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If the center left had proven even vaguely able to resist this sort of thing, the Right would also find them to be a more attractive option than tit for tat. Or would not have needed to get involved at all.
People like Rufo & DeSantis exist because attempting to appeal to universal principles or allowing the academy to police itself has utterly failed. A lot of this stuff (especially in America, in the UK the Tories take a lot of blame since they were in power) happened under their eye. They not only refused to do anything about it, they often attacked both right and left critiques of it.
And then, when someone goes "too far" in response, they lament that there's no partner for common sense and sanity and they definitely would have done something if not for those crazies who made it too tense to get involved.
Yeah, uh-huh.
I mean, I push hard enough against left-wing orthodoxy both in person and online that I'm regularly reflexively labeled right-wing, and I have the same frustration as you with plenty of other allegedly centrist politicians who fall hard for the "no enemies to the left, all enemies to the right" fallacy. You're really throwing this at the wrong person, sorry.
You still seem willing to prefer as allies the left-wing orthodoxy over the right-wing ("See, this is why center-left people don't feel like allying with the right, despite our [...]", emphasis mine) so I think you are indeed the right person.
If you want to know, my last vote went to the FDP, which is the german libertarian party. Unlike the US, the FDP is not consistently on either side, but has coalitioned with both sides (currently it's in fact part of a broad left-leaning government). Myself I'm not even a straight-ticket FDP voter, I've considered the CDU (originally center right, though nowadays probably just pure centrist), due to their family-first focus which I find appealing, and the SPD (center left), since I'm in favour of broad redistributive policies if done right. My vote ultimately went to the FDP however since it's the closest thing to free-speech absolutism on the menu and because they currently appear to be the party most concerned with imo common-sense concepts such as "having a functioning economy".
Privately, at work, and online, I primarily push back against left-wing orthodoxy since it's quite common among my acquintances.
Nevertheless, and yes this is precisely what I mean, if you try to force me into a binary left-wing orthodoxy vs right-wing orthodoxy, both enforced equally, I'll choose the left everytime. The right needs to be significantly less orthodox for me to consider it.
The FDPs milquetoast false-centrism position on the coronavirus response, and it's involvement in the current German coalition as that government seeks to disrupt, harass, or even outlaw political opposition in the AFD, makes me skeptical that they'd be a good match for your claimed political goals.
Of course, the centre-right refusing to ally with the right pretty much defines the entire current German political climate, not just you in particular.
What you call milquetoast false-centrism, I'd call regular centrism. I know Corona is your hobbyhorse, but the FDP was if anything overly critical compared to the center (which suits me, since I also was on the critical side).
On the AFD, the FDP is explicitly on the record as being against the Verbotsverfahren. Privately, I've argued multiple times that the AFD has a point, and that as long as the german political establishment is unwilling to tackle the dysfunctional, barely existent border and immigration politics, they will only get stronger. This is reasonably close to the stated position of the FDP, though I suspect that being libertarians they're more in favor of open borders than I'd like, but unfortunately we don't have a topic-based voting law.
By false-centrism, I mean that taking the middle ground between an utterly unreasonable position and a reasonable position is not, in itself, inherently reasonable or centrist. For instance, the centrist position on self-nuking is the same as the ardent anti self-nuking position, not that you should compromise by only nuking yourself with half the number of bombs. Similarly, the centrist position on lockdowns isn't that you should do 'kind' lockdowns, or short lockdowns, but instead that there should be no lockdowns, the same position as was held by all German political parties until 2020. The FDPs position on the coronavirus response is still extreme, even if it's not as extreme as the SDP.
I find myself questioning further why the FDP tolerates being in it's current coalition. Still, I prefer to look at what a party actually does as opposed to what it says, and being in a coalition government that is carrying out political repression is more important than their statements against that repression.
My read is that the leadership in general and Lindner in particular seem to have been burned by the "better not to rule at all than to rule badly" policy based on which they rejected forming the Jamaica coalition in the previous elections. And it is my impression that they have, in the past few years, run on a largely practical and non-ideological platform. As a member I receive the party newspaper, and it's full of equating liberalism with whatever the hell is currently expedient. Apparently liberalism is anything from feminism to subsidies, so long as the results are good enough. In other words, I think the FDP of the past few years just tried its damndest to be able to say "look, while the others are willing to ruin the country for the sake of ideology, we're just trying to keep everything working!". As a rabid ideologue, I'll accuse the party of having been far too reasonable and conciliatory throughout this term, because lo and behold, most voters do not appreciate reasonable, milquetoast and modestly productive policy. They either hate the FDP for being the enemy, or hate it for not waging the culture war.
Few are the Germans who just want a little less public debt, a little lower taxes, and a little less bureaucracy. And yet the party soldiers on, and tries to do what little good it can. It almost feels like it's out of some sense of civic duty, though cynicism won't allow the thought.
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The coalition is not actually doing anything yet, though. Even the SPD lead is rather mealy-mouthed: "we can't entirely rule out a Verbotsverfahren as a last stop, maybe". People are certainly complaining a lot about the AFD, which is legal. Funny enough I've heard the same criticism from the left in person - the SPD hasn't actually done anything against the AFD yet, and Scholz has mentioned deportation favorably in the past, therefore they secretly agree! I find that silly, to be clear.
More questionable is that AFD-members are being kicked out of some smaller organisations, which I'm mostly against, but this has little to do with the FDP, and is difficult to legally control without throwing out freedom of association in general.
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I feel I should note that there is such a thing as "being neutral", and thus that RenOS' note that he doesn't want to ally with you is not the same thing as declaring alliance with your enemies.
You might consider neutrality naïve, and you might very well be right, but you can't just treat naïveté as malice - not if you want to be intellectually honest, anyway.
I probably was harsh, and RenOS rightly accused me of venting my frustration here.
But I don't think my OP implied it was just malice. There are many reasons (few of which I respect) for this behavior on the part of the actual left-wing liberals who're now disillusioned.
If I had a problem with your post, I'd have replied to it. It was Nybbler's "You still seem willing to prefer as allies" that pinged my "objectionable inference" radar.
Yeah, but he was right. Your radar might need calibration.
Note the word "force". "If you put a gun to my head and demand I ally with X or anti-X, I pick anti-X" =/= "I am, IRL, allied to anti-X".
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It's an awfully one-sided neutrality that supports the left when it agrees with the left, and refuses to support the right when it agrees with the right.
We see that in the United States a lot. People who, when asked, are closer to Republicans than Democrats on most issues but still vote blue.
Voting is more about tribal affiliation and personal purity than about issues.
Voting Republican gives some people the "ick". So even though they hate homeless encampments, drug overdoses, crime, and broken public schools, they still vote for far left candidates in their city election.
That, or they don't trust Republicans.
Or polling doesn't capture their priorities (or the polls are just bad).
Or they are tribal and they intuit that Republicans won't accept them.
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