Centrist?
The Kadima party in Israel is usually described as “centrist” or perhaps “center-right”.
Let’s hear what Michael Parenti has to say on the subject.
There remains a problem with this alignment of left, right, and center. It has to do with the tendency to ascribe “moderation” to those on the center, and “extremism” indiscriminately to those on the “far left” and “far right”, based on an inclination to conflate spatial relations with moral meanings. Labels such as “left, “center,” and “right” refer to the political spectrum. They are metaphoric spatial terms …
It follows that an “extreme center” is a contradiction in terms, the extremes of the center being nothing more than the beginnings of the moderate left and moderate right.
But “extreme” has another meaning, a behavioral one that evokes an image of intransigence and violence. In news reports and common parlance, this second meaning is blended with the first and then ascribed to the left and right, but by definition never to the center. …
Other laudable concepts are associated with centrist moderation. Political moderates in various countries are described as defenders of stability. But whose stability? For whose benefit? At whose expense? …
As our unexamined political vocabulary would have it, the moderate centrists cna do no evil, while the immoderate extremists can do no good. In truth, those who occupy the mainstream center are capable of immoderate, brutal actions. It wasn’t fascist extremists who pursued a massively destructive was in Indochina. It was the “best and the brightest” of the political center, the extremists of the center, the moderate extremists, if you will. …”
Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions, Ch. 21, “Left, Right, and the “Extreme Moderates”", , pp. 186-194.
