Politics shape every facet of our lives, but its influence is often so entrenched it becomes invisible unless you're actively trying to be conscious of it. But being conscious of it is important, because otherwise you'll just end up implicitly supporting the current power structures created and maintained by the political status quo. Or society has guided us towards considering much of it as apolitical when is not for the purpose of perpetuating the existing power structures (capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy).
We live in a society dictated by capitalism, and it has infiltrated not only our markets but every aspect of our lives. We all know when you buy an apple from the store not all of it goes to the workers; it's putting some amount of money in capitalists' pockets and further accumulating wealth at the top of the hierarchy. We know the prices are only as low as they are due to the exploitation of workers all around the world working in horrible conditions for horrible pay. We know the company we buy from is organized like a totalitarian regime where all the decisions come from up high and serve to benefit those at the top. So why isn't buying an apple political?
Engaging in our market economy is both a necessity for our survival, and normalized through decades and decades of propaganda and reinforcement of the status quo. We become alienated to the effects of our actions as a defense measure because our daily complicity in various atrocities are simply too grand to carry on our shoulders. It becomes apolitical out of necessity. This has a side effect of making all challenges to the status quo (progressivism) appear far more controversial and political than just keeping things as they are.
With so many things becoming commodified, this effect becomes stronger with time. Our culture, love, attention have all been commodified. Everything being for sale means politics affects everything.
The Search For The Apolitical Video Game goes over how essentially everything is political, through the framework of searching for an "apolitical" video game. The arguments they make for video games trivially apply to all forms of media. If all media is political, so is the act of consuming it. Even news will always have a bias, as Objectivity doesn't exist.
This is a subreddit that claims to only allow non-political content. Naturally, this is a good case study to argue why the concept of non-political content doesn't exist. They have an interesting interpretation of politics, wherein content can even involve political figures, if the focus of the post isn't considered political. This leads to one of the top posts at the time of writing being about Jimmy Carter giving a speech in Japan. So its a post about a US president engaging in politics abroad, but the post focuses on how an interpreter handled a joke, so it's not political. There's naturally no discussion on why Carter was in Japan or putting this event in a broader context of the relationship between the US and Japan after WW2 and Carter's role in repairing it.
Even when they don't involve US presidents, nearly every post on that subreddit can be associated with politics. Complaining about subscription costs and how support agents can reduce the prices to keep you from leaving is apolitical, as is discussing how childrens cereal is so unhealthy ants disregard it as food. Apparently criticizing the lies told to us by our education system is apolitical, just like voicing distaste with how much advertising corporations spam. These are political issues, and they're only able to pass as apolitical by maintaining a lack of awareness on how politics shape society.
There is no "apolitical" perspective, as that's really just the stance of maintaining the political status quo. As put by Angela Davis, "In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist." Essentially, politics affect all of us and everything is political, and if you believe politics don't effect you, that's probably because the current political and economic systems work in your favor.
How to radicalize a normie describes how communities can be overtaken by fascists exploiting the fact that statements that are deemed "apolitical" are the ones with consensus, coupled with the fact that progressive statements, by challenging the status quo, are not going to have consensus in communities without a political alignment.
Adjacent to people seeking to avoid politics outright are those who hold the belief that our two parties are on polar extremes and hold the belief the correct position is going to be somewhere in the middle, taking aspects of both parties. This is fallacious because the center has no special value that makes it better than the extremes, a lot of the issues centrists want to pull from the different parties never needed to be politicized in the first place, and the two US parties are not on polar extremes anyways.
The center is just the midpoint between two points. That's it. Rejecting both sides doesn't make you intellectually or morally superior. The horseshoe theory was never a good theory to begin with, with the underlying political philosophies between the two sides being fundamentally opposed. I recommend "Blackshirts and Reds" by Michael Parenti if you'd like a better understanding of why the two ideologies are polar opposites, and how they clashed.
In practice these midpoints don't even make much sense to uphold. If the left says trans people should not be discriminated against, and the right says they shouldn't exist, where's the midpoint? We should discriminate against trans people but allow them to exist? Oh, how kind. In practice this is literally the stance liberals take, though: trans people can exist, but how dare you support Trans athletes in sports!
Today, centrism in America is not even talking about the midpoint between the rightist and leftist ideologies, but rather the Republicans and Democrats. These are arbitrary points dictated by the Overton Window that make the midpoint even more arbitrary. What is the midpoint between socialism and capitalism? The former is defined by private property not existing, the latter the opposite. Any midpoint is clearly still just capitalism, just with some regulations to temporarily stave off crises caused by capitalism's contradictions. The two US parties are both in defense of private ownership of the means of production, so the midpoint was never really going to be anywhere close to the left. This is why Bernie Sanders was called a "true" centrist because, by being further left than the Democrats, he actually was closer to whatever the actual midpoint between the far left and far right would be. Even then, the other arguments against centrism still apply.
Like political apathy, centrism is really just a bias towards the status quo, which I shall remind you is shaped by unjust power structures like capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. All my arguments, both here and in my page against "No Politics" Rules, apply equally to centrists as they do the politically apathetic. The Angela Davis quote once again comes to mind: "In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist."
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