@georgelakoff On a nuts-and-bolts level, I always figured the middle ground between democracy and dictatorship was "high churn dictatorship".

Rather than elections and formal transfers of power as the means of ensuring good governance, you have a chain of absolute leaders, but the understanding that they're each one bad decision away from being marched at gunpoint out of the presidential palace.

This has the added plus of not having to watch 18 months of attack ads before each election.

@georgelakoff

The media needs to be reminded that the image of a scale or spectrum of politics from left to right, with centrists in the middle, is just a not-very-useful visual metaphor.

One revealing light is that centrists sometimes also picture it as a circle, with the extreme left and extreme right close together, rather than farthest apart (attempting to 'explain' the fact that some self-described communist regimes have been just as inhuman as fascist regimes).

Maybe the problem with such representations is that they confuse 2 separate things: ideology and blueprints for better societies. It's obvious, isn't it, that centrism is the most ideologically extreme position (it reproduces the world-view of the status-quo) - but at the same time the least likely to favour an alternative blueprint?

The left is the least ideological - precisely because it favours a rational social organisation; the right is the opposite, based on the irrational (favouring over reason 'authorities' like tradition, religion, a strong man).

@georgelakoff
The idea that a people have a "right to choose" an authoritarian government seems to me incoherent.

If the people have the right to choose once, then surely they retain the right to choose again. Even if we have the right to choose to reject our own rights, our own rejection can't deny others' right to choose.

Given the premise that people have the right to choose their form of government, I don't understand how anything other than some form of democracy can be legitimate.