cat

Let me start with a question that I hope we could all agree upon: The most admirable, righteous, and worthy people of Nazi Germany were the ones who chose to risk their lives and their family’s lives to oppose the government and its genocide against the Jews.

Okay, we agree.

Next question: Do we agree that the majority of the people in Nazi Germany were complacent and ignorant of their government’s actions, even though they privately opposed them, because they were scared of not just the social consequences of standing up and out (after all, many activists at the time operated in secrecy), but they were also largely scared of the cognitive dissonance between being an ethical individual under God and the reality of their inaction against mass-murder?

It’s not as if all Germans at the time lost their ethical bone or really had no idea. Most Germans were very aware of the true nature of their country, but they chose to support Hitler against their own most primitive beliefs and values. The more obvious reason for this is the fear of standing out and becoming a target for the Gestapo, but that can’t be the only reason. In that case, the first instance of large-scale protest would have grown to an unstoppable size and Germany would have stumbled along as every supposed supporter was a traitor in wait. The more sinister underpinning of Nazism’s confounding success in its early years came from internal conflict at the individual level, where each person upon learning about the true nature of their government and their movement would be forced to reconcile their paralysis with their morality. It’s true that people didn’t want to put themselves and their families in danger; most people wanted to live their lives as normal and hide from the intense mental weight of their surroundings, but this complacency leads to an even deeper and more disturbing feeling. In this avoidant self-imposed ignorance, people didn’t lose their awareness of the material facts, really they gained an even stronger awareness of their own agency against those facts. The daily self-perpetuating confrontation between the individual and their surroundings imposed an intentional choice to continue hiding from reality, creating a growing internal tension between the individual’s morality and their conscious elective to violate it. One can only handle this for so long.

So the anxious tension could be relieved in two main ways: final repentance through action and reconciliation (the individual actually going out and satisfying their morality through rebellion), or alternatively enforcing a change to their morality itself. The first focuses on the action side of the dissonance, whose only real relief is through satisfaction of the morality. This looks like the invested father finally releasing his inner reservations by speaking to his family about how he really feels, the rogue teenager escaping home to join the resistance, or the SS officer offering himself to foreign intelligence.

The second focuses on the morality side of the dissonance by forcing the morality to be compatible with the action (that is, inaction). This is much more inconspicuous and invisible by design. In this resolution, the individual continues their usual actions, but bends and contorts their morality to align with them. This is the Nazi enthusiast justifying the eradication of Jews by reconciling it with their moral inclination towards the David beating the Goliath, in this case, the poor Aryans defeating the rich banking cabal of Jews. Another example could be the Nazi scientist reconciling his human experiments with the unrelenting pursuit of truth and knowledge through the scientific method.

You can see how the second method of relieving tension, that of changing morality itself, is so much more sinister and damaging. This turns the silent dissenter into a material supporter through a change so fundamental that it would take decades to reconfigure. These sorts of Nazis couldn’t let go of their morality even after Hitler killed himself and the Allies took control of Germany because they couldn’t ignore the tension between their actions and their morality otherwise, so the morality remains the same and they remain in mental equilibrium with their past selves.

This distinction is incredibly important. You can see how this applies to all scenarios of tension between action and morality; to use more contemporary examples, this is the factory owner justifying his abusive practices by turning money-making into a moral good, telling himself and others that he was poor too once, and made it out through hard work. This can also be the despot supporter, defending the evil tyrant because they think that the end goal is morally good enough to justify the evil. The compassionate Christian enforcing conversion therapy to save their gay son from going to Hell.

Upon recognizing this method of mental protection, whether intentional or unconscious, it begins revealing itself everywhere around us. Particularly, I see it heavily concentrated in the Republican party and the MAGA movement here in the United States. President Donald Trump has promised many good things, and yet has contradicted them an astounding number of times, which makes it incredibly confusing how the same person can support Trump twice. They think he is going to end wars all over the world, yet months later they just as ardently support his aggressive warmongering in the Middle East and South America. The explanation, as you might imagine from the long preface, is that there is a plastic morality that is bent back and forth to support someone who you honestly trust and hope will do good. Support for going to war with Iran can be justified through the same logic that supports the ceasefire in Gaza: peace is a moral good and war is a moral bad, so the ceasefire is good because it ends the war in Gaza, and inciting the war in Iran is good because it will eliminate an agitator in their region as well as abroad, preventing future wars by having one quick one right now. Pedophilia is morally bad, but even if Trump is proven to be a pedophile in the files, he’s morally rectified by releasing them to the public so that so many more pedophiles can face justice. People who have committed their vote, their money, their community, and their reputation to someone who they thought would do good things are obviously not going to be quick to turn their back. Every political and social action has been guided by an identity as a Trump supporter, so the dissonance grows as facts emerge. The actions of supporting Trump must be reconciled by either completely flipping and conceding to the opposition in a change of action, or by bending morality to maintain your identity and everything you’ve banked on Trump. People have gone both ways.

CENTRISM:

And here lies the centrist. The centrist might not like Trump, but they don’t like the opposition either. Or maybe they like both. Either way, they choose to toe the line between the parties of the United States. This may seem like the most reasonable group, after all they don’t get buried enough into a movement that they could get caught up in the action vs morality dissonance, right?

Firstly, I want to dispel the idea that the centrists are the independent free thinkers amongst a landscape of partisan zombies. The centrist who commits to centrism as a rule is just as partisan as the Democrats and Republicans. They might not be represented by a major party, but such commitment to centrism as a policy of thought, as a rule of political engagement, as a personal identity, is functionally identical to the Democrat who does the same with their party. It’s simple: a truly free thinker will allow themselves to align with Democrats and Republicans. A truly free thinker will be happy to register with a major party if that party represents their beliefs and values. The centrist who thinks that they are free because they don’t have a major party are still stuck in partisan grooves that hold them to a strict set of externally imposed principles. If I was a Democrat and wanted to become a centrist, it would be easy; I would just adopt the principles of toeing the line and pretending to like and dislike both parties equally while voting for Democrats and Republicans somewhat evenly to uphold the ideal of what a centrist looks like.

Here’s the sniff test: If you identify as a centrist, how do these ideas sound to you?

• Not registering as independent.

• Only voting for (Democrat/Republican) candidates for your whole life.

• Having enthusiastic and passionate support for the (Republican/Democrat) party while hating the (Democrats/Republicans).

• Listening to a particular radio station because they lean (left/right) like you do.

• Donating to a major political party.

• Putting up lawn signs and bumper stickers for a major candidate.

If those ideas make you uncomfortable, especially if you feel like they violate your identity, you’re a partisan centrist. The free-thinking unfettered centrist will be happy to support a major party, even to the degree of donating and exclusively voting that way, if that party represents their ethical and political beliefs. Something to chew on.

Second, centrism can be dangerous and corrosive to democracy. Democracy’s most powerful tool, the very thing that positions it as the best of many bad systems, is the vote. The problem with the vote, for all of its beauty, is that people feel helpless most of the time. We have elections about yearly, but the big elections come every two years, and everything in between feels mostly ineffective. As Trump just keeps doing things, all we can do is watch and protest, hoping for the best until we have another chance in the next big elections. The centrist is positioned in such a way that they are also watching Trump and abhor at the murder and pedophilia (and everything else), but feel the squeeze of not being able to do anything. This feeling is especially exacerbated amongst the centrists compared the Republicans or Democrats, because their principle of evenness bars them from joining in partisan rallies, protests, or supporting nonprofit organizations that lean one way. For the really dedicated centrist, even voting isn’t satisfying, because they obviously don’t want one candidate to win, but their evenness principle tells them that voting for the opponent who has a bigger chance is not fair enough and is too partisan. Their hands are tied as they feel forced to watch each next worst thing happen in front of them. This puts the dedicated centrist into a position where their action (in this case, inaction) is in tension with their morality. They rightly feel that Trump is doing evil, but the powerlessness and idle hands prove unsupportive of opposition. And so the centrists find themselves at the crossroads: do I act differently to ease the tension with my morality, or do I bend my morality to fit my actions? Realistically, I think most centrists take the first option and decide to wholeheartedly support one party for now so that they can do something to oppose the external immorality. This is righteous. What I’m really concerned with here are the centrists who are still centrists in 2026, the year of the midterm elections and the second year of Trump’s presidency.

These are the complacent supporters of evil. This is engagement with the thought patterns that led to inaction or outright support amongst Germans who knew that the Nazi government was committing evil in their backyards. When this person chooses to bend morality, it becomes a moral argument to try and defend the evil. Our American chooses to shift their morals back towards the center, standing on principles of fairness and impartiality above those of peace and justice. They concoct and propose the best possible argument in favor of what’s exclusively evil (often doing no such thing for the other side, because the argument for other side is too obvious and popular), extending as much charity and reinterpretation as possible to the evil. This can certainly be done moderately as long as the end position is still in opposition, but that’s quite the problem. MAGA is so far right that permitting even a percentage of Trump’s position to be true is extreme.

At this stage, our centrist has contorted to uphold evenness to such a degree that they have somehow returned to the center. I say “somehow” because the center is not the white part of the continuum from blue to red, left to right, it’s actually moved to the right. MAGA and Republicans in the United States right now are reaching the end of the spectrum to the right, and the Democrats are still in their original moderate left position, leaving the “fair” and “balanced” immoral centrist position firmly in the red. On the other hand, the moral centrists who chose to change their actions have been forced to support the Democrats as much as necessary, leaving them a little ways into the blue, but mostly still centered. Anecdotally, this is why I’ve seen so many self-proclaimed centrists fighting to support Trump’s actions against the obvious but “unfair” consensus, ending up functionally favorable to his administration in most cases.

The fascist with his illiberal rhetoric will be welcomed as a fair check on democracy.

While I still do think that this comprises a just sect of partisan centrists, they are certainly not isolated. A path can be traced from earnest self-identification as centrist to partisan centrism, to our moral crossroads, and either to moral or immoral centrism.

I also want to note that most of the time, partisan centrism is silent and innocuous, and that it’s because of our exceptional times with the Overton window shifted so far right that this latent group has become volatile. Still, it was always possible, and we have no idea what’s next.

And none of this is to mention labeling theory and the simple fact that integration of externally imposed labels influences our thought in major ways. A criminal is likely to reoffend once they integrate the label “criminal” into their identity. This is probably the locus of partisan centrism, even when it begins as an external label. As soon as someone self-identifies as centrist, they draw upon that identity along with their others (like being a father, an American, a Christian) in the quick process of how things make them feel and how they interpret them.

I think political free thinkers can start first with divorcing their identities from partisan labels like “centrist” in favor of no label at all. This requires time and energy-intensive thinking to uphold, given how there are no easy rules to follow on the ballot, but it’s much better than confusing intelligence with an outgroup. At the very least we can recognize this critical decision and choose to change our actions instead of our morality when it most counts.

cat

01/16/2026

Edit 01/17/2026

I feel the need to further highlight the importance of avoidance. When someone becomes avoidant and willfully ignorant of politics, that’s when they become most suggestible. When you avoid the facts and/or avoid interpretation, you open yourself up to other people being the first to tell you their side, and when those are the only facts and the only interpretation you’re familiar with, you adopt it as your own. Even if you try to avoid accepting a biased interpretation, you’re only ever given the facts most amenable to that interpretation, totally bypassing your baby gate attempt at impartiality. It takes effort and attention to have your own interpretation, and that means hearing multiple ideas from multiple sources that oppose each other. And no, the president has never ever been a reliable source. Remember that avoidance is the only way that Germans could ever seriously think that the Jews weren’t being starved and murdered en masse.