Dystopian Science Fiction only reinforces the real world Status Quo

[CharlesPhipps]

Centrists always wind up siding with Fascists because when it really matter they always consider them the lesser evil to Communists but Fascists share their love of Order. Hindneberg and Papan willingly Hitler in power even after Hitler just lost an election.

That was the narrative until the Centrist European powers went to war with, well, the Nazis. Which is to say that the Centrists can go either way. We have Reagan propping up dictatorial regimes to bulwark against socialist ones but just as often these regimes get attacked BY centrist nations.

See Ukraine and Russia, Assad in Syria, The First Gulf War, and so on.

Mind you, part of that may be the fact communism struggles to define any conflict not based on pure economic terms or class as Marx really went hard on the idea that no one was sincere when they believed there was more important things than money/resources.

Centrist nations also often co-opt small elements of socialist nations policies to prevent larger societal change....which is exactly what a centrist will do.

Moderates can and are ENORMOUS pains in the ass to effecting real systemic change, so much that Martin Luther King said that his biggest opposition wasn't the actual racists but people more worried about those afraid of systemic change but moderates can actually be swing votes versus the ideologically committed.

Or TLDR:

"My anarchist and leftist friends hate Joe Biden but all of us voted for him because it's a choice between being kicked in the nuts and set on fire."

America being the class example of a centrist political structure struggling against a conservative one. There's no actual socialist power base of note within the country anymore so it's a choice of one or the other.

[CharlesPhipps]

Not untrue, but I’d add that it’s a mistake to leave Kim at “aligns with the MoralIntern”. Fundamentally he’s with the centrists not out of ideological commitment but because his first duty is to his job, and the MoralIntern are the ones that incorporated his job and give it the functional authority to actually function.

In that way he’s a great foil to the culprit, an absolute ideologue who also has given up on achieving any actual good in the world and just wanted to hurt people who, in the moment, reminded him of his enemies.

(The irony of course being the woman he singled out here will be utterly blackbagged by the centrists if she’s detained for any length of time)

Yeah another bit of clever writing is the fact that being a Centrist doesn't mean you align with the Moral Intern in actuality (you may hate the fact Revachol is an occupied nation) but it leaves you allied with them in practicality because the two groups that would do something about the occupation are the Socialists and the Fascists. So Kim ends up protecting their regime by not wanting to ally with a burgeoning revolution like the Dockworkers Union or fascist nationalists who don't really consider him a "true Revacholian."

It's above his paygrade and he just wants to get on with his life. There's murders to solve, bills to pay, and so on.

[KuudereKun]

Centrists always wind up siding with Fascists because when it really matter they always consider them the lesser evil to Communists but Fascists share their love of Order. Hindneberg and Papan willingly Hitler in power even after Hitler just lost an election.

That was the narrative until the Centrist European powers went to war with, well, the Nazis. Which is to say that the Centrists can go either way. We have Reagan propping up dictatorial regimes to bulwark against socialist ones but just as often these regimes get attacked BY centrist nations.

I'm talking about how Centrists react to interna crisis not Foreign Policy.

[CharlesPhipps]

I'm talking about how Centrists react to interna crisis not Foreign Policy.

I also provided the biggest reference. There's usually a conservative and a "mildly progressive" faction in actual government. In the USA, Lyndon Johnson can't really be said to be of the Left but was there versus, well, everyone else.

And believe me, I hate being the guy to give Centrists credit. I just acknowledge that if they always did side with the fascists then the fascists wouldn't always be plotting to villify or overthrow them.

[KuudereKun]

I'm talking about how Centrists react to interna crisis not Foreign Policy.

I also provided the biggest reference. There's usually a conservative and a "mildly progressive" faction in actual government. In the USA, Lyndon Johnson can't really be said to be of the Left but was there versus, well, everyone else.

And believe me, I hate being the guy to give Centrists credit. I just acknowledge that if they always did side with the fascists then the fascists wouldn't always be plotting to villify or overthrow them.

Fascists vilify them by pretending they're Socialists, every time Socialists defend them simply because "we have to disagree with the Fascists" we vindicate what the Fascists are claiming.

[CharlesPhipps]

Fascists vilify them by pretending they're Socialists, every time Socialists defend them simply because "we have to disagree with the Fascists" we vindicate what the Fascists are claiming.

And when the elections come and the Left nopes the fuck out because the Centrists promise crumbs, the Fascists win. It's a shitty situation but that's where it is.

Notably, this actually is part of the reason why communism failed in America. Not because of Right persecution but a sense of general betrayal by the public to the worker's movement. The American Communist Party was vehemently anti-New Deal (the closest to actual socialist reform in this country) because they were furious that it came from a Old Money capitalist (Roosevelt) and was framed as capitalist reform. Some hardliners actually believed the Great Depression was the prelude to a communist revolution and were chomping at the bit for it (when, in fact, it was a FASCIST revolution with the Businessman's Plot that almost happened).

As such, the communist party ended up losing virtually all of its mainstream public support including among minorities.

A similar thing happened in France where the French communist party decided to nope out of the government as a form of protest on behalf of the Soviet Union (bluntly, not a great look for anyone in a democratic party). This allowed the party to be completely isolated and rendered an irrelevancy in French politics.

The Left is right to be pissed at the lack of progress but the problem is the actual reactionaries are still fucking out there and you can't actually focus on real change until they're defeated. Its frustrating and ridiculous but they're not anywhere near close to being as irrelevant as they should be.

TLDR:

A desire for ideological purity over immediate benefit fucks the Left over many times.

[KuudereKun]

Browder was Pro new Deal while Foster was Anti-New Deal. Browder had other problems though.

[Madner Kami]

Centrists always wind up siding with Fascists because when it really matter they always consider them the lesser evil to Communists but Fascists share their love of Order. Hindneberg and Papan willingly Hitler in power even after Hitler just lost an election.

Hindenburg was a monarchist by nature. Ironically enough, he was also someone who kinda put duty over personal believes, which actually made him a pretty darn good person to be where he was at the time, except for the whole "Being old and easy to influence"-thing. He's probably history's only monarchist, who was trying to keep the democratic order going and was honestly trying.

Fascists vilify them by pretending they're Socialists, every time Socialists defend them simply because "we have to disagree with the Fascists" we vindicate what the Fascists are claiming.

And you just vilified centrists, by pretending that we're fascists. That you don't even realize how hard you hit your head against the wall again and again, rather than taking a step back and rethinking your approach, is baffling.

TLDR:

A desire for ideological purity over immediate benefit fucks the Left over many times.

That right there is the Left's biggest problem (outside of fighting with itself about who is THE TRUE LEFT™. This extremist all or nothing mentality. Why not just take what you can get and make slow progress with moderation, rather than no progress at all and pushing the centrists away from you?

Moral being: If you treat people as your enemy, they'll treat you as their enemy. Maybe change that approach and you'd actually get somewhere, rather than treading water in the same spot?

Besides, that whole group-think thing you got going there? Centrism isn't a monolitic hive mind. You get left-leaning people, right-leaning people and everything in between in this group. We aren't all thinking alike. Maybe start treating people like, you know, people?

[CharlesPhipps]

Right, Left, and Center vary tremendously wherever you are.

That right there is the Left's biggest problem (outside of fighting with itself about who is THE TRUE LEFT™. This extremist all or nothing mentality. Why not just take what you can get and make slow progress with moderation, rather than no progress at all and pushing the centrists away from you?

Part of this is due to the fact that incremental change may not actually be something you'll live through and a lot of change actually does happen because someone takes a stand and does something drastic. The Stonewall Riots, Civil Rights, and other rights often happen immediately rather than incrementally. For a century, the attempt to stop slavery by starving it out only made the South EVEN MORE determined to preserve it when it took the Civil War to flat out crush it.

There's also the less dramatic, "If you're a, say, trans person, slow improvement is a stupid thing versus demanding your rights as a human being now." And they're right. Negotiating over whether to treat them as a whole human being is ridiculous. Sometimes the buck should stop there.

[Madner Kami]

Right, Left, and Center vary tremendously wherever you are.

That right there is the Left's biggest problem (outside of fighting with itself about who is THE TRUE LEFT™. This extremist all or nothing mentality. Why not just take what you can get and make slow progress with moderation, rather than no progress at all and pushing the centrists away from you?

Part of this is due to the fact that incremental change may not actually be something you'll live through and a lot of change actually does happen because someone takes a stand and does something drastic. The Stonewall Riots, Civil Rights, and other rights often happen immediately rather than incrementally. For a century, the attempt to stop slavery by starving it out only made the South EVEN MORE determined to preserve it when it took the Civil War to flat out crush it.

There's also the less dramatic, "If you're a, say, trans person, slow improvement is a stupid thing versus demanding your rights as a human being now." And they're right. Negotiating over whether to treat them as a whole human being is ridiculous. Sometimes the buck should stop there.

That's a very theoretical notion of a non-existent thing, if you ask me. Outside of conservative right leaning people, you're not going to find a lot of centrists who'd have a problem with treating trans-people as people. It mostly gets more murky, with increasing degrees of religiousness in that field of "centrism" (e.g. when it comes to the topic of gay-marriage), but that's that: An extremist-right position within a centrist spectrum, which argueably isn't even part of "centrism". (Besides, I don't subscribe to the agglomeration of such a diverse group of political opinions into one label.)

Slavery back in the day, the North didn't really care about it. They didn't have slaves and the South was far enough away to not make it everybody's problem. So the North was nominally opposed, but didn't really have many contact-lines with the issue, to force an action until the South radicalized itself and explicitly made it the North's problem.