Queering the Center
or Wherever You Go You Are Still Somewhere
So this interaction happened a few weeks ago; I am still thinking about it and I have some things to say.
Just for clarity’s sake, before we get any further into this topic, I a transgender, lesbian, Anabaptist Christian woman. I am also an Anarcho-pacifist1 and that involves being, by most definitions, a thoroughgoing leftist. I am also a trans feminist and I try to be an ally to a whole swath of people with marginalized identities. I don’t actually have purple hair but given my politics and who I am, I can’t imagine it would shock anyone if I did. Suffice it to say that “centrist” and “moderate” are not frequently applied to me.
So I am coming at this subject from a partisan position. It is (sort of, maybe) to my advantage for more people to agree with me. I like to think that the argument and analysis I am about to put forward will be compelling regardless of the source but I don’t intend to hide my social, political, and religious locations.
At a surface level, let’s just acknowledge (as Mr. Youth Pastor did later in our conversation) that the center or middle position in any given debate or discussion is not at all automatically virtuous. We can further acknowledge that, despite not being automatically virtuous or more likely to be correct, many people do have something of a cognitive bias towards a center position—more on that later—; and when we experience a psychological pressure to treat as true, conclusions which don’t merit that conclusion, we have a logical fallacy. In this instance it is the Argument to Moderation Fallacy. But I would like to speak to more than the Argument to Moderation as a logical fallacy.
The thing about a centrist or moderate position is that it is nearly always arbitrarily or at least situationally defined. Here in the US, the moderate or centrist political position is one that would be described as the right or even the far right in many European countries; similarly the parts of the left that I find myself in are viewed as extreme or far left here in the US, but in other contexts would be little more than center left or centrist in other places and at other times. And even in the US what is seen as centrist is highly contextual. Depending on the region, the culture, the era and so on, what constitutes a “sensible moderate” position is going to change.
And of course that change, the factors on which the definition of centrist depend, are the positions of the “extremes” as perceived by the population in question. For it’s existence, a centrist position depends on the actual existence of directionally extreme positions. One might even say that centrism has a parasitic relationship to polarization. And if that is an overstatement, it is nonetheless the case that we have a population of people who are conditioned to see and treat as reasonable that which falls between any two competing popular positions.
It was, ironically given that you are encountering it here, the archconservative Goldwater who reminded us that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”. I agree with him on this point as I suspect most people would—including those who think of themselves as moderates and/or centrists. The fact of the matter is that nearly everyone has some subject on which moderation or centrism is tossed aside and fervent polar partisanship is embraced; whether it is sports teams, music taste, politics, or religion, most of us are utter fanatics on some topic or other and, on that topic, we are all inclined to raise an eyebrow at the fence-sitter who is forever finding evidence of very good arguments “on both sides”.
I am no different. Unabashedly I am a partisan for the basic human rights of trans people, of queer people generally, or women and (I hope) of all who are oppressed. Shamelessly drawing on my religious commitments and persuasions, I am convinced that my calling as a Christian is to be relentlessly pleading the cause of the oppressed in any society. On the subjects (just to start) of white nationalism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and more I am convinced that anything short of full liberation is intolerable. The man who says “We probably ought to grant the gays some rights but lets not get carried away normalizing their culture/behavior/ideology” is certainly better than the neo-fascist calling for putting queer teachers up against a wall and shooting. But then “better than” is not the same as correct; he is merely—if fortunately—less wrong.
But all of this is maybe a little obvious. Let us take it as preliminary.
A popular idea invoked by those who see themselves as centrists is horseshoe theory—the idea that extreme positions to the “left and right” tend to bend back around and approach one another. The theory has a sort of rough and ready plausibility to it—it isn’t hard to note similarities between fascists and certain militant, statist communist regimes—but it tends to fall apart when confronted with the actual details of history. Notably it is a theory built to privilege its proponents by casting them as the sensible center which is, by nature of the theory, made immune to comparisons with the “extremes”. It make the center invisible, casting centrist positions not as one possible position among others but as the sensible starting point from which others deviate to varying degrees.
I want to suggest instead that we are better served understanding the center to be just as much a partisan position as all other positions. Centrists are not the default position from which the rest of us deviate, they are merely partisans of a particular position which objects to the positions held by everyone else. Let’s remind ourselves (we will have to do so frequently thanks to those cognitive biases) that there isn’t anything normal about centrism.
It might help to draw a parallel here to the conversation around queerness drawing specifically (if lightly) on queer theory. One major force perpetuating anti-queer prejudices and structures is the relentless, usually unexamined, belief that straight, cisgender, allosexual2 people are normal. Yes I hear already the objections that those non-queer folk make up the majority of the population and thus have some right to be thought of as normal but a few minutes reflection ought to reveal that the concept of normalness carries with it far more than numerical advantage. To be normal is to be the default. To be normal is to be above serious question and to hold an absolute right to consideration in nearly any social, political, religious, or commercial circumstance. What is normal is hardly ever excluded, what is extraordinary is only sometimes included. After all, there are loads of unusual or out of the ordinary or minority experiences which are nevertheless perfectly ordinary. A $2 bill, a skort in 2023, twins, or lefthanded people are all relatively uncommon but by no means abnormal.3
What is normal is hardly ever excluded, what is extraordinary is only sometimes included.
Queer theory (and, I would argue, any serious liberationist theory) insists or resituating the straight, cisgender, and allosexual as specific positions in a context where the very concept of normal has been abolished. I, an allosexual transgender lesbian, am no more or less normal than a cis allosexual straight man; we merely occupy different locations along a number of different spectra of sexuality and gender. Straight isn’t the default (as though “default” were a meaningful term to apply to human persons) it is merely one of the things people might happen to be, and gay isn’t the default either, it—together with other sexualities like bisexuality and pansexuality—is merely another thing a person might happen to be. Once you get the hang of seeing the world this way—deleting the default and allowing that all of the ways humans are, are just different ways of being human—you will find it grants all sorts of advantages in recognizing and resisting the wide variety of ways in which oppression occurs. I would go on to recommend it as an invaluable lens in deconstructing and resisting any and all cases of human marginalization: white supremacy, for instance, relies on the malformed and unexamined belief that whiteness is the human default while ableism relies on the malformed and unexamined belief that certain types of bodies are normal bodies. In each case oppression depends on presenting as normal what are in fact merely particular ways that some people happen to be.
And I am suggesting that this same operation needs to be performed on centrism as well. We have got to stop seeing the center as the default. The center, as I said above, is really only a position different from other positions people in a society might happen to hold. But before I go any further with this I want to make something clear: while decentering the normative necessarily involves an understanding each category a person happens to occupy as originally morally neutral in the general application of queer theory; that is not the case here. I am not for a second suggesting that there is no real moral difference between a leftist, an anarchist, a tankie4, a social democrat, a centrist, a conservative, a libertarian, and a fascist. Each of those positions (as well as each of the other political locations a person might occupy) justly entails significant moral judgement. It is, for instance, evil to be a fascist. What I am saying is only that we need to denaturalize the center and stop seeing it as a non-position.
I want to suggest that, if you take me up on the project of denaturalizing the center, pretty quickly it will begin to dawn on you that centrism reeks of just as much (if not more) zealous partisanship as all the other political positions, but their partisanship is often masked by our assumption that they are the “normal” ones.
You see—and now I draw near the point of this essay—the great strength of the “normal” center is that it represents the status quo. Where leftists want radical change in the direction of increased equality and liberation, while those on the right want regression to greater degrees of hierarchy5, the center’s politics are defined, finally, by a desire for things to stay basically as they are or—at most—to improve only gradually. And, if we are committed to reducing political analysis to “left-center-right”, I think this ought to make more of the center’s invisible strength visible. Those on the left have no motive or reason to ally with the right against the center as the right is in fact farther away from the goals of the left than the center is (and, of course, the converse is also true)6; but in times when reactionary politics (whether populist in flavor or not) are gaining ground, the center becomes an obvious ally to the left since “sure they don’t like our goals but we can agree that we don’t want the right to win”. At the same time, in moments of rapid social evolution, the center is just as able to ally with the right in an effort to resist change. In short the center is the obvious ally to both the left and the right—which grants them significant power.
To the student of history it should seem clear at this point that the United States deftly employed the invisible power of centrism throughout the 20th century, allying variously with full Statist Communists and with Fascists and Rightwing Military Dictators against Fascists and Statist Communists respectively. Of course we have sold this to ourselves as “searching for any willing ally in times of great need” but then it may, by now, strike you as a tad suspicious that the Global Superpower who has positioned itself as the “threatened sensible middle” seems always to come out on top, often as the party responsible for turning the tables or at least ensuring victory.
Or let us take a more current and immediate example: that of transgender people in 2023 here in the US. Our rights are not yet guaranteed in law across the country. In fact things are looking more and more ominous for trans people.
This is obviously a situation that we trans people would like to see changed. Those on the right would like it changed as well; they want to see the whole map turned to shades of red and burgundy while we would like to see the whole thing shift blue. Those in the center might hold any number of specific and individual positions but are going to be against both a green and an red map. And in a society as polarized as ours is, they get the deciding “vote”. Trans people and our allies will be advocating for more green, the fascists7 will be advocating for burgundy and with each vote—bathroom bills, Transition care bans, “Don’t Say Gay” bills,—it will be left to the center to decide whether they want to side with us or with the fascists. And that power should not be granted the invisibility of normalcy; centrists and moderates need to be just as much “on the hook” to defend their reluctance to change as anyone else.
What I Am Not Saying
Before I end I want to take a few lines to emphasize a few things I am emphatically not saying.
I am not drawing any sort of moral equivalence between a centrist and a fascist—at least not so long as the centrist manages to refrain from supporting the fascist. Centrists may well resist necessary change, and that is a problem, but on the whole they are not trying to make things actively worse.
I am not trying to give centrists a pass. Insofar as they are failing to fully support moral causes the centrist is guilty of a moral failing. Certainly theirs is not so great as that of the fascists (see #1) but it is nevertheless a bad thing and I hope that they will see the light soon.
I am not here advocating for any particular approach to centrists other than exposing their position and their partisans as a position and as centrist partisans. The centrist who derides “partisans” or “fundamentalists” or “extremists” to their left and to their right are, at best, blind to the fact that the center too is a position and not “the default” and at worst are themselves partisans relying on a logical fallacy to disguise their partisanship8.
In case I haven’t made it clear yet, I reject any attempts and declaring or insinuating a moral equivalence between any of these positions. The contemporary right in this country wants to erase protections for queer people other minorities, and the poor; the center doesn’t want to; the liberationist left9 wants to increase our rights and protections. These are not morally equivalent positions—it is an evil thing to want to oppress persons.
It will come as a great disappointment to the more radical of my readers that I am in fact rather a bad anarchist. I do subscribe to anarchist principles but am an incrementalist insofar as I am unwilling to recommend or countenance the cost of a revolution or other rapid switch to an anarchist society—the full cure would kill the patient. I am also tragically willing to work with and even within any institution or structure where I think my presence and influence can move things in the direction of greater equality and liberation.
Allosexual is the counterpart to Asexual just as cisgender and heterosexual are the respective counterparts to transgender and homosexual.
I am trying very hard to avoid a Young Frankenstein reference at this point. Your patience is appreciated.
I am using here the original political definitions of left and right as they emerged during the French Revolution and embraced by contemporary and future centrists; which is in no way a commendation of the horrific and bloody excesses of the left or the right in that conflict; if you go back and re-read my own self-description you will see where I have an element of centrism in my own approach to being an anarchist.
The exception here is probably the nihilist who just wants to see the system burn for burning’s sake but I would suggest that nihilism of that sort ought to be understood as a politics all its own which simply doesn’t map onto our current discourse in any simple way.
I do not intend to defend my characterization of the anti-trans right in the country as “fascists” in this essay. If you have any doubts on the matter then I would recommend Jason Stanley’s excellent book How Fascism Works and if you are not persuaded by that then please leave some comments and I may be persuaded to write another essay on just that topic.
It needs to be noted that partisanship is a different thing from merely taking a position. People of any persuasion can hold to their position with more or less openness to, or tolerance of, the beliefs and positions of others. I myself am of the belief that tolerance is a virtue but a limited one. I work hard to make space for good faith centrists who have honest concerns and may not yet have learned as much as they might while at the same time holding no space for overtly racist, homophobic, or generally oppressionist perspectives, recognizing the humanity of the person who holds them without tolerating any expression of their prejudices. Where one’s politics, religion, and beliefs are positional, partisanship is a matter of attitude.
Yes there is a tankie left and while some of them are liberationists generally (or can at least lean that way) there are too many whose analysis erases the differences between various civil rights struggles; some can even become objectively oppressionist in their politics and still will not be as oppressionist as the authoritarian right.