Is liberal just another word for moderate or centrist?
Leftists certainly think so. Take the song “Baby, I’m an Anarchist,” by the punk band Against Me!, which illustrates this dynamic perfectly:
“You believe in authority, I believe in myself.
I’m a Molotov cocktail, You’re the Dom Perignon.
Baby, what’s that confused look in your eyes? What I’m trying to say is that
I’ll burn down buildings while you sit on a shelf inside of them.
You call the cops on the looters and pie-throwers.
They call it class war, I call it co-conspirators.
‘Cause baby, I’m an anarchist and you’re a spineless liberal.
We marched together for the eight-hour day
And held hands in the streets of Seattle.
But when it came time to throw bricks through that Starbucks window
You left me all alone (all alone)”
Great song, and I guess a clean hit? I would march for an eight-hour day but am also opposed to throwing bricks through Starbucks windows. That’s not spinelessness, I just think peaceful protest for workers’ rights is good and effective, and I think intentional property damage is both counterproductive to gaining support and doesn’t really communicate anything except, well, anarchy. What radicals call moderation is often liberals honoring constraints (rights, universalism, pluralism) that have nothing to do with hugging the middle.
But it’s not just anarchists who define liberalism as milquetoast centrism.
In the aftermath of the release of Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s 2025 policy book, and after we launched The Argument, the familiar charge that liberalism is synonymous with centrism and moderation came back in full force — from both opponents of abundance liberalism and its allies:
The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait initially called The Argument a part of moderate Democrats’ counteroffensive.
New York magazine’s Simon van Zuylen-Wood called The Argument — as well as Abundance writ large — centrist.1
Another piece in The Atlantic, this time by Elaine Godfrey, again characterized us as a center-left project.
And, of course, how could I go without mentioning the Revolving Door Project, a group ostensibly focused on reducing churn between the private sector and public office, which initially characterized The Argument as “a factional publication committed to pushing strict adherence to centrist orthodoxy,” more than a month before we had even announced our existence. Charming.
Just to be annoyingly definitional for a moment: Liberalism is a normative political philosophy concerned with universal individual rights, pluralism, and the limits of free enterprise. Centrism, on the other hand, is a positional term, defined as the middle between extremes. Centrism can be a tactical electoral strategy focused on the median voter, and it can be a normative philosophy that argues for incrementalism and compromise as virtues in and of themselves.
As I’ve laid it out, it’s obvious that these are two different things, but I don’t want to feign ignorance. The best version of the argument that conflates liberalism and centrism is that liberals have become centrists in practice. More on this later.
The real problem for liberals is that most people don’t even know what the word means. Since becoming the punching bag for anti- and post-liberals across the political spectrum, liberals largely retreated from self-definition; it’s rare to even hear a politician use the term liberal to define themselves. Into that growing silence rushed our opponents’ caricatures: Leftists define us as moderates or incrementalists while rightists, to the chagrin of the far left, call us leftists.
There are left-liberals and left-illiberals, right-liberals and right-illiberals, centrist-liberals and centrist-illiberals. The fight of the 21st century will not be about the traditional left-right axis. It will be about the broader questions of individual freedom, self-determination, equal rights, universalism, pluralism, and a positive-sum view of the economy.
I’ll take my cues from “Baby, I’m an Anarchist“ — it’s most useful to define through contrast. On a wide array of issues, from abundance to democratic reforms to immigration, liberals and centrists find themselves in wildly different places.
