TL;DR because I get the feeling that investing any more energy here is a waste of time:

and

(E: one of the main things OP seems to be missing is that capitalism is just as much a system of oppression as racism, sexism, and the rest are)

Right-wing extremists nearly always identify as "centrist."

"Centrist" is a phony identity. It's a put on, like journalists who pretend to be "objective".

The whole thing is a reification of the concept of political "spectrum".

Self identified centrists are usually people who've only been recently engaged in politics. They imagine themselves as neutral arbiters; the consumer that chooses the best ideology. They represent themselves as above politics, when in reality they're operating on an elementary understanding.

Politics is values. The left values equality while the right values hierarchy. No human being has ever valued the midpoint between hierarchy and equality.

There is no political center between the current left and right parties in the United States. For example, one is pro-choice the other is pro-life. There is no middle on that issue. This is the post-truth world and we are now in different realities. You can't believe half of the Q stuff and then believe half of the Bernie stuff. If you don't follow politics enough to have an opinion you wouldn't call yourself a centerist.

Describing yourself as a "centerist" in today's conditions usually means you support Trump but are too embarrassed to say it out loud/you know you'll receive backlash for saying it.

I've heard different reasonings.

One is that the baddies don't call themselves the baddies. Apparently, there's some right-wingers who refer to themselves as "centrists", because they pretend that their position is entirely normal.

The other reasoning is that the leftists perceive right-wing rhethoric as so objectively bad that someone saying they have a political opinion and that opinion is in the middle, because both sides are valid, to them just means that person is being ridiculous.

Mind that the meanings of "left" and "right" and even "center" varies a lot between countries, so it depends a lot on the context.

I want you to imagine two political parties: The Petting Dogs Party and the Kicking Dogs Party (for the sake of conversation, I have not assigned them to any real world party). Obviously, the PDP would consider anyone who joins, or even supports, the KDP as being horrifically evil. Like, if you wanted to show a character is evil in TV, you have them do what the KDP do all the time. It's literally cartoonishly evil.

Now, in the political context of America, there are only two parties. The only way the KDP don't gain power is if the PDP gain power instead. So anyone who doesn't help the PDP gain power is either supporting or allowing the KDP to gain power.

In this context, a centrist will usually fall into one of the following categories:

• They refuse to vote for either side, allowing the dog kickers to kick dogs.
• They lied about being centrist because they don't want to admit they kick dogs.
• They lied about being centrist and are trying to convince more people to kick dogs.
• They openly kick dogs, but insist it's normal to kick dogs, so the KDP is the centre.

As you can see with those categories, it's a sliding scale of evil. The only non-evil option is to not kick dogs at all, which requires voting for the PDP.

Of course, if you have a Looking At Dogs Party, it gets messier. You'll often see people vote for the LADP where they would have voted for the PDP just so the KDP doesn't get in. But in America, the LADP does not exist.

What many comments miss is the fact that the "left-right-spectrum" is way to simple to describe the modern political landscape. If you want to place a range of opinion into whatever direction, you will end up with contradictions.

That's just my personal opinion, but centrists are often enablers of right-wing extremists/fascists. Since they don't really have their own opinion and political stance, they just kinda take the average of the left and the right-wing. This starts to become a big problem, when the right suddenly radicalizes, and the centrists now also move further to the right.

To me, it seems the right have been getting ever more extreme in the ugliest ways imaginable. The left, then, has to decide whether to become more inclusive of those who lean somewhat right but are feeling alienated at this point. Do they take in the refugees, or do they stick to their principles and leave a void in the middle? In short, it's an identity crisis and people are taking sides.

As a Canadian, I look at US politics and see only a centrist and right party. In some ways, the Democratic Party is further right than our Conservative Party, though the latter would certainly want to change that if we let them. There are some Democrats who are uncompromisingly left like say Bernie Sanders, but they are in the minority.

Especially in the US, where both parties are globally "right" in both political and financial aspects, a lot of time claiming to be a centrist means that you like capitalism and bombing other countries but you support LGBT causes and are pro-choice. I think, online and especially on lemmy, that the vocal left-wing voices (correctly) see this still as aiding the right but being too cowardly to admit it.

This also ties back to the MLK quote about the 'white centrist' being the biggest obstacle to his movement, because they may say the right things and appear to be helpful but take no action for the movement. By staying centrist and trying to meet in the middle, would lend credibility to the voices on the other side.

Depends on how you define "centrist". Most lemmy users would call me a centrist. Most Americans would call me a radical leftist.

Centrists have no spine to position themselves clearly. They constantly love to say both the right and left are equally bad, which is an insanely amount of false balancing to say wanting equality for all and deporting people and/or punishing people for their gender are things that are in any way comparable.

Don't shape your world views or perception of reality on what you read on Lemmy.

Centrists tend to advocate a middle view, hard to have a middle view for eradicating trans people, for one obvious example.

Three things are happening:

1. It is easier to dismiss someone's argument outright if you can put them in a box without needing to engage with anything they're saying
2. Historically and particularly in the 1990s, Democrats were sort of corporate dogshit, so a lot of the left got used to opposing them (often bringing up MLK's "white moderates" speech)
3. There are a lot of shills on Lemmy who really want Trump to get elected, and do it by attacking the Democrats "from the left" with various dishonest talking points, and if you point out that any of what they're saying is objectively false, they will call you a centrist as a way of dismissing you (see point #1)

The center isn't automatically right (often in the American political spectrum it works out as the average of killing all the immgrants and free school lunch, which is not a happy central point to reach). But also, simply applying a label to someone and dismissing them doesn't automatically mean you're right either, no matter how popular it may be.

Broadly because the entire dynamic of left-wing partisanship in the US - both for the politicians and for the voters - is built around the binaristic idea that the only alternative to supporting the Democrats is supporting the Republicans, and that doesn't work if they admit that there are more possible positions than just those two.

so brave of you to stand up and support the position that 'everything getting worse is good, actually.'