One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, racism, and death.

Centrism in El Akkad’s book refers to the journalistic and political practice of positioning oneself between opposing viewpoints, regardless of their moral or factual validity. El Akkad critiques this stance as a false neutrality that actually serves to normalize extreme positions by treating them as legitimate parts of reasonable discourse. In the context of reporting on humanitarian crises or human rights violations, centrism manifests as the flattening of moral questions into mere policy disagreements, with journalists simply presenting competing claims without evaluating their truthfulness or ethical implications. El Akkad sarcastically characterizes this approach as “high-minded” and “intellectually rigorous,” revealing how it can lead to absurd moral compromises: For instance, when one side advocates stripping immigrants of all rights and another of only some rights, the centrist position becomes advocating for stripping immigrants of “most rights” (43). Through this analysis, El Akkad argues that centrism functions not as genuine objectivity but as an abdication of moral responsibility that ultimately benefits those in power.