Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“The danger of titling one’s political position “centerism” is that it is bound to be confused with “centrist,” which will undoubtedly one day become a synonym for “stupid.” (Even spellcheck wants it to be “centrist.”) But centerism ties together ontology and practice in a way that is not necessarily explicitly absolutist, but certainly undergirds absolutism. Centerism entails always supporting the center or, more precisely, donating your resentment to the center. How do you know where the center is? It doesn’t necessarily always announce itself unambiguously, after all. But it’s always there, whe never you talk or think, on both the most micro and the most macro level. If you utter a sentence, you direct someone’s attention to something different, maybe even only slightly different, than what they have been attending to. What you direct their attention to may be something they simply didn’t know about, but in some way they must have not been completely prepared to see it as significant. “Significant” is identical to “central.” You are redirecting, with your utterance, their attention from one center to another. We are never centerless, but one center is marginal relative to another. So the problem is distinguishing the central (or perhaps it’s best to say “centeral”) from the marginal. It is when what you have been taking to be a center enters into crisis that its subsistence upon another center becomes evident.”

— Adam Katz, Centerism · Mar 2018 · GABlog