Comment by lucyjojo

for the author, only the centrists, his own group, can display independent thinking.

he assigns all virtues of the world to his group while others seems to be barely more than glorified barbarians.

this is, at best, laughable... and honestly quite reductive and insulting.

this seems to stem from the classic idea of "if everybody was informed and intelligent as i am we would all agree", which i thought had already been disproven long ago. people have different base assumptions. cultures are real things... individual differences matter too.

he also treats ideologies as unified things which is historically false, meanwhile his personal particular set of idea is not an ideology but something akin to objective truth (for which he explicitly argues) or something adjacent to it. any semi-consistent (if that) set of ideas instantly becomes an ideology as soon as you share that set to a group. there are myriads of ideologies that pop-up and die every day... the ones with staying power obviously have accumulated some following but they are rarely all compassing; we have a word for those, cults.

but first thing first, change country and you will get entirely different "centrists" with an entirely different set of ideas. there is no reason there would not be (in his own terms) "accidental" leftists and "accidental" right--ists???

in a locked 2 party system like what you get in the united states, stuff will probably have a tendency to degenerate though. things are way more fluid in countries where you have more democratic choice. there is a lot of fear in the american mix, that doesn't work well with free-thinking.