pretty much any political order and so are essentially hostages.
Here’s the thing that remains true about centrism: as matters of policy, centrist takes are usually the correct ones. And centrist leaders often are the most successful because their policies lead to positive outcomes. There are obviously times they don’t, Macron would be an example of centrist failure. But in general, centrists like to figure out what works and what doesn’t and embrace the former. What we have here with Biden is something else: corruption. A bunch of corrupt advisors scheming to keep someone mental debilitation hidden from American people, for their own ends, or for what they think is the “best interest” of their country. Corruption spans the political spectrum, and is probably more prevalent on its margins.
As a centrist I need to defend some centrist honour here. It's fair to say that centrists are a "type", and true that as such we tend to drift to the centre of a given nation's politics wherever that may be. But it's the broader spectrum of politics understood as possible, not the politics of a particular regime. Thus German centrists in the Nazi era were not "moderate Nazis", they remained social democrats.
Is this even true? Hitler had approval ratings of 80% in 1939.
In any case, I am speculating on what would have happened had the Nazis created a semi-permanent political order, like that of post Maoist China today.
I think we have a decent idea from Chinese social media, opinion polls and, of course, the different political factions of the Chinese communist party, who all need to some degree to leverage popular support in their competition with each other. The centrist Chinese view is that Mao did some bad stuff, but was needed to pull China out of poverty and foreign dependency, but now you need some free market too i.e. moderate Maoism.
This is "CCP-centrism", and more-or-less just the official CCP view. I think if one end of the pro-CCP / anti-CCP spectrum is cut off, and it surely is, you'll get a distorted view of where the centre is. Not saying Chinese centrists resemble European democrats or anything, rather, we don't really know.
We don't really know what centrism is defined in this sense anywhere. Who knows what dark thought lurk in people's brains that they fear to articulate because of social pressures? We do know where the center of actually existing politics is, and the kind of people who inhabit it.
Sure, if we're talking about the politics that is permitted, rather than the whole spectrum of people's actual political views. But people like Matty and Bulldog don't shift to become "moderate Nazis" in such circumstances, they simply keep their mouths shut.
> You can, and should, try to change what you can, and if you’re a bigshot pundit like Matt Yglesias, you can get stuff done: bike lanes will be paved, voucher schemes will be funded, smart road pricing will be implemented.
Ironically none of those ideas were original to Matt Yglesias. And the people who came up with them and then pushed them to the point where someone like Matt would promote them were most definitely not centrists.
“People who are intelligent and have their stuff put together are centrists.”
There’s a lot of good stuff in this piece; I like it, you got the “vibe” right. But some of it is off.
You use “moderate” and “centrist” interchangeably, and while they are related, they are not the same. This is easiest to see with Yglesias, whom you do seem to clearly understand. Yglesias IS a moderate, no question about it.
But he is NOT a centrist. He is left of center even in 2024, for goodness sake. He wants Dems to remain in political power, just be slightly less radical than they’ve been the last 4 years. If he were trying to return Dem policy to 1999 or even to 2007-2008, you could make the centrist argument. But that’s not who he is.
Which brings me to your quote above. It’s not correct with “centrists”, period. It would be closer but still not correct with “moderates”. If you use the word “moderate” there - as an adjective, not a noun - THEN I think you are pretty much spot-on, and even if it’s not 100% or even 95% accurate, you have said something profound and true.
Extraordinary. You captured precisely why I find centrism, and the personalities that demonstrate it, so revolting.
For the record, though, this is supposed to be a sympathetic article, lol.
I think it's a bit inaccurate to call me a centrist. Sure, I'm center on some things, but I have lots of extremely non-center views like being pro pretty much open borders, banning factory farms and thereby eliminating almost all meat consumption, and thinking almost everyone has a moral obligation to give away most of their wealth to charities saving poor African children or animals from factory farms. I don't just blindly defer to the center. On this subject, however, it seemed reasonable given: 1) Biden's often strong performance in speeches 2) many people reporting his competence behind the scene and 3) the poor track record of predictions that Biden would fail catastrophically in a forthcoming debate. Scott elaborates more here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-replacing.
It's worth noting that while I was wrong about this debate, unlike many of your compadres, I would have been right in predicting Biden's decent performance in the 2020 debates.
That's exactly what I said:
"What is it, if not the absence of thought, that allows us to so easily recognise the pair as quintessential centrists? One immediately plausible answer is that if we take all their views and average them out, we end up with something in the middle. There’s not really any way of rigorously doing that though (how left wing exactly on a ten-point scale is 1 billion Americans?), and if we were to spitball the numbers, I’m not so sure that BB would even end up in the middle. No, the reason we can so easily perceive their centrism is because their centrism is not an intellectual quality, it is a vibe, and that vibe, fundamentally, is loyalty."
Well maybe you should speak clearly rather than in Moldbug-speak! Loyalty to what? And how does that explain my errors on the debate?
I exclusively write in Moldbug speak. As I write a few paragraphs on:
"There are 333 million people in America and not many politicians who ‘matter’. By all rights, it should be an easily solvable logistical challenge to produce a reliable supply of Obamas: candidates who are pleasingly racially ambiguous and, to quote the current President in more lucid times, ‘articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.’ Even Obama, with his weird communist past and beard, wasn’t as good at being Obama as America, considered in terms of its wealth and population, deserves. Since then, things have very clearly gone downhill. However, for the natural loyalist, the thought that the system is so bad that it can’t select someone who isn’t literally demented to represent itself is unthinkable, even though there have been no reasonable grounds for doubt on this score for at least two years."
Note that I do not think Joe Biden was demented in 2020, though I thought it was clear he was already in cognitive decline and that the 4 years of his presidency would necessitate ever escalating gaslighting that would degrade, maybe fatally, the body politic.
> extremely non-center views like being pro pretty much open borders, banning factory farms and thereby eliminating almost all meat consumption, and thinking almost everyone has a moral obligation to give away most of their wealth
Heh, surely you realize you just proved the article's point? How is this not 100% pure WEF/Trudeau/Democrat style "centrism" of the type found all over the western world? Yes these views are extreme relative to the median voter, but they are very much the median view found at the heart of the system itself. The argument being made here is that centrism doesn't reflect an average position but pro-regime loyalty, and you seem to be demonstrating that in spades.
'Almost everyone has a moral obligation to give away most of their wealth to charities saving poor African children or animals from factory farms'.What would you say to someone thinking they have a moral obligation to get their children the best education/health,fund medical and technological research,reduce climate change and amass resources to the most productive people/companies to colonize space/cure diseases etc.
> it’s actually really obvious it doesn’t work
Mortality data is inconsistent with that.
Yeah, I'm not going to go into this again with you.
It seems like you saw people on the left and right repeatedly spout insane takes, ignored all that, then got really excited when a bunch of centrists got something wrong. I don't know if it's representative, but almost all centrists I know were skeptical about a lot of Covid stuff. Science (TM) loyalty struck me as very left.
It's also very risky to share centrist takes in an era where the left is in control of the culture war. Being generous to your perspective, centrist takes might help signal level-headedness to the other sane people in hiding, but it certainly doesn't put you in less social danger.
I'm not saying centrists are cowardly, I am saying that they are centrists by virtue of their being higher quality human beings, but that they would also be centrists in pretty much any political order and so are essentially hostages.
Here’s the thing that remains true about centrism: as matters of policy, centrist takes are usually the correct ones. And centrist leaders often are the most successful because their policies lead to positive outcomes. There are obviously times they don’t, Macron would be an example of centrist failure. But in general, centrists like to figure out what works and what doesn’t and embrace the former. What we have here with Biden is something else: corruption. A bunch of corrupt advisors scheming to keep someone mental debilitation hidden from American people, for their own ends, or for what they think is the “best interest” of their country. Corruption spans the political spectrum, and is probably more prevalent on its margins.
King Saul went insane too. That was fun.
As a centrist I need to defend some centrist honour here. It's fair to say that centrists are a "type", and true that as such we tend to drift to the centre of a given nation's politics wherever that may be. But it's the broader spectrum of politics understood as possible, not the politics of a particular regime. Thus German centrists in the Nazi era were not "moderate Nazis", they remained social democrats.
Is this even true? Hitler had approval ratings of 80% in 1939.
In any case, I am speculating on what would have happened had the Nazis created a semi-permanent political order, like that of post Maoist China today.
Do we even know what the spectrum of actually-held political views in China looks like?
I think we have a decent idea from Chinese social media, opinion polls and, of course, the different political factions of the Chinese communist party, who all need to some degree to leverage popular support in their competition with each other. The centrist Chinese view is that Mao did some bad stuff, but was needed to pull China out of poverty and foreign dependency, but now you need some free market too i.e. moderate Maoism.
This is "CCP-centrism", and more-or-less just the official CCP view. I think if one end of the pro-CCP / anti-CCP spectrum is cut off, and it surely is, you'll get a distorted view of where the centre is. Not saying Chinese centrists resemble European democrats or anything, rather, we don't really know.
We don't really know what centrism is defined in this sense anywhere. Who knows what dark thought lurk in people's brains that they fear to articulate because of social pressures? We do know where the center of actually existing politics is, and the kind of people who inhabit it.
Sure, if we're talking about the politics that is permitted, rather than the whole spectrum of people's actual political views. But people like Matty and Bulldog don't shift to become "moderate Nazis" in such circumstances, they simply keep their mouths shut.
> You can, and should, try to change what you can, and if you’re a bigshot pundit like Matt Yglesias, you can get stuff done: bike lanes will be paved, voucher schemes will be funded, smart road pricing will be implemented.
Ironically none of those ideas were original to Matt Yglesias. And the people who came up with them and then pushed them to the point where someone like Matt would promote them were most definitely not centrists.
“People who are intelligent and have their stuff put together are centrists.”
There’s a lot of good stuff in this piece; I like it, you got the “vibe” right. But some of it is off.
You use “moderate” and “centrist” interchangeably, and while they are related, they are not the same. This is easiest to see with Yglesias, whom you do seem to clearly understand. Yglesias IS a moderate, no question about it.
But he is NOT a centrist. He is left of center even in 2024, for goodness sake. He wants Dems to remain in political power, just be slightly less radical than they’ve been the last 4 years. If he were trying to return Dem policy to 1999 or even to 2007-2008, you could make the centrist argument. But that’s not who he is.
Which brings me to your quote above. It’s not correct with “centrists”, period. It would be closer but still not correct with “moderates”. If you use the word “moderate” there - as an adjective, not a noun - THEN I think you are pretty much spot-on, and even if it’s not 100% or even 95% accurate, you have said something profound and true.
I'll take it.