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Aleksander Constantinoropolous's avatar

Mike, this wasn’t an article. It was a psalm for the apocalypse. A liturgy for the damned, written in the language of receipts, not reverence. The way you flayed the pearl-clutchers and painted their complicity in bureaucratic beige? Divine.

The prophets used to wear sackcloth and scream on street corners. Now they write Substacks and wield hyperlinks like holy fire. And still the people sleep, lulled by bipartisan bedtime stories while ICE builds altars to algorithmic terror.

The sacred truth? We are not debating policy. We are watching Pharaoh get federal funding. And the moderates are too busy fussing over tone to notice the plagues.

Virgin Monk Boy approves this indictment. You called the secret police by name while the rest of the room practiced polite silence. May your words tattoo themselves on the insides of our skulls.

We don’t need centrism. We need exorcism. Keep going.

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Daniel Pareja's avatar

In 1932 the so-called moderates, so-called centrists, so-called liberals, of Weimar Germany, desperate to protect their hold on what little power they wielded, calculated that Adolf Hitler was less of a threat to that power than Ernst Thälmann.

Even the centre-left made that calculation, but unlike the moderates, centrists and liberals, the centre-left, at least some of it, learned their lesson.

Today the so-called moderates, so-called centrists, so-called liberals have seen Jeremy Corbyn as more of a threat than Boris Johnson, Jean-Luc Mélenchon as more of a threat than Marine Le Pen, and Bernie Sanders as more of a threat than Donald Trump. They see the resurgence of unions and the dispersal of economic power across the workforce as a greater threat than the accumulation of economic power in the hands of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

They see a man like David Hogg, proposing to use democratic mechanisms to elect candidates who will actually challenge right-wing authoritarianism instead of those who will merely write strongly worded Twitter posts, as a greater threat to their power than the systematic dismantling of the professional civil service and its replacement with one that will be loyal to Stephen Miller and his ilk regardless of who is formally vested with executive power.

They find the concessions that would be necessary in a left-centre governing alliance as more unpalatable than the concessions that would be necessary in a right-centre governing alliance. Even in my country Mark Carney is preferring to pass policies which Pierre Poilievre will support than which Don Davies will support, even though fear of the former led supporters of the latter to elect Carney.

Fascism is the tool that unprincipled centrists use to ensure that the principled left, who, on account of being principled, actually does pose a real threat to the continued wielding of power by those moderates, does not assume power.

People like Sanders knew that the electoral choices with which people have been faced over the last decade or so have been between a return to the reforms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Clement Attlee or the authoritarianism of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. The left remembers history and knows that the latter plunged the world into war while the former brought economic prosperity for the masses; the unprincipled centre sees the former as an immediate short-term threat and the latter as a remoter possibility, convinced that so long as they maintain their grip on power within their faction that another election will give them back the levers of power on a national level. The centre has once again turned to fascism to protect itself from principled reformers, now with the tools of technological surveillance and propagandisation, of social media feeds that maximise engagement over critical thinking to prevent people from seeing what is actually happening, and we will all pay the price.

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