Centrism

In politics, centrism usually refers to the political ideal of promoting moderate policies which land in the middle ground between different political extremes. Most commonly, this is visualized as part of the one-dimensional political spectrum of Left-Right politics, with centrism landing in the middle between left-wing politics and right-wing politics. However, there is arguably more than one dimension to politics, so even the center has its own radicals as exemplified by radical centrist politics.

Definitions

There is anecdotal evidence that some people, particularly in Western two-party democracies, especially in the United States, consider themselves "centrists" and consider the word a compliment; thus, people are rarely attacked for being "centrists." This leads to a recursive definition where a centrist is merely defined by other centrists as "someone who agrees with me". In this case the number of centrists can not be determined except to say that there are far fewer centrists than people claiming to be centrists. See Russell's paradox.

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An alternate definition is to assume that the two poles in question (e.g., Left/Right) are well-defined, and then (i) define as 'centrist' any position which the Left considers too far Right AND the Right considers too far Left, and (ii) define as a 'Centrist' any person who self-identifies more with those positions than either the Left or the Right. The weakness in this argument is that it is difficult to unambiguosly and objectively define both poles at once, but that difficulty affects all political defintions, not just centrists.

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In practice, the two poles can only be well-defined in a specific place at a specific time, since they differ from place to place and change over time. Thus, "centrism" itself means different things in different places (depending on the local political spectrum) and changes over time. For example, ideas that were considered extremist 200 years ago (such as democracy and universal suffrage) are considered centrist today - while other ideas that were considered centrist 200 years ago (such as slavery and racism) are considered extremist today.

Related Topics:
Democracy - Universal suffrage - Slavery - Racism

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