A lot of what I write, well more than a lot. Most of what I write is a mental response to what I have witnessed or read, and I just read something that bothers me. A short quote: “Not the centrist, ‘negotiating’ Democrats but the fighters like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, etc.”
Now I may be interpreting this incorrectly, and to me this isn’t about a Democrat, but about the term CENTRIST, which I define as moderate. This can be a right-leaning Democrat or a left-leaning Republican, now referred to as a RINO. Or really just one of the 45% of us who are actually independents.
It’s not the term Centrist exactly, it’s that we would be considered “negotiating.” I’d say we’re the least negotiating bunch out there. Our agenda is the least agenda of the lot. It’s not that we don’t have a stand, oh, we do. It’s Don’t Tread on Me. It’s Hands Off.
It’s: I can take care of myself, so take care of yourself. I don’t need you telling me what to do, and in return, I won’t tell you what to do. That’s not negotiating.
Now take the MAGA wing. They don’t want to negotiate either, but they don’t believe in live and let live, they want to set the terms and expect the rest of us to fall in line, one way or another. I’m not talking about the Republican Party here, because I believe that party’s been hijacked, and there are plenty of principled conservatives and honorable people who believe in a fair, helpful government for this country. Sadly, they’re just not the ones in office right now.
Look at the left side, fighters like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Socialists making headlines lately. I’m genuinely for what they represent. But they’re the ones who’ll eventually have to negotiate. Why? Simple. What they want doesn’t work for the whole country. It sounds good in New York. It doesn’t play the same in Pendleton, Oregon.
The Democratic Socialists always hold their rallies on or near a college campus. Not in a farming community.
That’s where this all falls apart. This is a Republic, and it’s a democracy too, both things at once, that’s the design, and part of that design is that what works in one place doesn’t automatically work in another. It’s not about negotiating. It’s about allowing self-governing. That’s where the centrists, the moderates, the independents come in. Let us take care of ourselves.
Now, I said “let us take care of ourselves,” and then I’m about to list off Medicare, Medicaid, Defense, FEMA. That’s not a contradiction, even though it might look like one at first glance. There’s a difference between the things that genuinely need to work the same everywhere, national defense, a safety net that doesn’t disappear the moment you cross a state line, disaster response, and the things that don’t. Self-governance was never “no federal government.” It’s “federal for what actually has to be federal, and local for everything else, and stop pretending every problem needs the same answer in New York and in Pendleton.”
And let’s be honest about something else while we’re at it: that federal help isn’t a gift. It’s not Washington being generous with its own money. It’s our money, every dollar of it started as a paycheck deduction before it ever became a program. The federal government depends on us, not the other way around. So why does it get talked about, year after year, campaign after campaign, like the relationship runs the opposite direction, like we should be grateful for the return of our own money, instead of the government being grateful we keep sending it in the first place?
What we don’t need is Bernie telling us all what we need any more than we need Trump forcing it down our throats with an executive order and a threat. The moderates don’t need to negotiate. They just need to be left alone to do the job.
