I would like to start a petition for journalists – and everyone else – to immediately stop using the C-word. Centrist. It’s an insidious word that has degraded how we think about politics and distorted how we see the world.
Perhaps that statement sounds a little over the top. After all, being a “centrist” sounds eminently reasonable, doesn’t it? A centrist is a moderate, right? Someone who is rational and practical and takes the middle ground. Someone who isn’t extreme like those crazy ideologues on the far right or far left. A centrist, logic dictates, is really what everyone should strive to be.
But stop for a moment and ask yourself how you would define a centrist in more specific terms. When you start spelling out what the word really means, it becomes clear that it obfuscates more than it illuminates. The word does not describe a set of ideas so much as it reinforces a system of power. ….more