Centrism Means Helping Fascists

Two examples from Spanberger and Sherrill.

Democratic centrists generally portray themselves as common sense pragmatists, dedicated to meeting the electorate where it is. “Democrats running in red and purple place…must define themselves as moderate and normies…” Jon Cowan, president of centrist org Third Way declared in March.

But is centrism really for normies or moderates? What does centrism look like in practice when one political party is dominated by open fascists? How do you triangulate with Mussolini?

The answer is both obvious and unfortunate. Centrist politicians who attempt to compromise with fascism inevitably end up helping fascists and boosting fascism. If you attempt to meet fascists halfway, you are pushing the country towards fascism—and betraying your allies and marginalized people in the bargain.

In recent weeks we’ve seen two depressing illustrations of these truths by Democrats who entered office with high hopes in 2025. The first is Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger. The other is New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill.

Centrist Spanberger helps fascists eliminate voting rights

Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer has a reputation as a moderate; she attacked Biden for being too progressive as president and has often castigated Democrats for running too far to the left. However, in her 2025 campaign, she ran hard against Trump. “To those across the Potomac who are attacking our jobs and our economy, I will not stand by silently,” she declared. After winning with nearly 58%, she started her first year by demanding the resignation of right-wing apparatchiks on the University of Virginia board of directors and rescinding her Republican predecessor’s order requiring local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws.

Things went downhill from there, though. As part of her centrist ethos, Spanberger vetoed legislation allowing Virginia public workers the right to unionize and legislation preventing ICE from making warrantless searches in state facilities. She also blocked legislation to prevent purges of voters and legislation meant to protect universities from free speech restrictions pushed by the Trump administration.

Perhaps her most painful, and direct gift to the Trump administration, though, is her approach to redistricting. In response to Republican efforts to mid-decade gerrymander their way to a federal House victory, Virginia’s legislature (like California’s before it) drew new maps which would have flipped four seats blue. Spanberger’s support was lackluster, because she wants to be seen as nonpartisan and there’s not much that’s as partisan as partisan redistricting. But she deferred to the party, and voters approved the redistricting in a referendum.

Unfortunately, the right-wing State Supreme Court invalidated the map. At that point, Spanberger simply surrendered. She shot down a proposal to force Supreme Court judges to retire, which could have saved the blue map, or at least would have given Virginia a Democratic court going forward.

Even more depressingly, she’s signaled that she wants to prevent further redistricting efforts for the 2028 election. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries—a centrist figure who has nonetheless figured out you can’t really centrist your way out of fascism—has been pushing for “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time” going into the 2028 elections, including sweeping blue state redistricting. Spanberger in contrast has insisted that she’s “not going to focus on some hypothetical in the future.” She insists that Democrats need to concentrate on the elections they have in front of them, without strategizing for 2028. In other words, Democrats should just vote harder, even as Republicans undermine the republic and make voting pointless.

Jeffries believes (correctly!) that vowing to fight will energize voters and make them feel like they still have a stake in their party and their democracy. Spanberger, in contrast, is desperate not to look too partisan or too committed to fighting fascism. She believes that partisan battles have caused her approval to crater—even though a more obvious reason for her falling numbers is that she was elected to fight Trump and she keeps fighting Democrats instead.

In any case, she’s turned to appeasement, declaring that she doesn’t want to fight as Republicans steal seat after seat in the House. You could call that centrism. Or you could call it a huge gift to fascists.

Centrist Sherrill helps fascists brutalize protestors

Like Spanberger, Sherrill, a former naval officer and federal prosecutor, won a commanding victory in November 2025 by promising to oppose Trump and Trumpism. In February, she signed an order barring ICE from performing civil immigration enforcement on state property. She’s also been focused on affordability issues, and she’s had solid approval numbers.

Last week, though, Sherrill embraced her centrism in an extremely ugly way when she took the side of DHS against protestors.

Said protests were centered on Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark run by the GEO Group. In late May, inmates in the center began a hunger and labor strike to protest inhumane and brutal conditions, including lack of medical care, inedible food and overcrowding. At least one detainee in the facility has died in custody.

The hunger strike inspired courageous protests outside the facility. ICE has reacted with violence; in one incident, Senator Andy Kim was caught in a pepper-ball attack. Democratic officials, including Kim, have been attempting to force ICE to allow inspection of the facility; Sherrill herself has said she wants it closed. A week ago, Sherrill attempted to gain entry and was turned away.

Sherrill, then, has been signaling solidarity with protestors and support for their goals. But this sort of firm stance was apparently too firm for her centrist instincts. After denouncing the facility, Sherrill decided that the real problem, somehow, was people objecting to a concentration camp. She ordered State Police to disperse protestors or force them into designated protest zones.

The result, as Will Bunch reports at the Philadelphia Inquirer, was brutal.

For two nights now, a battalion of Sherrill’s New Jersey State Police — who the first-year governor had claimed would “lower the temperature” in Newark — has turned up the heat to 11 by firing rubber bullets, tear-gas canisters, and flash-bang grenades while violently pushing back the demonstrators, both with mounted officers on horseback and with riot shields and batons.

Sherrill has claimed that the protests are being spurred by “outside agitators”—suggesting that somehow it’s illegitimate or a scandal for Americans to come to New Jersey to protest a federal concentration camp! She’s also imposed a curfew.

Sherrill seems to be motivated by a fear that Trump will send a surge of ICE agents into Newark, brutalizing the population there as Minneapolis and Chicago were brutalized earlier in Trump’s term. Those escalations were horrific, and it’s understandable that Sherrill does not want to see a repeat in her state.

But to avoid federal attacks on her people, Sherrill has decided to do the brutalizing herself. She has lent bipartisan credibility—and actual weaponry—to lawless fascist violence. Rather than resisting, she has chosen, in the tradition of Vichy, to aggressively capitulate. And so instead of another public relations disaster for Trump, Sherrill has destroyed her own credibility and physical harmed her own constituents.

The quisling core of centrism

It’s not surprising that Spanberger and Sherrill have struggled to respond to an aggressive fascist federal government. The federal government has a huge amount of power and can impose great costs on those who oppose it. It seems to make sense to try to negotiate or finesse the issue—to seek a middle ground where you don’t capitulate entirely, but also don’t draw fascist ire.

But the thing about fascists, as Neville Chamberlain discovered, is that they aren’t interested in compromise. They see any capitulation as weakness and as a chance to simply seize more territory. Spanberger hopes that she can retreat and just win elections, rather than having to actually declare herself a partisan willing to fight. Sherrill wants to tear gas some protestors so the feds realize that she’s on their side against the radicals and then reach an amicable agreement on how bad concentration camps are allowed to be.

But what actually happens when you knuckle under to fascists is that your allies abandon you while fascists kick you again. There is, maybe, a centrist approach to taxation or to environmental regulations. These are cases where finding a middle way may be cowardly and may be bad policy, but could still be recognizable as a compromise between two poles. But when you are dealing with a fascist takeover of the United States, there is no moderate, median policy. You are either opposing the fascists, or you are helping them.

Spanberger and Sherrill both, after some vacillation, decided to provide material help for Trump’s fascist movement because opposing that movement seemed too hard. That doesn’t make them tough and pragmatic. It doesn’t make them normies. It makes them quisling betrayers. They, and centrists like them, can still change course. And they better do it fast, for their own sake and for the sake of the country, or we’ll all find out just how little fascists care about the distinction between centrist Democrats and progressive Democrats when they are shooting pepper balls, or worse.