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Silence8 -> RE: Please welcome Sanity to the Center! (3/14/2010 7:30:47 PM)
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A good indication that Sanity isn't center anything is when he argues Fox news is moderate. That's a clear point of reference were there ever one.
Still, the argument doesn't fly that the far left and far right are ruining things for moderates. Maybe the reason the proverbial center seems so amorphous is, one, its basic opportunism, and, two, that it fails to see outside everyday ideology and lacks the drive to reorganize the values embedded in experience. Perhaps moderates are simply kings of convenience; what could be more American?
Again, what's easy to miss, as Moonhead and Juliaoceania note, is that the whole field of discussion is shifted rightward (despite the joke of liberal bias in the media); the right is moderate, the center is left, and the left isn't mentioned.
So, I know for MM moderation is a key stance, but I'm having difficulty seeing it. Are you really going to argue, for instance, that Obama is not moderate enough? For what, then, are you arguing? A new party, not coffee, tea, but... tap water? (Many places you can't even drink the tap water, errrr too much moderation, precisely not enough liberals hugging trees, and blocking roads, etc......)
Moderation, furthermore, has destroyed healthcare reform. What's needed instead is a revitalized left, that at least threatens the center-right enough to spur real non-Obamian change from without, rather than kowtowing from within.
A heuristic I've developed, a litmus test for political orientation, and a gross simplification that rings of some truth, and relates back to the theme of everyday ideology: the left says exactly what it believes, the right says the opposite of what it believes, and the middle doesn't believe anything at all.
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