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You could argue this happened in 1992, and it would also be the last time centrism won an election. In 1992, Democrats had basically given up on the political hegemony that had defined them since WW2, and accepted the political hegemony of neoliberalism and Ronald Reagan. And they won on it. It won an election for them.
And since that time, Democrats have been convinced that they had to run to the center to get "moderate" voters, when in reality, "centrist"/"moderate" voters never actually manifested. It was a middling black-swan event, but what it did, is it gave corporate democrats a hall pass to permanently assume a thing about a thing that didnʻt exist or even actually happen.
The very principal of a left versus right spectrum, represented as a normal distribution, is a construct of liberalism^1^. Its a way to represent an assumption about how voters think and behave and are distributed. And you are under no obligation to accept this construction. And when this construction has to get pushed up against reality; real actual voters with real actual data, it falls apart^2^. And this is because voters are messy, complicated, contradictory things. And this should be an obvious explanation because actual voters are actual people, and actual people are messy, complicated, contradictory things. A scientific materialist should faithfully reconstruct the models, push the models against the data, and reject the models which donʻt match the data. Any rational person who has borne witness to the previous decades of politics should recognize how the liberal construction of voters behave doesnʻt map to the data. It canʻt predict outcomes. There are ways of analyzing politics which do predict future states. But if you narrow your view to what assumptions liberalism demands you make, youʻll struggle to predict future state of politics, which is the ultimate test of any theory. If
You are not obligated to accept the assumptions of liberalism. And if the assumptions of liberalism dont predict beyond the data theyʻre trained on, you should reject those assumptions. You are not immediately obligated to accept other assumptions. In science, we reject theories all the time when the evidence tells us to, and sometimes that leaves us with an uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty about how that system works. But it is better to be uncertain than it is to be comfortably wrong.
1: I consider liberalism to be the parent philosophy of democratic liberalism, republican conservatism, neoliberalism, neoconservatism; all of these extension find their roots in liberalism. Two philosophies not finding their roots here are social democracy (roots in marxism), and american fascism (roots in nazism/ european fascism).
2: I can go into explaining this, but I want to keep the argument brief. The case involves multivariate analysis and stats.
S+ tier comment, in the words of my generation. I love it.
I realise why we've got so invested in certain framings of reality using different political lenses (conflict theory, my beloved) because it touches on literally every parts of our lives and our value systems.
But at the end of the day, it's just a system used to organise us. I've seen similar tiffs arise at work over co-op versus owned, kanban versus sprints, matrix versus pyramid, and it's the same kind of shit except for the scale: who benefits, who makes decisions, why do we do it. Real questions with concrete answers that we can experiment on and change our approaches—and keep changing them.
But just like with trying out workplace arrangements that would benefit the vast majority, there are people invested in the status quo for a variety of good and bad reasons.
We should be able to talk plainly and soberly about these things as long as we all agree that human flourishing is the ultimate goal of any system we build or reproduce.
Yeah, this is it. I appreciate the uncertain language of whether or not centrism "won" the 1992 election as well. It really is just an oversimplification where everyone but the establishment loses. The results from the last decade or so should be data enough to show that the way things are measured is fundamentally broken. While the whole left/right liberal/conservative paradigm is still the pervading "default" mode of thinking in the meta of American Politics, but it's increasingly coming under more scrutiny, especially after this last election once again failed to produce predictions that had the results within their parameters. I think a good portion of that lies in this weird idea that many dem and even academic circles are getting recently that "populism is a right-wing thing", which is once again predicated on the paradigm of left/right liberal/conservative. Almost like people really aren't that simple or something...
I'm sure it is very convenient to the reigning political duopolies in the world to have people self-organise into two broad "teams."
I've seen it happen in real-time, where I'll agree with someone on 90% of the facts, but then we're off on the last 10℅ and suddenly we consider eachother wholly on the "other side."
Then if you're already labeled as being on one side or the other, and you have two major politicians representing just these two broad sides with barely any room for nuance, who are you going to vote for? Some loser 3rd party isn't on a team, and just has human opinions??
Anyway yeah