Are there any issues that have no reasonable middle ground?
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I found this interview pretty annoying. Jim Acosta (who I usually like) seems to be telling Andrew Yang that candidates who advocate for nuanced, middle ground positions are worthless.
Acosta certainly has a point that running a centrist third party candidate in our current system is likely to cause something even worse to happen... (i.e. split the vote and give it to a candidate that is worse) I don't disagree with that.
What I disagree with is that you must take one side or the other on every issue to be a good office holder. He mentions abortion and guns, both of which seem obvious to me have middle ground positions where it would be a positive for a candidate to see nuance.
I also get that if you go to a football game, it's more exciting if you can expect one side or the other to be a clear winner. Not nearly as fun if both sides go away happy. But I'm not sure why government should work like this.
Is there any truth to the idea that office holders must "take a stand" on one side or the other? That to make people happy, you need to make almost as many people unhappy?
Note that Acosta's view seems similar to FairVote's idea that "we like IRV since it encourages real stances". (note that they only say this when arguing against Condorcet, which in practice might be ever so slightly more center-seeking than IRV)
https://www.silive.com/news/2022/05/there-is-a-middle-ground-on-ar-15s-gun-control-opinion.html
https://www.troysingleton.com/environmental_pragmatism_a_middle_ground_for_both_sides
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Reasonable in whose opinion? Take abortion. I could describe various regimes of restrictions based on conditions as middle grounds and it would seem reasonable to me to describe them that way. But for an absolutist, it's murder and any policy that doesn't take that into account fails that person's standard of ethics.
Approval-ordered Llull (letter grades) [10], Score // Llull [9], Score, STAR, Approval, other rated Condorcet [8]; equal-ranked Condorcet [4]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [3]; everything else [0].
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I suspect that you understand what I mean by "reasonable." I don't consider the opinion of an absolutist to qualify as reasonable. (see any definition of "reasonable"... absolutist is pretty much the polar opposite)
But ok, I'll elaborate. First, a very basic example:
If I like the office temperature to be 65 degrees, and my co-worker likes it 75 degrees, 70 degrees is a "reasonable middle ground." Most likely, I'm going to like 70 significantly more than 75. Likewise, my co-worker will probably like 70 significantly more than 65. Reasonable people, who understand the concept of give and take, would see that as a compromise.
Unreasonable people would refuse to budge, possibly saying "even 1 degree above my preferred temperature is just as bad as 10 degrees above. So...my way or the highway."
I would expect almost everyone who is "pro-life" would consider banning abortions after viability (~24 weeks) to be a significant improvement over allowing abortions right up until birth. Likewise someone on the "pro-choice" side (who might argue that a woman's bodily autonomy outweighs every other consideration), would consider that banning abortions after viability to be an improvement over disallowing all abortions all the way back to conception. So, viability as the dividing line is an example of what I mean by "reasonable middle ground."
Those of us furthest from viewing such things in black and white, might even see a completely smooth spectrum between "perfectly ok to kill" and "horrible crime to kill" rather than just dwelling on semantics, such as what is considered "life" or "a human being."
Same goes for things like gun control. Outlawing things like AR-15s (and but allowing other guns) is a middle ground.
