Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Reich

"Centrism is bogus" lands like a thrown brick because it’s meant to. Reich isn’t auditing a political category; he’s calling out a posture. The line compresses a whole critique of contemporary American governance: that “centrist” has become less a principled commitment to balance than a brand that flatters power, dulls conflict, and mistakes compromise for morality.

Reich’s intent is strategic. By rejecting centrism as a legitimate identity, he forces listeners to stop treating the political midpoint as neutral ground. In today’s U.S. context, “the center” often functions as an establishment consensus: austerity as responsibility, deregulation as pragmatism, incrementalism as adulthood. Reich’s subtext is that this “middle” isn’t the median voter so much as the median donor. It’s a way for politicians and pundits to sound reasonable while quietly enforcing the status quo.

The provocation also reflects an economist’s instinct: look at incentives, not slogans. Reich has spent decades arguing that inequality is engineered through policy choices. If one party is pushing redistribution and labor power while the other is pushing upward transfers and corporate capture, “splitting the difference” doesn’t produce equilibrium; it bakes in asymmetry. The word “bogus” signals moral impatience with a system that treats structural harms as negotiable.

Culturally, the line is a rebuke to an era addicted to civility theater. Reich is saying: if politics is about allocating power, then pretending you’re above sides is often just choosing the side that’s already winning.