Now that the election is over, I’m getting into a certain kind of fight with people that I think I am going to try to stop having.

These fights have to do with how much worse it will be living under Trump than it would have been living under Harris. It also has to do with with whether our left fringe or right fringe is more dangerous or more unhinged, or whether the centrists of one side or the other is more blameworthy for failing to effectively reign in their extremists.

I’ve noticed this kind of conversation activates precisely the kinds of ideological blindnesses, speculations and distortions that made me uncomfortable taking any popular side in this election. It brings out tribal energies. I leave these conversations feeling shitty.

I have noticed though if I make a centrist appeal things tend to go much better.

Nobody I know likes either fringe, their own or the other side’s. (By now, I’ve managed to alienate most of my fringy friends.)

So I say this: “Each party has its own Silent Majority of reasonable centrist-types. That silent majority needs to stand up and take its party back, and send its extremists to the basement. Were it to do this, they could offer the voting public something it could get enthusiastic about. It would put an end to voting for lesser evils.”

For whatever reason, weighing evils and trying to determine which evil is the lesser evil and which the greater brings out the worst in everyone, including myself. And while the necessity of picking a lesser evil when an existentially threatening evil looms is an important one, that is no longer a topic I am willing to discuss.

I have a friend named Ken who sends out political limericks to his friends. His views are pretty typical for a man in his later 70s. He’s still cruising along on ideas he formed forty or fifty years ago and the content he thinks about is the reporting he sees in the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN. He’s somewhere between old-school liberal and progressive. Lately, some of his limericks have gotten me feeling a little bit impatient. So I sent him a counter-limerick of my own, using the centrist affirmation approach:

Radicals think they’re omniscient
But their judgment is plainly deficient
They make voters cringe
Send them back to the fringe,
We need centrists: sane, fair and efficient.