Quotes About Centrists

For too many years, those eligible to vote in primary or general elections did not bother to do so. Those sensible centrists who do not go to rallies but care deeply about our country effectively silenced their own voices. That sent the message to incumbents that they were either doing the right thing or that we just did not care.

Because liberalism typically doesn't sell in American presidential politics, liberal candidates tend to run as culturally conservative centrists.

Transcending divisiveness is one of the dreams of centrists, as if disagreement were a bad habit rather than fundamental to politics.

Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites.

I think that in politics, when people want to discredit a particular position, they say, "Oh, they are liberals," or "They are conservatives; we are centrists." Everybody wants to be a centrist.

The fierce battles between New Democrat centrists and old-style liberals that defined the Democratic Party in the 1990s are long gone, with the party unified behind Barack Obama's economic agenda of universal health care, expensive federal programs and more regulation of the financial markets.