radical centrist

In a discussion with the inimitable and fearsome dannye, I just called myself a radical centrist, and by God there wasn't a node for that yet. So now there is one.

A radical centrist is somebody who dares not to be pissed off. A radical centrist thinks the status quo is not perfect, but that it's nowhere near as bad as it could be, and that the people trying to drag us off in various directions do their best work when they cancel each other out.

A radical centrist is exactly like a moderate, except you get to smirk a lot more and randomly change sides in arguments. This is because both sides are full of shit, but it's still very important for them to do their thing and pass their laws. It's cool: You're all wrong, all of you! About everything. Not only that, but it's a good and Godly and healthy thing for you all to be all wrong, as loudly and as often as possible. The more the merrier!

Ignore the last paragraph, it's a red herring. I think. Anyway, the thing here is that a radical centrist believes in exactly one Great Truth, which is that all Great Truths are dangerously insane. Every Great Truth leads to a Simple Solution, and every Simple Solution is a short road to Hell. So it's important to keep the Simple Solutionists tied up snarling at each other and jockeying for power, because they're all stark raving mad.

The radical centrist believes that everything will turn to shit soon enough anyway, so there's no sense in accelerating the process by trying to stop it.

I am a radical centrist, however, I describe it differently from wharfinger. To me, being a radical centrist is being a moderate by virtue of the extremes, in other words, believing some of more liberal and more conservative politics. Unfortunately, this leads to everyone hating you, as they either see you as being wrong on half of the issues, or as a friend of the enemy, for believing in some of their "extremist" notions.

I have never understood some of the uproar about my positions. For example, I am in favor of raising taxes (majority jacking them up, I come from a rich family and there is no way in hell that we need the amount of money we have), especially for the rich, but I am also in favor of cutting the budget (I don't feel like there is room for many social programs in a capitalist society, excluding public education), so that we can pay off the national defecit. I catch flak from liberals for cutting spending, but I catch flak from conservatives for raising taxes. I'm also extremely pro-choice and in favor of the death penalty. I don't understand why these positions should be out of line with each other, but many people treat me as if they are. Although every political test I have ever taken has described me as a moderate, I cannot politically relate to my other moderate friends, and this is why I consider myself a radical centrist and not a moderate. Contrary to what wharfinger says above, I do not believe that being a radical centrist is at all like being a moderate.

In the end, there are many ways of defining a radical centrist, a moderate, a liberal, and a conservative, and they're all both correct and incorrect depending on the situation. Defining yourself politically in this current age and time requires you to think in shades of grey, but then to define yourself in black and white, and as long as we subscribe to this way of thinking, we'll always have problems understanding others opinions.