so republicans today are talking about the 'far-left agenda' promulgated by obama yesterday. it's extreme, they say. it's out of the mainstream. (i leave aside that i myself regard 'extreme' and 'out of the mainstream' as compliments.) to which all sorts of people on the left, many of whom are well west of obama, are going, 'what?!' or maybe they'll say, with an amazing failure of basic reflection, that that's just factually false. well, you know i heard many people describing mitt romney as a radical right-winger with an extreme agenda. mitt fucking romney, who had absolutely no actual positions on anything.
now i have often argued that the left-right political spectrum is a ridiculously bad way to think about politics, though one i guess we're stuck with. but a good thing about it: obviously whether something is to your left or right, or way far away or very close, depends on where you are and which way you're facing. it's like you're asserting china is way far away, but you don't mean from here; 'from where' doesn't matter: china has, you assert, the intrinsic property of wayfarawayness. it's just an objective fact, even to the folks in beijing, that china is wayfaraway. sadly for this magnificent idea, 'wayfaraway' or 'extreme' pick out relations (really, more or less the same relation), and they are symmetrical relations. x is exactly as far from y as y is from x. if you are saying that someone is wayfaraway or extreme (from where you are), you are also saying equally that you are yourself extreme (from where she is). so you are, as a matter of strict logical entailment, always accusing yourself.
the overall effect of each side of our stupefyingly banal mainstream politics calling the other extreme, and (what seems impossible for quasi-rational creatures) their followers buying it or at least repeating it, is to whittle the political spectrum down to nothing. if obama and romney are extremists, then no creative or interesting ideas are possible, because any sentence that you haven't already heard 2k times is just too freaking weird. this is one reason that american political discourse is so unbelievably repetitive, and one reason neither the dems nor the reps has had a new idea in decades. obviously, the politicians and their followers don't want any. the obama and romney campaigns consisted largely of empty catch-phrases: often exactly the same ones ('balanced plan,' e.g.). anything that is not a mere cliche is dangerous and radical and weird.
this whole thing is just silly name-calling, and all it means is: he's not like us. it's like your little clique of cheerleaders or whatever, who all agree, you know, that shelley is just so weird. they experience shelley's weirdness as an objective fact. well, cheerleaders are not cheerleaders in virtue of their reasoning abilities. shelley and her goths, of course think the same about the cheerleaders, though thinking has nothing to do with either attitude. so i'd recommend that both sides just shut up with this 'extremist' crap. if you want to see actual extremist positions, read my books. this will of course entail that the democrats and republicans are extreme from my point of view (admittedly in tension with their milquetoastiness), and indeed that they are all together at the far-extreme edge of the spectrum. there i overcame your supposedly partisan divide.
