The Center does not exist

Getting rid of the lies of moderation

We heard about it all the time during the 2024 Presidential election. We’re hearing about it again and again with the 2025 New York mayor’s race. The mythical center. The need to moderate. Kamala should move right (again). Zohran should move right. Moderate, be a centrist, never mind that Trump is a far-right fascist and won twice. Never mind that Kamala ran with Liz Cheney and lost. That magical center still must be secured. The moderates must be won over.

Turns out, the center is a myth. The perfectly triangulated, perfectly moderate voter hardly exists. There isn't some huge block of voters who are perfectly situated between the Black Panthers and the KKK. There aren’t millions of votes to be gotten by finding the precise middle between CEOs and unions. The data makes that clear, but a handful of people get a lot of money (from the super rich) to tell us that anyone to the left of George Bush must moderate, find the center, move right. And, oddly enough, at the same time they don’t devote themselves to telling MAGA to move left.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

One of the main data points used to support the moderation thesis is the massive number of registered independents. At the moment about 43% of voters are independents, with each party only home to 28% of registered voters. So of course it’s natural to moderate during the general election. Sure Zohran, for example, won the primary on policies like free buses and freezing the rent, but according to this logic he must move toward the center during the general election. On the surface this makes sense, but the slightest investigation show that in truth this whole idea, this whole approach, rests on a false assumption about who independent voters are and what they want.

Independents aren’t centrists. They haven’t triangulated their views to fit perfectly between the left and the right like certain pundits would have us believe. Polling from last year shows that swing voters pay less attention to politics in general. And, while they do self-identify as moderate more often than other voters, they mean something very different by that than the pundits would have us believe. In the last presidential election these folks said that expanding healthcare coverage was the number one issue that would change their vote. They wanted taxes to be raised on the rich, increased protection for abortion, the minimum wage to be raised and more. These ideas are, in fact, reasonable and moderate in the eyes of most people in the U.S. and around the world — they’re just labeled radical in Washington and on Fox.

So when pundits whose job it is to tell progressives to shift right tout that independents label themselves moderates, they’re deliberately obfuscating the fact that most Americans think expanding Medicare to provide more people with health care is moderate. They’re avoiding the reality that most people think taxing the rich and raising the wage is moderate. The fact that Bernie Sanders has the highest favorability rating of any politician in the country makes a little more sense here. The fact that Zohran mopped the floor with the former governor of New York makes a little more sense here. Taking small steps to help the working class in a country with skyrocketing inequality is in fact a reasonable, moderate, first step. And it’s extremely popular.

There are more independents than registered voters for either of the two major parties, and tens of millions of people who don’t vote, not because they’re waiting for some perfectly centrist candidate but because they see two parties that hardly fight for them. They see the minimum wage stagnating for over 16 years now, regardless of who’s in office. They see a refusal to tax the rich, a refusal to back Medicare for All, and the corporate capture of the vast majority of both parties. This reality comes through not just in policy, but in talking points. Democrats have largely refused to treat the oligarchs like the villains they are. That’s starting to change, thanks to Elon Musk as much as anyone, but you still have people like the head of the DNC insisting there are good billionaires out there, and you still have a loyalty to donors over the 99% that guides both parties.

The mythical center doesn’t lie in some place where you can support billionaires and also support the working class. That spot doesn’t exist, and people see through it. The millions and millions of Americans who are disenchanted with politics don’t want an endless parade of corporate stooges who listen to overpaid consultants and try to have it both ways. They want fighters. They want people who will take on the oligarchs who are making their lives worse, killing their jobs, and trying to replace them with machines. Trying to triangulate a position perfectly in the center leaves politicians looking like the phonies who stand for nothing, which is often exactly what they are.

Palestine is the perfect example. Now, horrifyingly late in the genocide, more Democratic politicians are finally voting to send fewer weapons to Israel. But for 20 months most of them tried to have it both ways; they tried to find a center point between the slaughtered and the slaughterers. They tried to triangulate the middle position on genocide. And it left people disgusted. It left people seeing that most of these politicians are spineless. The fact that Senators and members of Congress couldn’t, and in many cases still can’t, bring themselves to vote against sending bombs to be dropped on civilians wasn’t some brilliant centrist calculation, it was weak and disgusting and depraved.

Photo by Ahmed Abu Hameeda on Unsplash

The genocide in Gaza is an extreme example, but it captures a fundamental dynamic in our politics. We’re told that everything runs on a crystal clear left-right spectrum, that good politics is about finding the middle point every time. And that’s just not true. People want to vote for someone with some values, someone who fights for what’s right, someone who stands with the working class and the vulnerable instead of trying to appease the bosses, the donors, the super rich and pandering to the masses at the same time. People are not grouped in a perfect, mythical center, they’re grouped outside the system, angry, looking in with disgust at the whole charade.

The center does not exist. We can and should free ourselves from appealing to the people who preach endless moderation. They're representing their own interests and those of their donors, not those of the masses. When people walk out on strike the answer is not for us to preach moderation, it’s to side with the workers against their exploitative bosses. That principle, that approach, builds a politics and movement that appeals to the millions of people who are angry, fed up with both parties, and looking for answers. Appeasing the rich does nothing. In fact, worse than doing nothing it perpetuates a system of greed and oppression. So give up on the imaginary center once and for all, and come join the fight. - JP

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