Ever since Galileo violently hurled us from God’s bosom out to the periphery of incalculable space and time, our species has been scratching and clawing in a mad, desperate attempt to make its way back, if not to the centre of the universe, at least to the centre of things. To be the centre of all things. To be situated right smack dab down in the middle of everything.

Nowhere is this desire more apparent these days than in politics.

The centre’s where it’s at, where you want to be. Toeing the line along the middle of the road, hugging it to your chest. The cool kids might not hang out at the centre but it’s the hot spot all reasonable, sober-minded and sensible adults like to congregate.

In a world gone mad, the centre provides a lone safe harbour for those seeking protection from the extremes. Those extremes representing everything that you don’t, everything that you stand opposed to. “There was a time,” former newsreader, Leslie Roberts, reminisces in Tuesday’s National Post, an American owned hedge fund media outlet, “when most Canadians stood proudly in the political centre.” Yep. Good ol’ Canadian centrism with its warm embrace of individual freedoms, free speech, a social safety net, public safety, reasonable government, fiscal responsibility, according to Roberts, are all “now branded right-wing.”

Of course,

“Extremes on both sides have reshaped the political landscape.”

It’s always with the sides, you see. The both sides. The sides with sharp, pointy edges poking holes and deflating the pleasingly spherical centre. If we all just huddled close together, believing in all those centrist things, the exact things Leslie Roberts believes in, if we saw the world just as the Leslie Roberts’s of the world see it, a world full of freedom and free speech and safety and responsibility and respecting different opinions, immutable tenets of democracy, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re currently in.

Such concepts are very concrete and absolute to Mr. Roberts’s way of thinking. Poles to pitch a centrist tent up on. Ideas no right-thinking person could argue with.

Only extremists would support emergency measures to break up a peaceful, pro-freedom for the right to not wear a mask or get vaccinated during the height of a global pandemic demonstration that shut the downtown core of the nation’s capital, according to Mr. Roberts. Only extremists would support protests against genocide and ethnic cleansing, declares Mr. Roberts. And only extremists would think it safe, Mr. Roberts points out, to advocate for safe drug supplies and safe injection sites.

As Leslie Roberts shows, freedom isn’t some slippery, nebulous notion. Not at all. As long as you take to the streets to protest the right thing. Personal safety and public safety never, ever collide, in Leslie Roberts’s view. There are just right and wrong ways of approaching issues.

The convenient thing about the centre, the political centre, to those who claim the mantle of centrism, is that it’s exactly where you are, what you believe, how you see the world. That’s the centre. You are the centre. The centre is you.

There’s another word for the kind of centre that Mr. Roberts is calling a revolution for in his editorial. Solipsistic. The world as he sees it is the world as it should be. Any deviation from that he labels as extreme. Although, it’s clear from his Post post that only the one extreme really gets his goat.

“Centrists have become disillusioned,” Roberts claims, “and for good reason. Take the case of former prime minister Justin Trudeau. Once the darling of the centre, he took the Liberal party sharply to the left…” yaddie, yaddie, yaddie. Not once does he cite an example of egregious conduct from the extreme right. Not once. Except, I guess, his thumbs-up to the Ottawa convoy. Take a bow, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber!

There’s nothing in his screed about Danielle Smith and her UCP. Nothing about right wing backlashes against public health. Nothing about Donald J. Trump’s USA in 2025. In 2025. Unchecked Executive power. Masked, secret police. Political kidnapping. Concentration camps. Illogical and overtly corrupt trade wars.

None of that seems to plague the centrist minds like Leslie Roberts.

It’s almost as if he’s embarrassed to call himself a conservative these days and wants to adopt the ‘centre’ as his political home, the centre being, of course, all the politics he believes in. Roberts, though, lacks the courage to call out those responsible for the poisoning of the conservative well: far-right extremists, authoritarians and fascists, technocranks, grifters, the truly unhinged and certified sociopaths. None of these bear mentioning, almost as if they’re beside the point.

Nope. It’s not that conservatism’s changed. It’s just that the rest of the world has gone all extreme, extremely left.