What is the center left? ft. Nate Silver, Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias

So, I mean, I mean, like you like one of your your first question of your first four questions is about the relationship between liberalism and centrism.

So you ask, like, should the center left explicitly avow liberalism as opposed to centrism, moderation or compromise? So I wrote this piece for the argument a while back about what is called why I'm not a centrist, which is basically about kind of drawing the distinction between liberalism and centrism.

And my point is that if you.

you know, if you are like an avowed liberal, people who are liberal, you know, believe a wide range of things, but they're often like actually, they're like a lot of very radical things that modern liberals really believe that are not like centrist.

Like, I think that like, you know, Matt, you've written about this too, but like, if you take like yimbyism seriously as an economic project, it's like a radical remaking of like the entire country.

It's like, It's not at all like something you could categorize as moderate or or even compromise.

Like to me, like centrism has largely been like a tactic that people can use in different points in order to like enact an agenda.

So, you know, for instance, like Yimby's do not say when they're trying to upzone, you know, Nashville, like, hey, like we actually don't believe that any, you know, of these regulations are legitimate unless they have to do with health and safety.

Right.

They go like, what's wrong with the townhouse? Like, what's wrong with a smaller single family home? Because that's how you like win political fights with people is by meeting them halfway.

But to me, it's like, you know, it's hard because when we talk about the center left, like often I think what we're talking about is like actually a very diverse group of people who don't enjoy like the extremism in some form or fashion.

Sometimes it might be like Super far left on social issues, but are also, you know, really, I don't know, aware of how economics works.

And so they don't sign on to some of the more insane left econ ideas.

Sometimes it means that they're like actually super centrist on social issues, but they have like very far left views on economic populism or whatever it is.

And like it's not actually to me like a super concrete group of people, which I find very difficult to like then think about, like, who are we talking about? Yeah.

Yeah, there is a real energy gap.

If you look at surveys of all Americans, there are a lot of people who are moderate or centrist.

And I'm happy to parse those terms and the difference between that and center left and liberal and all these things are different.

But they tend to be less activated.

It's a bit like herding cats.

I mean, inherently kind of both the strength.

and the weakness of liberalism, as I understand it, or one of the strengths, is that it is a system based in some ways on tolerance and saying, okay, people of radically different views come from all ethnic backgrounds and religious backgrounds in the United States and have different incentives, and how do we all get along? I live in the middle of Manhattan, and just the complexity of activity in the city when you're ducking taxi cabs, and it's kind of amazing to me that there's not...

Anarchy in some ways.

Right.

We built all these skyscrapers and have this highly functioning subway system, a big defender of of New York City things in general.