Comment by jjani
At the risk of sounding very arrogant, I've found this incredibly obvious even when I was just 18 years old. Decades have passed, plenty of my beliefs have changed, but this one hasn't.
The chance that one "ideology", whether it's liberalism, conservatism, anarchism , fascism or any-ism is always the right answer to every single societal question, is 0. It's comparable to the idea of exactly 1 of the (tens of) thousands of religions being the true one, correct in everything, with all of the others being wrong.
And this extends to politics. Where I'm from, the political landscape is very different from the US, with at least 5+ different parties that support different policies in various ways. At the same time, it's similar - there isn't a single one that approaches things on a case-by-case basis, each of them being ideology-based.
> So I don’t think being a centrist implies one is not tribal, rather that the degree to which your beliefs on a variety of issues align with the “default” of a group implies how tribal you are.
Absolutely, "centrism" is an ideology in itself. This is also why the usage of the word "moderate" in the article and by PG is very unfortunate. That word too comes with a whole lot of baggage, and saying that independent thought leads to one being "moderate" in the way that most people think of that word, is straight up wrong. We need a different word, but I'm not great at coining those. "pragmatic" is the best one I can come up with. I can feel a "pragmatism is an ideology!" coming, but "the ideology of not looking at things from an ideological perspective" is entirely different from anything else. I'm sure the bright minds here can give better words.
> In other words, a politically thoughtful and independent person probably has a basket of opinions that don’t fit into neat left or right, liberal or conservative, etc. categories.
Very much so. And as the article points out, this is unfortunately a very lonely experience, so it's completely logical that most don't opt for this, instead choosing the warmth of a dogmatic community.
Funny that you say pragmatic, because that’s exactly the word I tend to use when describing my own political beliefs. The best that I have come up with is “pragmatic with a propensity for…” and a few sub-categories that more accurately define what I’d like to see politically happen.
For example - preventionism. It seems to me that many issues could be avoided or eliminated entirely if we tried to prevent them from happening in the first place, rather than choosing between two actions, both with unavoidable negative consequences.
Another is aesthetics. For some reason, the simple desire to make public spaces more beautiful is not really a policy position adopted by any political group, at least in a primary way.
And so maybe the solution is an issue-based political system in which votes and resources go toward specific issues and not parties. (Or work toward eliminating those issues in the first place.)