We Need to Talk About Reactionary Centrists
Sympathizing with the right while punching left is not the neutral position pundits seem to think it is
NOTE: I’ve moved my writing to a personal site after Medium’s management union busted their employees. You can find a version of this essay here.
We have a crisis of lopsided political polarization in the United States.
There are fewer moderates than ever in the Republican Congress. Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has thrown out the rule book to undermine healthcare and steal a Supreme Court seat. The United States is the only country with a major political party that denies the scientific reality of climate change. Republican state legislatures are attacking people’s voting rights instead of trying to win their support. And right wing media routinely promotes conspiracy theories, from questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship to suggesting that the Parkland student activists are “crisis actors.”
But despite these developments, a great deal of popular political commentary still approaches our politics with a strange form of unearned evenhandedness. Opinion columnists, influential academics, and think tankers feel a need to occupy a middle ground, even if it’s one that is increasingly a product of their own…
