Why I'm not a centrist
Liberalism is an ideology. Centrism is a tactic.
Is liberal just another word for moderate or centrist?
Leftists certainly think so. Take the song “Baby, I’m an Anarchist,” by the punk band Against Me!, which illustrates this dynamic perfectly:
“You believe in authority, I believe in myself.
I’m a Molotov cocktail, You’re the Dom Perignon.
Baby, what’s that confused look in your eyes? What I’m trying to say is that
I’ll burn down buildings while you sit on a shelf inside of them.
You call the cops on the looters and pie-throwers.
They call it class war, I call it co-conspirators.
‘Cause baby, I’m an anarchist and you’re a spineless liberal.
We marched together for the eight-hour day
And held hands in the streets of Seattle.
But when it came time to throw bricks through that Starbucks window
You left me all alone (all alone)”
Great song, and I guess a clean hit? I would march for an eight-hour day but am also opposed to throwing bricks through Starbucks windows. That’s not spinelessness, I just think peaceful protest for workers’ rights is good and effective, and I think intentional property damage is both counterproductive to gaining support and doesn’t really communicate anything except, well, anarchy. What radicals call moderation is often liberals honoring constraints (rights, universalism, pluralism) that have nothing to do with hugging the middle.
But it’s not just anarchists who define liberalism as milquetoast centrism.
In the aftermath of the release of Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s 2025 policy book, and after we launched The Argument, the familiar charge that liberalism is synonymous with centrism and moderation came back in full force — from both opponents of abundance liberalism and its allies:
The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait initially called The Argument a part of moderate Democrats’ counteroffensive.
New York magazine’s Simon van Zuylen-Wood called The Argument — as well as Abundance writ large — centrist.1
Another piece in The Atlantic, this time by Elaine Godfrey, again characterized us as a center-left project.
And, of course, how could I go without mentioning the Revolving Door Project, a group ostensibly focused on reducing churn between the private sector and public office, which initially characterized The Argument as “a factional publication committed to pushing strict adherence to centrist orthodoxy,” more than a month before we had even announced our existence. Charming.
Just to be annoyingly definitional for a moment: Liberalism is a normative political philosophy concerned with universal individual rights, pluralism, and the limits of free enterprise. Centrism, on the other hand, is a positional term, defined as the middle between extremes. Centrism can be a tactical electoral strategy focused on the median voter, and it can be a normative philosophy that argues for incrementalism and compromise as virtues in and of themselves.
As I’ve laid it out, it’s obvious that these are two different things, but I don’t want to feign ignorance. The best version of the argument that conflates liberalism and centrism is that liberals have become centrists in practice. More on this later.
The real problem for liberals is that most people don’t even know what the word means. Since becoming the punching bag for anti- and post-liberals across the political spectrum, liberals largely retreated from self-definition; it’s rare to even hear a politician use the term liberal to define themselves. Into that growing silence rushed our opponents’ caricatures: Leftists define us as moderates or incrementalists while rightists, to the chagrin of the far left, call us leftists.
There are left-liberals and left-illiberals, right-liberals and right-illiberals, centrist-liberals and centrist-illiberals. The fight of the 21st century will not be about the traditional left-right axis. It will be about the broader questions of individual freedom, self-determination, equal rights, universalism, pluralism, and a positive-sum view of the economy.
I’ll take my cues from “Baby, I’m an Anarchist“ — it’s most useful to define through contrast. On a wide array of issues, from abundance to democratic reforms to immigration, liberals and centrists find themselves in wildly different places.
Centrism but not liberalism
Let’s start with abundance.
The pro-housing YIMBY movement, which is at the core of the abundance movement, has long been attempting to get rid of the vestiges of exclusionary zoning. Those longstanding regulations, which govern what type of housing can be built where, began as attempts to racially segregate white suburbanites away from Black and Asian Americans. They now function as a form of de facto class segregation and a drag on technological progress, wages, and the entire U.S. economy.
The opponents in this fight have always been anti-liberals across the political spectrum. Yes, often there are left-wing groups in the way, but in large part, it has been centrists that stood between YIMBYs and victory.
In New York, when Gov. Kathy Hochul attempted to pass a Housing Compact, it was opposition from moderates that killed the effort. In state after state I’ve reported on — California, Colorado, Montana, and Arizona — centrists have been some of the principal barriers to progress.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Centrism is about identifying the point between two extremes, and the liberal view on land-use regulations is pretty extreme! Completely undoing decades of procedure and allowing dramatic changes to the built environment so that cities can absorb newcomers quickly is not moderation. Liberals are extremists on human flourishing, individual freedom, and freedom of movement.
The evidence of abundance liberals’ overt radicalism is doubly clear in the space of energy abundance, where liberals have been arguing to allow for the fast development of nuclear, transmission lines, geothermal, and utility-scale solar and wind. Pushing to completely remake how the nation grants permits is not choosing the midpoint between the climate left and the drill-baby-drill right, it’s taking a strong, positive-sum bet on growth and innovation even when the median voter is skittish.
Democratic reforms are another place where liberals and centrists end up on different sides. Take the filibuster: Moderates, who place a strong emphasis on procedure and tradition and shy away from radical reforms to the democratic process, have been opposed to blowing up the Senate chokepoint. Leaders like Sen. Joe Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, along with many of the Democratic senators who voted to reopen the government last month, are all examples of this type of centrism. Sinema gave a clear centrist defense of the filibuster in a Washington Post op-ed: “The filibuster compels moderation and helps protect the country from wild swings between opposing policy poles.”
Liberals, on the other hand, are not moderates about democracy — we’re maximalists. From supporting blowing up the filibuster to opposing the procedure fetish to pushing back against excessive process in government actions, liberals find themselves, yet again, out of step with the median voter.
The final, and perhaps clearest, example is immigration. There are few positions as obviously liberal as being pro-immigration, particularly for an American. Given the core principles of liberalism — individual liberty, universalism, pluralism, and a positive-sum view of the economy — to reject immigration is essentially to reject liberalism itself.
After the political fallout from the chaos of the Biden years, centrists have caved on immigration. Not merely as an electoralist posture, centrist thinkers have actually begun to oppose immigration on its own terms. Most notably, The New York Times‘ David Leonhardt has become a champion of the widely discredited view that immigration is bad for native-born American workers.
In 1940, Lewis Mumford wrote an article in The New Republic called “The Corruption of Liberalism.” In it, he distinguished between “pragmatic liberalism” and “ideal liberalism.” Pragmatic liberals, who preached isolation as fascism was at the gates, had, “in a disintegrating world … lost [their] integrity but retained [their] limitations.”
Now again, we see the corruption of liberalism, by both enemies and friends, away from its guiding moral force and toward a set of tactics. Part of why centrism and liberalism have been conflated is because many liberals have again forgotten who they are and what they believe.
I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: Centrism has value. Anyone serious about winning elections needs to identify the median voter in order to begin the work of winning her over.
Pragmatism has its place. Just look at New York’s new mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani. His sincere leftist commitments are obvious. And yet, he has clearly recognized the value of centrism and moderation as tools every politician has to use, both to win and, at times, to govern.
The problem is when this narrow electoral pursuit stands in for ideology. Centrism has no animating moral force. It can’t tell you what to prioritize when the median voter is silent or conflicted. It can’t provide guidance when the median voter has morally abhorrent views. And it can’t tell you when to stick your neck out for an unpopular minority view.
What it can do well is still important — and underrated — it can help you win narrow elections.
But even there, centrism alone is insufficient. Part of what makes so many modern Democratic candidates lackluster is the absence of any animating center. What moves Kamala Harris? Gavin Newsom? Pete Buttigieg? Not what they say or what vibe they give off or if they are any good at interviews, what do they believe?
Moderation is a tool in the hands of a great politician, but it’s not an ideology. Liberalism is.
This piece was doubly bizarre because it contrasted socialism vs. abundance, which are both, in principle and practice, compatible. The real fight is between nonsocialist lefties like the anti-monopolists vs. abundance. Simon van Zuylen-Wood seems not to know this distinction.
My hot take is that the vast majority of US leftists are also liberals and I wish they’d just admit it.
Bernie and Zohran and Warren are calling for Scandinavian-style welfare programs and labor protections, not the abolition of private property. And how many writers at Jacobin or The Nation support throwing out individual rights and democracy in favor of a dictatorship of the proletariat? Almost none. Hell, one of the top leftist causes right now is antitrust, on the grounds that monopolies harm market competition. So leftists aren’t even anti-market anymore!
I think the distinction is mostly about aesthetics, not core values. This is why leftist politicians, who actually have to govern, are much more positive toward the abundance agenda. Abundance policies actually help them achieve their goals.
Haven’t read the whole article yet but I do find it quite funny that Against Me! later put out a song called “I Was A Teenage Anarchist” talking about how they were wrong to be a teenage anarchist.