...it comes from an overly simplistic linear interpretation of political thought and opinion, whereupon all political attitudes appear on a continuum consisting of two poles: a left and a right. According to this viewpoint, all politics can and must be boiled down into binary terms, you're either a 1 or a 0; black or white; left or right; liberal or conservative. You are either closer or farther from one or the other, but you can never ever be both, or something else entirely.

The real world corresponds very little to this continuum, therefore it is an imprecise and ultimately irrelevent reflection of the true scope and scale of political expressions held by any population*. Any one of the political 'power-hitters' on this forum fail at some point to neatly fit into a pattern consistently reflecting just one of the poles--myself included. Even the term "centrist" is deceptive, as who, when and where do we define the 'center' to exist? What was 'centrist' 20 years ago, would now be considered left, but those of today would've been considered right back then.



*I believe that in the end, the prevalence of a mass and homogenized media may come to render my analysis moot, as folks willingly and uncritically allow themselves to be funneled into the little binary boxes defined for them via repetition.