I'm a centrist but you Republicans keep pushing me further left with your extremist beliefs

David Adler, from the University of Oxford's Department of Politics & International Relations, published a study in 2018, that demonstrated that in surveys of their views "centrists" were meaningfully, contrary to conventional rhetoric, more anti-democratic, least supportive of democratic institutions, and most supportive of what he classifies as "authoritarianism".

(That catch-all term again, I know)

It's not very long (it's mostly survey results and graphs) and you can read it here.

I do think that you could argue that this is a manifestation of their ideology being predicated not on a fixed ideology or particular material reality, but on an almost gnostic belief in their own position as being simply 'the right one' and therefore all others being inherently worthless or even malevolent. It's essentially the divine right of kings but for self-defined superior wonks.

The benefit of having an ideology that's so rootless and immaterial is that you can shift to whatever position is neccessarily to maintain the status you create for yourself. The downside is that its immateriality means that it's a mirage, an illusion of a position, and so any alternative beyond its current makeup cannot be valid, but also the illusion cannot exist without defining itself against them.

All outside perspectives become an existential threat and can only be proclaimed to be untrue and from bad actors. Your material experience of the economy is wrong, everything's great! Views beyond my centerist consensus can't be real people, it must be disinfo spread by bots! Jewishness is definied by my narrow defininition the 'correct' amount of support for Israel in this moment! Yes, we wrote articles for 20 years about the worrying influence of neo-Nazism in Ukraine, but they've all just stopped being Nazis and are democratic patriots! History is sacrosanct until it differs with the personally beneficial version I was taught! We believe in science until listening to scientists on the climate or Covid would negatively influence my lifestyle or stock portfolio! And so on.

But for the liberal it’s basically just I mostly support the status quo (with small incremental changes to social issues at home!), and because of that, anything that’s not roughly the status quo represents a threat immediately.

The Kingdom of Conscience will be exactly as it is now. Moralists don't really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.

I'll one-up you: the Harry Potter series. This configuration of government was talked about in Harry Potter 4: Deathly Hollows when Harry had to demean a dementor:

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