It’s not a great time to be a political centrist. As I look at the current political landscape, I find myself disappointed by what I see on both sides. I’ll use examples from current events — and even an ongoing election — but it’s not merely about one individual or one election; a given candidate or administration is of course merely representative of the public whom they represent, or seek to.
When I opened up The New York Times today, I was greeted by an article on the frontrunner for mayor, Zohran Mamdani. There’s plenty I could write about his remarkable hostility to the State of Israel, and his deployment of liberal Jews as tokens of his apparently wide political base. I’ll also add, more overarchingly, that his policy ideas are foolish and unworkable — not to mention the fact that he is profoundly unqualified for the role. His ideas have been tried in other large metros in the United States as well as overseas — with discouraing results.
Mamdani is, of course, representative of a concerning on-the-ground seachange among younger generations — and even Jews. I recently had a FaceTime call with a Jewish relative of mine, and she joined the call wearing a kefiyyeh. I didn’t say anything on the call, since I found the idea of a white lady in New York wearing kefiyyeh ridiculous, and even kind of funny.
When I shared this anecdote with friends of mine, they were indignant, and said that I ought to have said something. “Does she know,” they said, “that you live in Israel? Is she aware that signs of Palestinian nationalism are, for many in our neighborhood, basically like a KKK hood?”
For better or worse, my reaction is different: I view the wearing of kefiyyeh by a non-Palestinian — let alone a non-Palestinian in an affluent liberal enclave in the US — as “larping” of the highest order. It’s of a piece with something I saw on a work colleague’s Instagram account, which prominently mentioned his “Anti-z!0nist” bonafides. Our ancient progenitors hunted the wooly mammoth, our grandfathers stormed the beaches of Normandy, and their descendants deploy these hard-earned rights to DM one another on Instagram and ally themselves with people whom they by default view as victims in a century-long conflict they know nothing about. Can they speak Arabic or Hebrew? Have they read anything by Edward Said outside of a few excerpts from Orientalism in Post-Colonial Lit 101? Can they locate the West Bank on a map?
No, of course they can’t — they haven’t — and they couldn’t. I had harbored the hope that people were more than the sum of their stereotypes. Everyone is different, we contain multitudes, yadda yadda.
Which is what made that Facetime call laughable to me. Because I didn’t want to believe that someone could fit so neatly into a box, and yet here they were, fitting the very stereotype I had worked to tamp down.
After this Facetime call, I vented to a friend that I was certain the my kefiyyeh-wearing relative had — I was sure — also advocated for the rights of Kurdish self-determination, and had protested against Bashar Al-Assad’s actual genocide of 500,000 of his own people. And, I was sure, she had written to Congress asking about the plight of the Yazidis fleeing ISIS.
Now, this is, of course, facetious. This person has, to the best of my knowledge, not done any of this. Why? Because wearing a kefiyyeh while living in New York — especially on a call with someone in Israel — is just engaging in Frantz Fanon roleplay while parking their Subaru in Whole Foods.
I had another work colleague record an Instagram Reel about how he was, after October 7th, harassed and isolated by friends whom he had long-considered allies. “Just because you’re Jewish,” he noted apologetically, “doesn’t mean you support Israel!” He then proceeded to mention how a given Jewish holiday wasn’t technically connected to the land of Israel (he was wrong; it was). I don’t know if his friends took him back after this groveling Reel, but I do know that, as they say, “tokens get spent.”
As I was writing this, I struggled to find a sort of cultural or literary handhold. There are many, but I find the below quote from the Netflix movie Glass Onion to be fitting. Sometimes, one need not be charitable. People are wonderful and amazing and complex, but also, well, kind of stupid.
And sometimes, it’s a stupid that’s wrapped in academic terminology — “power structures” and “reify” and “Algeria paradigm” — but is just what it is: dumb. Sometimes people are just dumb.
But, to mix my metaphors a bit, I’ve got clowns to the left of me, but I’ve also got jokers to the right. When President Donald Trump brokered the recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, some of my conservative friends needled me, “what do you think of Trump now? Not such a bad guy, huh?”
My default response has been “Foolish people are sometimes capable of pretty good things.” Because I don’t have any better way of processing the rest of what Trump administration does. Every day brings a new level of ridiculousness and rage-inducing policies — if one can even call them that: random deportations of Spanish-speaking people, kowtowing to autocrats, alienating allies, de-emphasizing renewable energy, indicting political opponents — and that’s just the last few months.
When I walk around Israel, it takes every ounce of willpower for me to not confront the occasional person wearing a red MAGA hat, and ask if they approve of Trump’s policies around women’s ability to choose, or healthcare, or gun control.
Trump and the Republicans of 2025 are a ridiculous husk of a party. There’s no guiding principle — “Make America great again?” What does that even mean? — it’s just a collection of Trump’s base instincts and predilections mapped onto the entire apparatus of state power and executed by feckless apparatchiks and unqualified sycophants. It’s a clown car, a barrel full of monkeys, a confederacy of dunces. It’s just, well, stupid.
There’s a great bit from the standup comedian Matthew Broussard, who’s jokes about finding himself in a similar conundrum. He looks around and asks “why are these my only two options?”
I don’t really have an answer for why. Recent history is filled with examples of bifurcated social movements that squeeze folks in the middle. Yeats noted, sadly, in The Second Coming:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
I remain hopeful that we can have normal, compassionate centrists who are immune to the foolish elements and groupthink and purity tests of causes de jour…while also steering clear of cults of personality and cronyism and a strange affinity for authoritarian regimes.
Oh, and less antisemitism on both sides would be great, too.
I trafficked a bunch in pop culture, so I’ll end with a quote from Rambam (Maimonides), who writes in Hilchot Deot:
“The path of the upright is one of moderation in every trait, so that each trait is equidistant from either extreme and not close to either.”
*names have been changed to protect the innocent and the stupid.
Silicon Spatula 