The Moderate Politics Thread

[OutByEaster?]

I guess off the back of that then, that I think from what I can gather, you can define centrism by what it seeks to prevent rather than what it believes in.

Does that sound about right?

 

[KentVillan]

2 hours ago, OutByEaster? said:

I guess off the back of that then, that I think from what I can gather, you can define centrism by what it seeks to prevent rather than what it believes in.

Does that sound about right?

 

No because it's also much more simply about the mechanics of electoral democracies.

If you have a position which sits roughly in the middle of public opinion, it's more likely to carry broad democratic support.

Of course this varies, because with some issues you have more of a bimodal distribution of opinions (i.e. one chunk of views to the left, one chunk of views to the right, and the bit in between is a bit hollow).

But with most issues it's more of a curve with the peak of support somewhere in the middle. Centrism is about harnessing that to get things through parliament, through elections, etc.

It makes more sense when you think about things like tax & spend policy, where there is an obvious spectrum of views with lots of granularity.

It makes less sense on something where attitudes are very binary (i.e. you're either strongly for or against a specific policy).