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Do you think centrists are bad?
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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Centrism is okay during good times, when managing the country is all it takes and the political climate isn't poisoned. During times of crisis, however, it's horribly ineffective, because centrists are usually quite averse to any large-scale reforms and their ineffectiveness will only benefit (usually right-wing) radical parties.
Good times for whom?
In an ideal world, you have conservatives and revolutionaries. The revolutionaries want to make changes to try and make things even better. The conservatives act to maintain the status quo. When they balance properly then you get steady change, but slow enough to detect and fix cascading problems/failures.
In this situation, the centralists act as the balance point, being swayed one way or the other to set the path.
Unfortunately the only place this is actually close to accurate is Sci-Fi novels.
In any society, some sections would be having 'good times', and wouldn't want the status quo to change. Other sections wouldn't be having a great time, and would be asking for change.
Centrists then might be people who want some changes, although people who don't want any change often also call themselves centrists since (1) different sections would be asking for different directions of change, so staying put might seem the middle ground, and (2) it's more respectable than admitting the current system benefits them and they don't want it to change.
Also centralists are different. Centralisation / decentralisation is the debate over how much power national governments should have versus local governments.
In another word : they’re useful idiot