The Myth of the Center: A Place That Never Really Existed
The political center is a failed fiction. It doesn’t resist fascism, it enables it. In 2025, compromise is complicity. Stand clear or be buried in it.
The Center is Dead Ground
Why the Age of Compromise Has Collapsed Under the Weight of Its Own Cowardice
“In politics, the middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
That was 1956.
Let’s get one thing straight. The usable surface Eisenhower described has been paved over by a convoy of hedge fund managers, culture war opportunists, and weak-kneed politicians trying to have it both ways while the world burned behind them. The center they once referred to with such smug civility isn’t the middle anymore. It’s dead ground. A sinkhole. The graveyard of every urgent reform we keep pretending we can workshop into existence by staying polite.
We are well past the moment where moderation is a virtue. In this political moment, it is malpractice.
The Myth of the Center: A Place That Never Really Existed
Let’s define what people mean when they invoke the “center.”
In political science, the center is often imagined as a floating midpoint between two extremes, a rational negotiation zone where pragmatic policy gets crafted in good faith. In practice, it’s never worked that way.
In the 1960s, the so-called center supported the Vietnam War while civil rights activists were labeled radicals. In the 1980s, centrists welcomed Reaganomics and the War on Drugs, laying the groundwork for mass incarceration and wealth stratification. And in the 1990s, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) remade the party in the image of corporate donors, gutting welfare and embracing “tough on crime” policies to court so-called moderates; many of whom had already drifted toward the Reagan-Bush cult of deregulation and nationalism.
This wasn’t compromise. It was capitulation, rebranded.
The center was never a fixed ideology. It has always been a product of Overton drift, and the right has been dragging that window across the floor like a body bag for forty years.
Centrism as a Shield for the Status Quo
If centrism is the midpoint between power and resistance, then it is not a neutral zone. It’s a defense perimeter for the powerful.
Consider the following:
Healthcare: Over 70 percent of Americans support Medicare for All or a public option. Centrists tell us that’s "unrealistic," while clinging to a private insurance model that leaves 30 million people uninsured and lets Big Pharma post $110 billion in profits in 2023 alone.
Climate change: According to Pew Research, 75 percent of Americans favor stronger environmental protections. Centrists offer carbon tax credits while subsidizing fossil fuel expansion. Bipartisanship gave us Joe Manchin’s mansion and Exxon’s boardroom influence.
Wealth inequality: The top 1 percent of Americans now hold more wealth than the entire middle class combined, per Federal Reserve data. Yet every time progressives propose a wealth tax, centrists cry about “punishing success.”
What the center protects is not reason or consensus. It protects capital. It exists to temper movements for justice and to reassure the donor class that nothing will fundamentally change.
The Center’s Role in Normalizing Extremism
Let’s say the quiet part loud: the center has aided and abetted the far-right for decades. Not because it agrees with their goals, but because it refuses to confront them directly. Instead, it offers deference, appeasement, and procedural theater.
Look at the record:
1994: Bill Clinton signs the crime bill, feeding a prison-industrial complex that disproportionately targeted Black communities.
2001: Joe Lieberman and other centrists back the PATRIOT Act in the name of “security,” laying the groundwork for mass surveillance.
2016–2020: As Trump dismantled civil rights, centrists called for “understanding his voters,” not resisting his agenda.
2021–2025: With democracy itself on the line, centrists like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocked filibuster reform and voting rights protections, choosing decorum over democracy.
Every time fascism knocks, centrists want to negotiate its terms, not slam the door.
Historical Precedent: When “Centrism” Enabled Collapse
This is not a new story.
In the Weimar Republic, centrist parties refused to form coalitions with the left and underestimated the Nazi threat until it was too late. In Chile, centrist elites alienated the working class and paved the way for Pinochet's coup. In post-Soviet Russia, so-called moderates enabled oligarchic consolidation and constitutional hollowing that delivered Putin his throne.
The pattern is always the same: centrists, clinging to the illusion of order, enable extremists who promise “law and order.” Then they are discarded.
History is full of dead moderates who believed their nuance would save them.
The Data Doesn’t Lie: Americans Are Not “Centrists”
Let’s bury the last excuse.
Here’s what Americans actually support, based on aggregated polling data from Pew, Gallup, and Data for Progress:
71% support a $15 minimum wage
68% support Medicare for All or a public option
70% support legal abortion in all or most cases
63% support stricter gun laws
75% support higher taxes on billionaires
74% support government action on climate change
60% support student debt relief
These are not fringe positions. These are majority positions. So why are they treated like wishful thinking?
Because they threaten entrenched power. And centrism is where power goes to hide behind polite excuses.
Centrism’s Death Rattle: From Electoral Strategy to Moral Black Hole
In electoral terms, “the center” is rapidly becoming irrelevant. The 2022 and 2024 elections proved that turnout is driven by base enthusiasm, not soggy triangulation.
Young voters, working-class communities, and people of color do not want hedged bets. They want bold action. And they are sick of being told their lives must wait for incrementalism to catch up.
In 2024, centrism couldn’t even protect itself. It failed to deliver codified rights, failed to pass basic protections, failed to call fascism by its name until the jackboots were already lacing up.
And still they offer op-eds, not opposition. Norms, not resistance. Seminars, not strategy.
Conclusion: The Center Cannot Hold Because It Was Built to Collapse
W.B. Yeats famously warned, “The center cannot hold.” He was right, but let’s be honest, it wasn’t meant to.
The center has always existed to absorb dissent, blunt critique, and slow the march of justice to a crawl. In an age of crisis — ecological, economic, democratic — centrism becomes not just inadequate, but obscene.
There is no neutral ground between liberation and oppression. No balance point between justice and injustice. No middle path between survival and collapse.
If you're still clinging to the center, you are standing on dead ground. And it is time to fight for your life.
Those who advocate for the “center” are really saying, “move to the right”.
The illusion of a center existed in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, when Nazis were afraid. Now, they’re bold and ruling entire nations.