this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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"Centrists" are those that oppose authoritarianism in all forms. The far left and and far right make rationalizations about why their preferred flavour of authoritarianism is good (it just gets a bad rap!) while pretending to vehemently oppose the other side's flavour of authoritarianism.
But in the end, those who rationalize in favour of any kind of authoritarianism could easily be manipulated into supporting any other kind of authoritarianism. There's a reason the Nazis called themselves the Nationalist Socialist party, just a small amount branding can get a good number "leftists" to support fascism. Because few people actually think in ideological terms, they just go along with the group and repeat whatever ideological bullshit they've heard to conform with the group. It's easier to turn a socialist into a fascist (and vice versa) since it's mostly just about branding.
Socialists and Fascists love the concept of political spectrum they can put themselves on opposite ends of, but that's all an artificial construct to allow for fear of the other to rationalize the need for a strongman to protect them from the other side that supposedly has completely different values than them. But the "far right" and "far left" have both been conned into being willing to give up their rights in fear of the other. Fascism is a convenient rationalization for communism and communism is a convenient rationalization for fascism. These "ideologies" has a symbiotic relationship with each other.
Those who fall for these grifts believe the verbal diarrhea of demagogues that use a lot of words and say little other than give a vague feeling of "trust me, give me power, I will make you stronger / more equal". The stupid see someone using a lot of words and don't notice there isn't any real explanation of how the demagogue will deliver on their vague promises. They just need to hate the same people their audience hates and use a lot of words, and the stupid will eat whatever bullshit is thrown at them.
Internet podcasting has allowed people to have an endless selection of small time demagogues to choose from. The flavour of authoritarianism the stupid will fall prey to is entirely dependent on which content an algorithm selects for them. And that is based on content they may consumed before puberty. These grifters need to get them while they're young, someone with more life experience will be more likely to say "yeah sure that's a lot of fancy words, but how does any of that help me right now?" which they don't have an answer for.
Right now we live in a dictatorship of the wealthy. The capitalists control productive forces, decide how the majority of us spend our time, and lobby governments in their own interests. On the other hand, the workers, the people that labored to create everything we need, are given a fraction of the value of what they produce in the form of wages. In other words, every person that survives on their wages is exploited by necessity. We are institutionally coerced to sell our labor (i.e., make money for the capitalist) or fall into abject destitution.
Centrists obviously don't see the dictatorship. We live in a time where the rule of the wealthy is as normal as the divine right of kings once was. Accordingly, centrists may be sensible enough to see the following trends as problems, but they tend to think of them as entirely disconnected:
Marxist theory can explain all of these problems, and in many cases predicted them before they happened. But if the billionaires can convince people like you that a better economic system is synonymous with authoritarianism, and that continuing capitalist wealth extraction is the reasonable "center" position, then they can prevent the workers from banding together against the ruling class.