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John Grillington, lifelong center-right suburbanite, has voting preferences indistinguishable from a literal neo-nazi. One shouldn't draw overly strong conclusions from that. I can understand why Trace writing the right off might be annoying, but it doesn't make him a fake centrist.
I actually think this is backwards, both specifically and in a more general sense. The rat-left are mostly pretty moderate and hold normie center-left policy preferences. They like meritocracy, institutions, pluralism and tolerance, etc... They hold some odd beliefs, but those are orthogonal to their politics. The rat-right, such as it is, is far more prone to fairly radical political beliefs (e.g. neoreaction, HBD).
Tbh there’s a pretty good chance he voted Obama at least once.
While he is a fictional archetype, he is representative of a number of people I know in real life. The general pattern is that he has fairly moderate (albeit nebulous) policy preferences but doesn't engage with politics very much and is strongly negatively polarized against anything vaguely left-wing. He definitely didn't vote for Obama.
Yeah, at least 50% of the people I run into who meet that description voted for Obama in ‘08. Granted, this could be filter bubble effect- having ‘moderate’ policy preferences is much more left wing than average round here. But also, mathematically, Obama had to get votes from plenty of these people to win Indiana and North Carolina.
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It rather does. As a matter of category, a centrist is a balance of left and right. If they write off on half the political spectrum, they are not a centrist.
If your definition of centrist is 'even 50/50 split in preference for prevailing political parties', perhaps, but that is an unreasonable standard and also a faintly ridiculous one. It would require ignoring actually existing politics in favor of maintaining a dubious notion of balance. Intellectual alignment is not partisan alignment and you don't get to vote for what you want; you get to vote for what's on offer. One can have authentically centrist preferences and still feel one party consistently offers something more aligned with your preferences than the other.
One may also align with one party or the other for more basic reasons. TW has been pretty unambiguous about why he's not aligned with the American Right, and it's not because he's actually a doctrinaire leftist; it's because the American Right thinks he deserves fewer rights and preferentially wouldn't exist.
The location of a center does not care if you think it's unreasonable or ridiculous. A center is a relative state, and it is relative to elements adjacent to it as a whole, not what someone wishes those elements would be. Trying to claim an 'authentic' center is just a No True Centrist fallacy in the making.
TracingWoodgrains is not a centrist because they disagree with both elements the Left and the Right. They are a fake centrist because they are not in the center. That they quibble with the left on matters of tactics is irrelevant.
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Should we not though?
I know from experience that DR3 ie "Democrats are the real racists" is a widely disparaged take here but when the voting preferences of literal neo-nazis are functionally identical to those of the woke left, shouldn't that give you pause?
Who's accusing who of "fascism" again? I cant help but notice parallels between the origins of national socialism durring the inter-war period, (seizing the means of cultural production) and the rise of the woke left over the last 20 years.
No. People have widely disparate reasons for voting for a party. The fact that a conservative centrist and a neo-nazi both have strong preferences for Republicans doesn't imply that the conservative centrist is actually a neo-nazi or the neo-nazi is actually a centrist.
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