[serf]

>What does that even mean? What would a middle/center party do, exactly?

Forget the wording 'centrist', parent is trying to describe the need for a party that seeks allies from all angles rather than trying to produce outrage towards specific groups of people in a lazy effort to foment in-party support and credit.

In recent years, I guess due to success of certain parties, everyone has decided that it is in fashion to have a group to demonize - to hate. This (necessarily) creates a group of disenfranchised people that have an axe to grind.

It used to be that political parties demonized far entities that were as far outside the voting American public as was feasible; now it's fashionable to attack people that constitute American voters. Now we have hordes of people that were demonized by one side or the other, and a lot of them want to vote one way or the other out of pure spite rather than political interest.

[aaplok]

> Forget the wording 'centrist', parent is trying to describe the need for a party that seeks allies from all angles rather than trying to produce outrage towards specific groups of people in a lazy effort to foment in-party support and credit.

Well politics is about making choices where consensus is unattainable. By nature of not being consensual, there will be some angles from which these choices are undesirable. So attracting allies "from all angles" is essentially the same as saying "whoever is not my ally comes from no (reasonable) angle", which is precisely what the democrats are being described as doing in the article. They are the utmost "centrist" party in a way.

The answer to the demonization issue is not to pretend everybody must be your ally, it is to acknowledge that one can reasonably disagree with you, and be willing to engage with your political opponents rather than treat them as enemies, to reach an agreement acceptable to most (though not all).

[lapcat]

> Forget the wording 'centrist', parent is trying to describe the need for a party that seeks allies from all angles rather than trying to produce outrage towards specific groups of people in a lazy effort to foment in-party support and credit.

Fair enough. I'm all for breaking up the duopoly.

However, the strategy of scapegoating and creating enemies is hardly a new phenomenon. It's as old as politics itself. More recently, I'm old enough to remember Reagan railing against "welfare queens". In 1968, George Wallace ran for President, and won 5 states, on a platform of racial segregation. There was also the McCarthy era, of course, where there were supposedly enemies, Communists everywhere in the US. And George W. Bush weaponized patriotism after 9/11, painting anyone opposed to US imperialism as supporting the terrorists. (This same happens today to anyone opposed to US imperialism. They're called antisemites and supporters of Hamas.)

In the end, though, polls usually show that people vote based on their pocketbooks. Economic issues are almost always most important and salient, despite all of the other political commotion.