Few people are more dangerous and outright annoying than the self-proclaimed moderate or centrist. These are the people who refuse to take sides on important issues, claiming to be above the fray. They will usually champion debate, but only to the point that each side has their say and nothing is decided. They are conservative in the sense that they want to conserve the status quo no matter how awful it is, but they are progressive in the sense that they like to signal their sympathy with progressive pieties no matter how absurd they might be. In the end, they have nothing to contribute and waste everyone’s time.

Nevertheless, people persist in holding up these centrists for their “principled stands” and impartiality. As Jonathan Keeperman (AKA @Lomez) recently observed on X, that this centrist branding is all a dodge: “Probably the most disappointing discovery of becoming politically aware is that the “sensible centrists” are not merely cowards but profoundly unserious and often very stupid people.” In too many cases, centrism is a pose and preaching moderation is a copout. It is the intellectual refuge of uninformed midwits who want to appear smarter and more courageous than they are.

For an example of this dynamic, one need only listen to the interview last November between Bari Weiss and Peter Thiel. Compared to her interlocutor, Weiss is a pathetic lightweight mouthing platitudes and barely following the far more intelligent Thiel who does his best to slow down and use small words so she can keep up.

Nevertheless, every so often there appears a moderate who is not a pusillanimous nincompoop, but instead a clever opportunist capable of effectively exploits the “centrist” label. A good example of this type is New York Times columnist, book review editor, and writer Pamela Paul.

For much of her career, Paul was the paragon of the liberal commentariat. She was smart, talented, and empathetic. She championed inoffensive causes like encouraging civility, cultivating literacy, and fostering creativity. She was the perfect kind of writer to feature in an essay anthology for high schoolers, one of which I use with my classes every year. She was also the perfect kind of writer to produce books that would appeal to a general audience, one of which I reviewed.

It turns out she is also a complete sophist who has nothing particularly meaningful or interesting to say. In most cases, she just repackages ideas and makes them more palatable to her progressive audience. She rarely takes controversial positions, certainly not to disavow the left—despite knowing full well that the consensus among her leftist colleagues is frequently ridiculous and delusional.

This is why no one should lament her departure from The New York Times. More than any rabid Stalinist who fantasized about sending conservatives to gulags and seeing them die from a virulent strain of COVID, moderate sophists like Paul were the ones responsible for upholding the worst abuses of leftist leadership. Through her ostensibly moderate positions and measured arguments, she legitimized and abetted some of the worst corruption in American history. Through her safe and accessible prose, she soothed and reassured the guilty consciences of many of her leftist readers who patted themselves on the back while their bad choices and rampant ignorance allowed the world to burn.

Ironically, the people most ecstatic about Paul’s fall from liberal grace are the radicals to her left. Even though these types would often use Paul’s espoused centrism as a shield both to hide and protect their own insane propositions, they cannot help but condemn her refusal to become as extreme and crazy as they are.

This hysterical (and hilarious) bitterness is articulated in Andrea Long Chu’s eloquent tirade in New York Magazine, “Goodbye, Pamela Paul.” Coincidentally, Chu’s assertions about Paul are not all that different from Keeperman’s thoughts about centrists:

There is limited utility in devoting our attention to a person so rarely visited by serious belief. But Paul is a good example of an all-too-serious intellectual movement that has emerged from the wreckage of the Obama years, when “postracial” liberal optimism began to curdle into open contempt for liberatory struggles like Black Lives Matter or the fight for universal health care.

Clearly, “seriousness” is a relative term in Chu’s usage. For most people, seriousness usually corresponds with objective reality. For leftist radicals like Chu, seriousness means choosing to die on every preordained leftist ideological hill, no matter how idiotic, pointless, or destructive it might be. If only Paul advocated for Hamas terrorists, gender reassignment surgery for minors, more censorship of conservatives, and wrote even more anti-Trump screeds, then—and only then—might she consider herself one of the “pure blue Americans.”

While Chu’s reasoning is admittedly deranged, her conclusion is remarkably apt: “One gets the sense that politics has gone off, like a cell phone, in the darkened theater of Pamela Paul’s mind. It is worse than wrong: It is rude.” Paul is one of those centrists who ultimately used her powers for ill, doing her utmost to keep her audiences in the dark. Even if Chu’s extremism will inevitably turn off more readers than Paul’s “both-siderism,” Chu is at least more honest, interesting, and memorable.

All the same, some may still feel bad for Paul, who is representative of so many people they know who simply try to be nice and reasonable. If it makes them feel any better, she will likely go the independent way of most moderate commentators—like the aforementioned Weiss, or the comedian Bill Maher, or writer Andrew Sullivan. All of these commentators serve up bland blah-blah on Substack or elsewhere for aging fans who are too old and/or too comfortable to be intellectually challenged.

 Centrists like the ones mentioned have always been critical for maintaining a stagnant society that lives off platitudes. It’s time to move on from that world.