[natechols]

You're both applying a wildly subjective label whose meaning nobody can agree on. I happen to think (as a relatively centrist American living on the West Coast) that those opinions are indeed "centrist". They might count as "very conservative" in the part of the country I live in, but in many other parts they would be distinctly "liberal" (another word whose meaning has been utterly scrambled).

In general I think there's a tendency for politically engaged people to put "views I disagree with" in the "other" bin, and everyone defines "extreme" and "center" to reflect their particular idea of what the sane, morally correct opinion is. There were plenty of people on the left who seemed to think Warren (for example) was a centrist neoliberal sellout.

[woofie11]

This is exactly it. Every conservative I speak with thinks I'm Joseph Stalin, and every liberal thinks I'm Adolf Hitler. I've stopped talking to people about these things.

What's amazing about it is you can voice disagreement in just one place, and you're either a liberal snowflake or a Trump-supporting racist. It doesn't seem to matter which place you disagree, or whether your disagreement falls on the other side of the political spectrum.

[natechols]

What terrifies me even more is when the same tribalism leads people on either side to start reflexively defending their entire "side" - thus the right-wing fondness for Pinochet or Franco, or the left-wing fondness for Castro or Maduro (just to cherry-pick some examples). Sooner or later you just end up delegitimizing liberal democracy altogether (which I'm sure is the entire point, for some).