What "Center" Is That, Exactly?

I really can't get over the signs.

The Republicans held what was basically a Nuremberg rally in Milwaukee last month, where they shook their official MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs and crowned their king—the convicted criminal, adjudicated rapist, and known insurrectionist, Donald Trump—to become the next President of the United States. This is a job that already includes command of the most massive military in human history, as well as a job that was just blessed with total immunity from prosecution for any crime committed under its auspices—a full negation of the rule of law enacted by a corrupt body of extremist theocratic judges, who have been bribed by billionaire enemies of humanity to further their plan, which is the total dismantling of a free, open, and pluralistic society.

The MASS DEPORTATION signs represent an open desire to visit terror and menace and abuse and death upon about 22 million of our friends and neighbors who live in mixed-status households. They represent a desire for armed checkpoints and mass incarceration and concentration camps and civilian murder squads and population surveillance on a scale not seen in this country since the time of chattel slavery. And, since the people waving the signs are observably energized and animated by every other sort of bigotry, and because their party has published their detailed plans for attacks on every other sort of marginalized community, we can rest assured that their evil intentions are real and will not be constrained only to our mixed-status friends and family, but will quickly spread to all other undesirables who are already being targeted and menaced today. Sure enough, the convention featured the usual gleeful celebration of cruelty and domination as virtues, and the usual eager expressions of desire to continue dismantling our shared society for profit, and the usual listing of the undesirable qualities of undesirable people, and the usual celebrations of bullying and violence, and the usual eager promotion of national myths of cultural purity mediated by a nationalist myth of purification through systemized violence, which are the hallmarks of any gathering of Republicans.

Again, the six bribed and/or fascist members of the Supreme Court have declared that if enacting any of this is illegal, any president of the United States is utterly immune from prosecution for pursuing any of the illegal parts of it. These "justices" have also spent considerable time making sure that if any police officers want to murder citizens, they have qualified immunity from prosecution for pretty much any killing they'd like to do. "Qualified immunity" is a legal phrase that in practice appears to means "if you want immunity, you qualify." So, in my opinion, we'd do best not to think "they aren't permitted to do that," but rather think of all the things they'll permit in order to get it done, and realize that's exactly what they are going to do if given a chance.

It was the sort of horror show that any person of awareness has come to expect from the Republican Party over the decades. Abusing others for sport and profit is pretty much their whole bag at this point—at least when they aren't openly longing for license to say slurs again.

Our false-equivalency engine in legacy media was humming along by the time the Republicans' piss-haired felon of a candidate hit the stage, so after his 90-plus minutes of nonsensical menace rambling, we were treated to the usual responses to all this horror. One of the greatest hits from these quarters is a very serious scolding from those who claim to be in "the center." Now, "the center" is a term that doesn't really reflect any coherent policy, but which establishes for everybody watching that the person self-applying the label isn't horrified by horrific things like the rest of us, but also isn't actively pursuing those horrors like Republicans are. It's a valueless principle-free position which those in "the center" frame as the rational reasonable position. "The center" wants us to make sure we understand the perspective of MAGA party members, who are perpetually licensed by centrists as "regular folks" no matter how irregular and degenerate their morality becomes, no matter how committed they are to harming every sort of "regular folks" including themselves.

What centrists mean by "understanding" is not actually understanding, I should note. In fact the act of truly understanding MAGA fascists is seen by centrists as very polarizing and divisive. What's being suggested is that we join MAGA in imagining that by wanting what they want, things like deprivation and cruelty, they actually want something entirely different, something good and reasonable, like safety and security. What's being suggested is that we continue to take the MAGA self-exonerative rationales as credible, even though they are not credible. What's being suggested is that at any point of disagreement we take the time to change MAGA minds, one-by-one, by proving our point of view to them to their own satisfaction, and if we fail to persuade them to return to humanity, then the failing is not theirs, but ours.

This is all bullshit, so I treat it like bullshit.

It's hard to imagine that any voter would want to empower a party with zero positive qualities led by a man with zero positive qualities, dedicated to menace and harm, but I already have had to contend years ago with the fact that supremacist ideas and Nazi ideals do not interfere in any way with the desires and enthusiasms and intentions of very fine voters calling themselves conservative, nor do they frequently disturb the comfort of very fine voters calling themselves centrist. So it's disturbing to me, but not something I fail to understand.

And I've given up engaging people who ask me to prove to them that Trump and the Republicans are supremacists and fascists. The question is like being asked to prove gravity; it reveals such a desire to not observe things that it exposes itself as an active desire to not understand. What can I tell you if you've failed to notice the ways Trump has the enthusiastic support of white supremacists and Neo Nazis and conservative Christians and other hate groups, the ways that the policy planning of the political machine around him matches their desired ends, the way he expresses for them exactly the worldview they most want? What can I tell you if you've decided to forget the devastations of the previous Trump presidency? What can I tell you if you look at a sea of smiling white people waving signs that say MASS DEPORTATION NOW and refuse to understand what that means? I'd rather explain it all to my dog, who will understand me just as much, but at least won't respond with a pre-gurgitated string of laughable lies I will be expected to take as a serious counterpoint (though, unlike many MAGAs, he will expect scritchies).

So I tend not to entertain the spectacle of conservative outrage by lending it my time or energy in rebuttal. Republicans—who are outraged mostly by acts of basic human decency—simply have no standing to pretend to be outraged about anything else: crime, corruption, bullying, hatred, election fraud, fiscal unaccountability, terrorism, bigotry, hypocrisy; these are, in fact, the only detectable consistent conservative values.

But "centrists" should celebrate, because despite all this, I do still try to understand the MAGA perspective.

I try to imagine what it would take for me to go to a fascist rally and wave a MASS DEPORTATION NOW sign with a smile on my face, claiming to be concerned about crime while cheering a criminal, claiming to want safety while demanding danger, claiming to be decent while celebrating indecency, claiming to be a patriot while fomenting for civil war. I think of how twisted I would have to become, for the spectacle of diversity and equality and freedom to traumatize me into suicidally counterfactual reactionary nonsense. I think of the disassociation from shared humanity it would require, the orientation toward violence, the abdication of observable reality, the open and proud desire for awful things to come to our fellow human beings, our neighbors and our family members: the desire for deprivation, for starvation, for punishment, for bullying, for harm, for killing, or at least the willingness to allow these things to occur, to achieve some perceived advantage.

And then I think of the things that cause these sign wavers mental anguish, the things that offend them most, the things that they most fear. There appear to be two main categories: 1) anything that prevents the strong from punishing the weak, which our nation's conservatives/fascists experience as endangerment, oppression, and violence (which exposes the way these self-designated conservatives know themselves to be the strong despite their protestations of being an oppressed minority); and 2) anything that gives people in desperate need the things they need so desperately, which our conservatives/fascists experience as theft, degradation, and moral calamity.

Republicans are particularly enraged these days because the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, just chose her running mate, and it's jolly Minnesota dad Tim Walz, who seems to think that belonging to a gang of malicious bullies who fear basic governance and basic decency, and celebrate cruelty, and reject reality is just downright hecking weird.

He believes the government should help people and he doesn't care by gosh who knows it. This drives fascists bonkers. It drives "the center" bonkers. But I suspect I repeat myself.

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Now: Both Harris and Walz are Democrats, which means that they have deep and unfortunate and abiding institutional ties to our long-standing governmental traditions of punishment and deprivation, of colonialism and imperialism mediated through military violence and economic violence. This is something you'd think would reassure Republican voters, for whom the punishment and deprivation of millions or billions of others clearly represents safety and comfort. But no; Republicans actually refuse to acknowledge that Democrats are often similarly awful on these issues, because Republicans want to win elections, and Republican voters think that awful things are good. So Republicans have to pretend that Democrats actually do a bunch of really wonderful and necessary things that would make our society better, things they frame as existential threats, insisting that all Democrats are dirty socialists, which is something that would be far, far, far better than what Democrats all too often are.

The Democrats meanwhile have spent most of their time pursuing the votes of people who won't vote for them, by promising that they won't do any of the awesome and desperately necessary things that Republicans warn their reality-free voting base Democrats are doing and will continue to do.

And then Tim Walz—center of the road, steady as she goes, gee-whillickers Tim Walz—shows up, and gets accused of socialism, and his response appears to simply be well sure, I used government to help feed hungry kids; food is just the thing for hungry kids, what the hell is wrong with you weirdos? and the explosion of impotent vitriol from the overcoddled right and the explosion of ... I suppose you'd have to say grateful relief? ... from the near-totally ignored left, simply due to a glimpse of a politician who had seemingly no interest in currying the fascist vote, was an amazing thing to see.

Look, I don't want to overstate here. I don't doubt there are disappointments to be found in Waltz's current record and in his political future. And a great deal of the enthusiasm we see is due to the top of the ticket, which is Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to headline a major party presidential campaign, and somebody who is proving to have sharper political instincts than she's been given credit for. And some of the enthusiasm is probably due to a lot of people, who really didn't want Joe Biden, suddenly receiving a viable option who wasn't Joe Biden. But in my opinion a big part of it comes from the tone Walz set in the days after Biden stepped down—a tone that Democrats have to some degree adopted—with his straightforward proud owning of his preference for using government to help people, and that total willingness to give people who would rather see government hurt people a confused and disgusted countenance, then blithely tell them to go to hell.

It's almost—almost—as if there's a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm to harness from millions of people who would rather not be menaced and abused and killed by their government, and would even like to be helped by it, who haven't been very well represented at all for decades. It's almost as if the Democratic habit of trying to pick up voters to their right flank is a totally doomed strategy in an age when conservative voters have selected a completely alternate reality to live in, and will never acknowledge the ways that the opposition party is also giving them a lot of the cruelty and violence they so desperately want.

And, to some degree anyway, fascists are right to worry. Being Democrats also means Harris and Walz propose maintaining many recent but still-traditional governmental safeguards for the weak against the strong, and building and rebuilding governmental systems of social care that serve as bulwarks against deprivation. This infuriating-to-conservatives habit of using government to make sure human beings are taken care of, are, again, something that is to the conservative mind a moral calamity and an unforgivable theft.

And our false-equivalency engine in legacy media is humming along pretty well, so when Walz was selected, we were treated to the usual responses to these acts of basic human decency. One of the biggest hits came to us last week courtesy of false-equivalence superstar Jonathan Chait, who wrote that in selecting Walz, Harris had missed a chance to "capture the center."

And I thought: what center?

Where are the points of the poles that define this center? What kind of center doesn't include that jolly beardless Santa Claus himself, the ex-high school teacher and football coach, the avid hunter, the bog-standard moderate, the midwestern Democratic governor of Minnesota with an aw-shucks demeanor and plain-spoken diction, Tim Walz?

It must be a center that exists between two points, one of which pretty clearly reads MASS DEPORTATION NOW. I suppose Chait would have it that the other point is apparently so far to the right of basic acts of governance like feeding hungry schoolchildren that such acts don't appear in between the poles. The center is apparently now a cruel enough place that decency doesn't live there, and Chait, who has never believed that Democrats should ever do anything other than seek the votes of those who hate decency, now believes that Democrats should once again run away from decency, as a strategic matter.

So maybe "the center" isn't a position. Maybe it's an alignment, one that sees unity as a constant and never-changing agreement with supremacists, a certification that supremacists and only supremacists are part of "us," and any attempt to make common cause with unwanted groups that supremacists consider to be their enemies represents polarization and disunity, in a way that supremacist violence itself never will.

Maybe "the center" is just whatever no man's land currently happens to occupy the space between the worst atrocities we can imagine, and however far we've travelled toward those committing them to try to get them on our side, a journey we undertook so that we won't have to do the work of opposing them.

I think it might be that.

Such a center is a center that will make itself comfortable with any atrocity, because comfort is its only goal.

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The way "centrists" promote this sort of value-free center-seeking behavior involves a person from the center—often someone on the (sadly all too large) center-right flank of the Democratic Party—responding to the latest Republican gains by saying something like "Republicans are not our enemies."

It's a nice sentiment. After all, who wants a country full of enemies? Barack Obama tried a version of this message out in his famous 2004 "One America" speech, and Republicans have spent the 20 years following that speech doing their best to take that sentiment, cram it into a car compactor, and reduce it to a solid cube, preferably with as many people still inside as they can fit.

I can't stop thinking of the signs. MASS DEPORTATION NOW, they say.

It makes me ask myself: Are Republicans not my enemy? Under what conditions would they not be my enemy? I don't want them to lose their fundamental rights or be deprived of basic human needs or be mass deported, or lose life-saving medical care, or be harassed and murdered if they become homeless, or be enslaved in our prisons, so I suppose in that way I don't hold them in similar enmity that they hold others, but I'm not sure that makes them not my enemy, not when they've decided to harm and kill so many of my neighbors and family. When your father is stabbing your sister to death and announcing his intent to stab your mother, is he not your sister's enemy, and your mother's? What must I do to secure my father's friendship in that moment? Do I stand by and watch? Do I pretend he's not attacking? Do I sharpen knives and hand them over to him? And what peace can I establish with my father that doesn't involve me making war against my sister and all who love her? Do I even notice that my sister doesn't get to make such a choice about who is or isn't an enemy?

I ask myself: Is their enmity something I get to choose? If it is something I get to choose, what does it say for me if I make that choice?

This is a real problem a lot of people are struggling with right now, and it's not only because Republicans are fascist monsters, but because so many Democrats have spent my entire lifetime seeking a compromised center that is just monstrous enough that fascist monsters will finally hopefully agree to unify with them there—this, instead of just accurately naming fascist monsters as creepy weirdos with perverse desires, and then getting down to the business of for example feeding the hungry without for example fretting about how it might alienate people who hate seeing hungry people fed, if the feeding hasn't first been fully authorized by them. This is the struggle a lot of people are facing, and it's a struggle Democrats chose: Too often, Democrats have sought a middle that makes them the enemy of my sister, too.

And all too often, that middle is what we all seek—by we I mean those of us privileged enough to not be directly targeted for some form or another of MASS DEPORTATION NOW. We appeal to a shared humanity, but we appeal only to the shared humanity of those who have no respect for shared humanity, who want only domination, who will scorn all attempts to bridge our divide unless we get a knife and commence stabbing our sisters alongside, because the stabbing is the only point of unity that interests them—and even then they might scorn our shared bond, because we lack the proper vigor for the task, because they see how we shrink from the killing stroke, note the way we seek the less horrific center, and because they with whom we seek to share that center will always seek the most horror possible.

I think that's the center we are asked to seek when we say Republicans aren't our enemies. We're saying "Republicans aren't our enemies," seeking a peace that is extended only to us ... and then we drift always further right, always seeking the support of people who seek no commonality with anybody else, always leaving out all the people who don't have any choice about "enemies."

I recommend we seek a new center outside the poles we've inherited; one that sets its poles upon principles of basic human decency and basic governance and doesn't stray outside that; one that cuts us free from the rough machinery of empire and colony and the instruments of punishment that are used to maintain and expand them; one that looks at supremacists and their malign intentions and then doesn't involve them whatsoever.

That would be a center to move toward. And then, as soon as possible, to move beyond.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He feeds from the bottom, you feed from the top, he lives upon morsels you happen to drop.