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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   22305 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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Because it’s a mental trap I see friends and family who think of themselves at centrists fall into a lot.

Something along the lines of:

  • Most centrists are people who are reasonably comfortable with how things are, which is why they avoid radical politics.
  • But they see that lots of other people are upset. How can this be? Intellectually, they can read the arguments/complaints but viscerally they don’t feel them and it doesn’t make sense to them.
  • They therefore get deflected to an argument that does make sense to them. This is usually either economic (‘people scapegoat minorities when they’re feeling precarious’ is a common one) or media (‘social media presents a biased view of the world so they can’t see the truth that actually the important things are all fine’).
  • These explanations are particularly useful because they suggest it’s possible to fix the angry people’s problems without doing anything scary. All we have to do is improve the economy using the tried and tested methods the populists dislike, such as raising immigration in a Boriswave or lowering taxes, and/or regulate social media to show the true (and centrist-friendly) state of affairs at which point they will slowly realise they were wrong.

In short, blaming the discourse for popular upset flatters centrist sensibilities/*, gives an excuse for authoritarian action to silence the scary people before they ruin everything, and best of all it’s sometimes correct. So it’s very alluring.

* like all of us, centrists are only human

Perhaps a misleading phrasing I admit.

That is a minor variation on the populist trap. The essence of populism (both left-populism and right-populism) is to channel inchoate anxiety among the populace into hatred of the designated (ideally but not always foreign-coded) scapegoat. The centrist trap @Corvos is referring to is to attempt to dismiss inchoate anger by pointing to a non-existent scapegoat.

The essence of populism is that it is popular because it takes the stated concerns of people seriously rather than airily dismissing them.

The centrist trap @Corvos is referring to is to attempt to dismiss inchoate anger by pointing to a non-existent scapegoat.

I have no idea what you are talking about here, but thank you for providing a perfect example of the type.

The essence of populism is that it is popular because it takes the stated concerns of people seriously rather than airily dismissing them.

Although there are popular populists, it isn't necessary for the term to apply. Nigel Farage was still a populist back when UKIP were getting single-digit percentages of the vote.

Even now, populists are generally not popular, in the sense that they tend to lose elections to centrists. (Yes, Trump won. But the Republican theory of the 2024 election is that there was no centrist on the ballot, not that Trump beat a centrist).

They therefore get deflected to an argument that does make sense to them. This is usually either economic (‘people scapegoat minorities when they’re feeling precarious’ is a common one) or media (‘social media presents a biased view of the world so they can’t see the truth that actually the important things are all fine’).

I don't think this is just a centrist thing. The socialists at Novara media play the same games and then call for eating the rich as their solution. It's just a standard anti-other-people's-radical-politics stance.

Got it. Yeah, I just asked because I sometimes call myself a centrist but I don't make those kinds of arguments. It's certainly possible that the majority of centrists would make such arguments, though.

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