- Centrism's biggest fan.
Domestication of the wild horse
is thought to have taken
place in Central Asia
around 3500 B.C.
As they became more commonplace,
working animals were exposed to conditions
that broke down or quickly
wore through their hooves.
And so we developed a
solution, the horseshoe,
a piece of metal we attached
to the feet of horses.
(burps) Also, it's somehow taken seriously
as centrist political theory.
(ambient electronic music)
The horseshoe theory
is political framework
that proposes the far
left and the far right,
rather than occupy opposing
ends of the political spectrum,
get further away at first,
but then bend back closer to each other,
much like the ends of a horseshoe.
This theory is obviously
correct because America.
How exactly do think we
settled this country?
You think we road pigs
across the frontier?
Nah.
Pigs is food.
That's why we use horses,
which taste very bad
when compared to pigs.
Horseshoe theory is attributed
to French writer Jean-Pierre Faye,
whose name translates
from French to English
as status quo guy and serves pretty much
as the full justification for centrism.
Centrism, you know, rationality.
Being smart and
understanding that directly
between two sides of an argument
there is most certainly the truth.
Somewhere in the middle is the truth.
That's the truth.
Everything that's outside the
center is extreme and evil.
(gurgles)
Boy, this country's gotten so polarized.
Everybody says agreeing with each other
about how everything should be.
(moans)
I know that my personal truth
lies somewhere in the middle.
If I had to guess,
I'd say that I think you
probably understand pretty well
that I think that stuff has
been jammed into our heads
our entire lives and it's not that valid.
To talk about centrism,
I want to bring up thought leaders.
This is something that
I think in the abstract
bothers a lot of people,
but most of us lack
the language to explain
what's really just so
grating about the idea
of a thought leader.
More and more lately,
you see people lamenting the fact
that expertise is viewed with suspicion.
How dare you question the experts?
But in the same breath they'll criticize
The New York Times for
hiring a climate denier
to write about climate change.
Let's make a quick distinction.
Thought leadership is not expertise.
It's lifestyle marketing
made to look like expertise.
Expertise is specialized knowledge.
It is not charisma.
It also can't sell a product
line or an agenda on its own.
Expertise has been conflated
with the neo-liberal concept
of thought leadership.
Thought leadership is TL;DR
level quote-unquote "expertise"
paired with the willingness to
accept corporate sponsorship.
We need to make facts
fun in order for people
to pay attention to them is a gateway to
but we have to have native content
written by thought leaders.
Experts talk about their
(whip whacking)
specialized knowledge.
Thought leaders make facts fun
and accept money to push
products and agendas.
Thought leaders are the human version
of an advertisement
tailored to make you feel
as though you are making the right choice.
Thought leadership works to
validate the thought leader
as well as the people following them.
I like to call this a validation gang
because everybody likes to
consider themselves a leader
as opposed to a member of a collective,
but they all need that validation
within this supposed meritocracy,
because that's how you
get and keep a job, right?
Being an expert and a
thought leader is looked at
as the same thing as an expert now?
Yeah, you get it.
When discourse, the creation
and implementation of ideas
have been marketized,
the marketplace of ideas
needs salespeople of ideas.
Thought leaders are the
salespeople of ideas.
Now markets are all pretty
much manipulated in some way,
so let's take that a step further.
Since the marketplace of ideas
is awash with plutocrat cash,
it can be very difficult to stand out.
And in my own opinion,
that's pretty much the point
of being a thought leader,
the standing out,
the wish to be a leading
voice within thought.
In many ways, it's a savior complex,
but it's also a business tactic.
If you stand out,
the rich will want you on their side,
which of course there are benefits to.
The rich have access to the media
and the media is how you get attention,
and I've said it before
but I'll say it again,
attention is currency in
the marketplace of ideas.
Attention.
Attention is what I'd like to assert
is the functional currency
in the marketplace of ideas.
Not practicality, not useful application,
not wholesale validity,
but how engaged people
are and for how long.
Simply having a unique outlook
and a brand that goes with it
has become increasingly profitable.
The thought leader is more
of a marketing gimmick
than a philosopher,
and that's why every thought leader
is eventually funded in some
way by a corporate source,
whether it be sponsored native content
that reads like an article
but is actually an ad for something,
or they're hired in as a consultant
or get a job with a think tank
that acts as an intermediate
between a corporation and a politician.
You know, a lot of profitable positions
a single person can be
in that they benefit from
and look really cool and smart and great,
get to go on talk shows
and sell their books
and feel really important,
and I'm definitely not
parodying them at all
with the title Very
Important Documentaries.
No, that's not the whole
idea or anything like that.
This class of paid-for intellectual
typically espouses a centrist viewpoint.
Why?
Well, people generally believe in freedom.
Freedom is not any specific ideology.
It is simply the rejection of control
by another entity on oneself.
So in a free society,
how is it justified that
massive corporations
somehow are allowed to
hoard wealth and resources
in an effort to retain
control over the populace?
To do that, we could
frame things like this.
Too much freedom is bad,
which is not wrong.
If you were allowed to kill
people because you wanted to,
that would be bad.
And corporate totalitarianism is also bad,
which I don't even really think
I have to explain that one.
That makes sense all on its own.
So these two things are our two choices,
but neither of them is
really good on its own,
so maybe if we look
somewhere in the middle
we'll find the answer?
Then we just wrap these both around
because we think they're both bad,
and voila, a horseshoe.
Centrism is an outlook
that supports the balance
of a degree of social equality
with a degree of social hierarchy.
This is essentially an expression
of ancient Greek philosophy
that originated with Aristotle
called the golden mean.
Here's an example.
Aristotle called courage a virtue,
but if you had too much courage,
you'd be a reckless jerk,
and if you had too little,
you would be a weeping, bumbling coward
who lurks in the shadows
for fear of being found
and sustains themselves
on the crumbs of society,
for they have no backbone.
But the big problem there
is that it is an argument
that does not prove its own assertions,
a logical fallacy.
This one specifically is known
as the golden mean fallacy,
or the argument to moderation.
The truth doesn't have to be found
as a compromise between
two opposite positions.
The opposite of Nazi is not Nazi,
so the golden mean or the
argument to moderation
is kinda Nazi, I guess?
And I don't really see
how you could kinda Nazi,
like, I don't get it.
What, do you give the
Jews a little bit of gas?
Like, don't put the pedal
all the way to the floor?
I mean, that's bullshit in itself,
but eventually the Nazi
version of Sammy Hagar
is gonna show up and be
like, I can't drive 55.
This kind of argument
isn't typically looked at
as a bad thing.
In fact, it's pretty much how they try
to get Americans to think.
And don't you dare tell me that everything
doesn't encourage you to find the middle.
From your kindergarten teacher
to the South Park guys,
it's all about finding the right answer
somewhere in the center.
Everybody who's outside
the center is an extremist.
In order to figure out where they stand,
centrists capitulate
with the Overton window.
The Overton window is essentially
a descriptive spectrum
of the range of ideas
the public will accept.
However far to the left
or the right we've gotten
and depending on how much
space in between them,
you find your center.
And where you find your center,
you find your centrists.
(whistling)
You know, those brilliant thought leaders
who don't see in black and white,
but instead in shades of gray.
Being a centrist is the
equivalent of saying
I don't think anything needs to change.
I'm good.
I've got what I need.
If we do stuff that goes off
to the left or to the right,
things are gonna change for me,
and I don't like that.
Thus the incentive to paint
anyone out of the center
as an extremist makes itself obvious.
If intelligent, well-spoken thinkers
are able to express their opinions
that ultimately endanger my position,
you know, reduce my
ability to appear unique,
remove my foot in the door
from the corporate hierarchy,
well, they may cut off my cash
flow and I don't want that.
I want things to stay the same.
I am an expert right now.
I am respected right now.
I am looked to.
I am asked questions.
My opinion matters.
It drives the world, in fact.
I am perpetually correct,
and the conditions that exist
right now allow me to be that.
There's a certain
vulnerability to centrism,
and I kind of think I understand it.
See, centrists always feel
like right now is their time,
and nobody ever wants
their time to be over.
But it is.
♫ It's done
♫ The party is done
♫ It's over and done
♫ The panic is done
♫ The politics done
♫ Hypocrisy done
♫ The party is done
- So you may noticed that I am not exactly
centrism's biggest fan in the world,
and I can give you a pretty
simple explanation as to why.
You see, centrists defend
centrism with crap like this.
Now I'm gonna go at it and say
this is probably the worst one I've seen
that is still somewhat
mainstream acceptable,
at least among centrists.
In the center we see liberalism,
which I would like to note is neither
automatically socially progressive
or socially regressive.
Secularism, which doesn't
really mean anything
regarding beliefs.
It's just kept out of the discourse.
Classic feminism and equality.
Now, all of these things are conflated
with science and accuracy, I guess.
The implicit stance taken
by including accuracy
in a region of the horseshoe
is that the other regions of the horseshoe
don't have accuracy.
So the statement being made in the subtext
is kind of obviously the correct
thing to be is a centrist,
and if you aren't a centrist,
then accuracy, science, equality,
and all these things aren't
really a big concern of yours.
So let's just head to the far right.
The first thing I want to point out
is that Islamism has somehow made it
to the right of fascism.
Here's the problem.
Islam is a religion
and I don't believe in
it or agree with it,
but if Islam acts anything like fascism,
then it's fascism.
It's not Islamism.
Fascism is fascism.
That's how that works.
And I'm not going to say that entirely buy
that Islam or Christianity
are religions of peace themselves,
but the vast majority of
normal religious people
tend to specifically know
the peaceful teachings
of the religion they follow
and that's the reason they follow them.
But let's also just say this.
If anybody ever does
use the word Islamism,
it's basically guaranteed to be ignorant.
So as we move to the left,
we have fascism and nationalism,
which are really two
sides of the same coin.
You can't do fascism without a scapegoat,
and that scapegoat is
immigrants 99.9% of the time.
And if you want a democratic society
but just for your race or nationality,
you're a fascist.
Male chauvinism somehow between
nationalism and conservatism.
Once you get to conservatism,
there's no male chauvinism at all.
That's the border for that.
Stops there.
To the left of conservatism
is Catholicism,
which is somehow further
right than corporatism,
but absolutely nowhere near Islamism.
Climate change denial is also tucked away
between two labels, right and far right,
so you don't really notice it,
but it's there.
Quickly peering over to the exact opposite
on the other side,
climate change denial is the opposite
of anti-vaccine sentiment, apparently.
That's news, huh?
Directly to the left
of center is hedonism,
which to me seems like a
very strange thing to place
at the very beginning of your
journey towards the left,
hedonism being the pursuit of pleasure,
or at its most complex,
an ethical theory that
pleasure is the highest good
and the thing that you
should strive to attain
while alive on this planet because,
well, that's what matters.
That's not really a political ideology.
As if every step you take left
is more and more pleasure-seeking.
It's not about solving
the problems of inequality
inherent to our economic
and social systems.
It's about getting off.
And I'm not pointing this out
to discredit people who seek
pleasure as a high ideal.
If a society is truly free,
obviously people should
be allowed to do that.
But the point here is to hand wave away
all leftist ideology as just some folks
looking for their jollies.
Next is altruism, which is,
you know, the belief that selfless concern
is important in the world,
not a political ideology.
Environmentalism coming next,
which is a category of political concern
and not an ideology all to itself,
and then at the absolute
furthest from conservatism
is socialism, the first ideology
actually mentioned here,
at least on the left.
Feminism, which is up in the
center as classic feminism,
is, I mean, a left-wing ideology.
But after we get past postmodernism,
which is a philosophical
approach or methodology,
again, not political ideology,
we get to our second
actual left-wing ideology,
third wave feminism,
which classical feminism
and third wave feminism
are apparently different
things to a centrist.
Classical feminism is in the past
and therefore unlikely to change anything,
being it's already made the changes
that it set out to do.
Women can vote, for instance.
That was a big part in classical feminism.
The reason there is still feminism today,
though, is because there are still things
that need to be done regarding
actual equality for women
and also feminism has also
been historically centered on,
well, white women, cis white women.
There's a reason why
people say white feminism.
It's the same reason why
people say white liberal.
In a system like capitalism
that intentionally exacerbates
the inequalities between
various groups of people,
you can be a nice,
rational, friendly centrist,
but because those scary extremists
on the left and the right
are always shaking up your world,
it might be just a little bit too hard
to bring yourself to fight
for anyone else's rights.
You've got yours, right?
Good stuff.
- Being friendly and being a friend,
I think, are two different things.
I think there are many whites
who act friendly toward Negros.
A fox acts friendly toward the lamb.
The wolf doesn't act friendly,
and therefore the wolf has more difficulty
in getting the lamb chop.
- So anyway, postmodernism,
anti-vaccine sentiment,
and third wave feminism are
all basically the same thing,
and then we have communism,
which is more hedonistic,
more altruistic, more environmentalistic,
more anti-vaccinationistic,
more postmodernismistic,
more third wave feminismistic
than all that stuff.
But since it's the opposite of fascism
and fascism is not the extreme,
obviously Islamism needs
to have its counterpart,
and that is anarchism,
which just makes no sense whatsoever
as something that is
somehow close to Islamism.
Anarchism is real and political ideology,
while Islamism, like I said,
is not real, not political ideology,
and it's just kind of a roundabout way
of demonizing a specific
religion, but nyeh.
Somebody who believes
in a political horseshoe
and believes that the
center is somehow the ideal,
which are two things that
make up a Venn diagram
that is simply one circle,
somebody sat in that area politically
believes that only the middle is accurate.
Only right now is accurate.
Only the status quo is accurate.
Everything else has to be inaccurate.
That means pre-civil
rights was inaccurate,
but so is BLM.
People seeking to change
things are inaccurate,
and therefore people fighting
for their rights are inaccurate.
This is how centrists,
whether they are kind or
nice to marginalized people,
are at least accidentally
aligned with bigotry,
because bigotry hasn't been beaten
and beating bigotry would require ideology
that is out of the center,
and so therefore it is inaccurate.
And in the perceived meritocracy
of the United States of America,
being wrong is bad.
But centrists, oh, they're accurate.
Compromise, that's how we
stopped the Nazis, right?
(nervous laughing)
Not really.
And you might be thinking to yourself,
wait, so they want the status quo,
but they capitulate around an
ever-changing Overton window.
This is an inherent contradiction.
Something's up here.
You're right.
The problem with doing everything you can
to preserve the status
quo is that it will always
slide into regression.
Whether consciously or subconsciously
attempting to preserve the status quo,
one is fighting progress.
In doing so, it lays groundwork
for those that fight
progress a little bit harder.
In order for those extra-smart centrists
to be right about everything,
the positions and
approaches of the opposites
at the end of the spectrum
would have to have
quite a bit of overlap to be
considered similar overall.
So let's talk about several categories
of political concern and
the positions and approaches
that the far left and right take.
Leftist ideals typically attempt
to redistribute the wealth
in order to create generalized welfare.
Now Nazi Germany, a
far-right totalitarian regime
on the absolute end of
any legitimate spectrum,
had social programs as well,
but these programs were built
on the theft of property
through military annexation
as well as seizure
of Jewish property in Germany
and was meant exclusively
for German-born Anglo-Saxons.
Jews were routinely denied
access to these programs
because they were Jews,
and the Nazis and Jews, you know.
Leftist social programs are intended
to be available for all people
and are funded through
progressive taxation
or collective ownership.
National Socialism, or Nazism,
was not socialism.
It was simply just
ethnonationalist superiority
distributing wealth.
It's important to note
that National Socialism
is not socialism, it's fascism.
They intentionally create underclasses,
that is to say,
people who do not have the same rights
and privileges as other people.
The whole point of every
single leftist ideology,
communism and its various
approaches to get there,
such as socialism and anarchism,
exist specifically in
resistance to the idea of class,
and if communism was
actually fully achieved,
it also wouldn't have a state.
On the issues of equality,
far-right regimes typically
regard the situation
that we're already in as one
that has gotten out of hand.
People of far-right ideology
want to regress in social issues,
whereas economically progressive positions
are designed to work with
socially progressive ones.
If all of the people are
not explicitly included,
then it automatically
trends towards the right
because it is a superiority situation
as opposed to a legitimately
egalitarian one.
Now on healthcare is when we start
to get into an interesting area.
The left-wing position on healthcare
is that all people should have healthcare,
whereas the centrist position
is some should have healthcare
if they can pay for it,
which is kinda eugenic-sy.
And on the far right you
have specifically approved
as biologically superior
people getting healthcare,
which is, you know, very eugenics-sy.
On the issue of environmentalism,
let's bring the Nazis up again.
They actually were
somewhere environmentalist,
but it's not good.
Nazi environmentalism
was rooted in the idea
that the traditionalist,
and keep in mind
traditionalist is the key word,
farm life was viewed as good
because the modern life
was, quote-unquote,
"the results of Jews owning banks."
So it's not like they were funneling money
into solar panel development
or something like that.
They just used the earth as another way
to demonize Jewish people.
Leftist environmentalism
is rooted in science,
which is essentially the
opposite of traditionalism,
and finally, ideologically
the far left and the far right
could be literally no more
different on the issue of labor.
Fascism subjugates labor
and Nazis eliminated
labor unions and encouraged businesses
who were quote-unquote
"down for the cause"
to become monopolies,
cartels, and oligopolies,
and they did this by removing regulations
and even funding these companies
as long as they were willing to,
you know, do the Nazi.
On the other side,
left-wing ideologies such as communism,
anarchism, socialism,
and everything in between
all have different ways
and means of doing it,
but the intent is to
ensure that the worker
owns the means of production
and therefore their labor.
I'm sure somebody out there is thinking,
but the USSR.
But China.
But Venezuela.
Well, it's quite possible
to call yourself communist
but really be totalitarian regime
bent on exploiting labor
for your own profit.
What you call yourself
doesn't really matter
if you're not doing it.
And to be totally frank,
these regimes are not represented properly
by basically anybody in the United States,
so the stuff I just said
doesn't even really matter.
The point is entirely of perspective,
and for a centrist,
the perspective is constantly shifting.
What is considered
acceptable by the public
is an ever-changing thing.
At one point in time,
this meant finding the center
between blacks can vote
and blacks can't vote,
and obviously that puts the centrist
siding on a platform where
black people can kind of vote?
That's a false middle.
That's not a valid choice,
I mean, unless you're terrible.
And see, here's the thing.
There might be some similarities
between both the left and right,
but that doesn't actually mean anything.
Here's a crowd.
Here's another crowd.
Both groups of people in one place.
Same thing obviously, right?
Wrong.
An issue can be taken on by
both the left and the right,
even systemic ideas,
but the approach is always
invariably different.
If you employed full-blown
communism for white people,
for instance, it's not communism
because it's the establishment of class.
There is a class that gets the privilege
of participating in that
so-called communism.
Everybody else, whether
they be people of color
or just people of a
nationality that is not
the nationality of the country,
are an underclass and
essentially that negates
the idea that was put forward.
If a socialist idea doesn't
actually help everybody,
it's not actually socialist.
It might mechanically be vaguely similar
to socialism in some respects,
however, the exclusion of some people,
the creation of an underclass,
automatically implies totalitarianism,
because those people are
going to be exploited
in service of the upper class.
So in that respect,
horseshoe theory gets kind of close?
But close only matters in
horseshoes and hand grenades.
Antifascism is not the
same thing as fascism,
and as much as media outlets
love publishing narratives
that act as though
each one of these incidents is
one singular individual act,
these events aren't just
things that happen randomly,
totally unrelated.
If you go back,
you can find repeated incidents
of the right being
violent towards the left,
and as much as liberals
may not like the tactics
of antifascist action,
it's direct action in an
attempt to stop more of this.
These incidents are connected.
They are part of an
overarching series of events
that have escalated due to
the right wing, not the left.
The left is resisting this escalation.
People really need to
stop saying alt-left.
Within the framework of centrism,
it binarizes leftism
as alternative ideology
and therefore validates the alt-right.
Trump realized this,
and that's why he co-opted the term.
It's really hard to argue
with your own point.
- What about the alt-left?
They came charging at the,
as you say, the alt-right.
Do they have any semblance of guilt?
You had a group on one side that was bad
and you had a group on the other side
that was also very violent
and nobody wants to say that.
- People who are in fact for the idea
of everybody having healthcare
or radical changes in the
criminal justice system
or LGBT rights.
Frankly, the left just really doesn't like
the whole inequality thing,
and that includes between
genders or between classes,
and the further left you go,
the more that manifests.
Calling anyone left of center the alt-left
puts them on the same level
at white nationalists,
which, you know, helps white nationalists.
And I'm not gonna say that there aren't
shitty people on the left,
nor am I going to say
that anyone on the left
hasn't proposed working
with the alt-right.
It's just that the majority
of us know that's shitty,
the vast majority.
Yeah, there's some shitty
leftists out there.
Some.
There are zero people
who identify as alt-right
that aren't shitty,
and whether or not you believe in anarchy,
placing it as the counterweight
for an imaginary fascism-infused
Islam political affiliation
demonstrates that the person
who made that horseshoe diagram
doesn't know what they're talking about.
And before you go,
well, that's not every horseshoe diagram,
sure, yeah.
But it's a pretty popular one.
A lot of people who claim
liberalism and centrism
have posted that specific
diagram as a means
to paint a political horseshoe as valid.
In truth, if you want to
actually paint similarities
between policies and what
their net effect ends up being,
the center shares more in common
with the right than the left,
resulting in more of a fishhook.
The fact is the center will
side with the far right
if it ensures that the far left fails.
Their capitulation will always end up
with them siding with the
right rather than the left.
For instance, both the
right and the center
love their free-market capitalism.
Both the right and center
think certain amounts of people
should be excluded from healthcare.
Both the right and the
center are uncomfortable
with the social progression
of human rights.
And both the right and
the center hate the left.
Why do you think in the 1990s
the Democrats went tough on crime?
For fun?
They were capitulating
to the center for votes,
which, you know, allowed the right
to pull the Overton window
further to the right.
This is the result of the
ostensible left chasing the right.
The second you call the center the left,
the point in between
the left and the right,
the center, moves to the right.
And even if this weren't true,
the fact that the center
has such a willingness
to hear both sides,
centrists will always at very least
accidentally provide a means
for the extreme right to rise.
Centrism is at its worst a mask
or a cover to feed right-wing ideology
to people who consider
themselves rational.
But even at best,
it's leaving the door open
for people who want to consolidate power
to put distance between themselves
and those they consider
lower in a hierarchy to rule.
In leaving the door open
for those types of people,
you give them the ability
to do exactly that.
Not everybody actually
wants to rule the world.
Some people kind of want to just live.
In fact, most people,
the majority of people,
like somewhere in the
neighborhood of 99% of people,
and there's this 1% of people
that don't think that way,
and yet for some reason
are able to maintain power.
Every time you ask those people,
regardless of how they identify themselves
with which political party
or what values they espouse,
for some reason they always hate the left.
I wonder why that is?
So is that polarization actually bad?
If the extreme on one
side is full equality
and the extreme on the other
is full totalitarianism,
why would anyone pretend
these are two sides of the same coin?
Why is it so important to compromise
with ideologies that result in
the marginalization of people
by class, identity, or some other vector?
Why is it that the only Nazis that matter
are the ones in the history books?
("Pony" by Ginuwine)
♫ I'm in the center
♫ Ideas in a market
♫ Someone who looks at both sides
♫ Without even picking one
♫ You gotta be a liberal
♫ Or watch me as I'll pivot
♫ No matter what you say, I'll start
♫ Compromise 'cause I'm just so rational
♫ If you're corny, let's do it
♫ Ride it, my pony
♫ My horseshoe's waiting
♫ Come and jump on it
♫ If you're corny, let's do it
♫ Ride it, my pony
♫ My horseshoe's waiting
♫ Come and jump on it
♫ If you're horny, let's do it
♫ Ride it, my pony
