Sydney Michalski lives in Columbia.

The political climate is becoming increasingly polarized, they say. We need to to find more middle ground, they tell us. My senator worries about the “growing gulf between the left and right and the shrinking middle.” 

But what we’re witnessing right now is not polarization. And I am tired of being framed as a radical left extremist in service of a talking point that is missing the moment.

When we talk about political ideology, the center of the spectrum in the United States is meant to be the Constitution and the rule of law. That is the standard, the baseline, the bare minimum of agreement against which the full right-to-left spectrum of policy negotiations and compromises must ultimately be tested.

The gulf that has developed today is not about polarization. The left and right are not migrating further apart. The right has launched off the edge of the chart into violent authoritarianism. There is no corresponding leftward lurch toward social revolution.

The overwhelming and growing public reaction, these thousands and millions of protesters flooding the phones and taking to the streets to demand that the law and the Constitution be followed — we are the center. 

I tried to explain this to my congressman once, too. He really, really wanted to call me a radicalized progressive activist. But I’m just a wife and a mom who lives in a cabin in the woods. We chop firewood for heat, we harvest maple syrup tree by tree, our kids work on local shellfish farms. We are deeply ordinary. 

But our most basic and fundamental civil rights and liberties are increasingly under assault. If an ICE agent doesn’t like the way I follow their instructions, they will shoot me in the face, call me profane names, and the president will say that, according to his own morality in his own mind, that was legal and I deserved it. 

Just how far right do you have to travel to start believing that asking elected officials to follow the Constitution and the rule of law is progressive activism?

We are not far-left extremists becoming increasingly polarized. We are masses of Americans asking for adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law. We are asking for the bare minimum. 

The center is not supposed to be negotiated ever rightward into fascist dictatorship. The center is supposed to be uncompromisingly anchored in the Constitution and the rule of law as a line of absolute principle.

That is why I am disappointed with every Democrat and every independent who votes with the regime. It’s not because I’m polarized. It’s because they’re negotiating with people who don’t believe in the center at all. They are negotiating with terrorists.

What we are witnessing today is not a shrinking middle. The center is actually growing in a rising tide. Millions of Americans are suddenly deadly aware that every constitutional right that we thought was firmly enshrined is threatened by one single group of far-right, power-hungry, violent rogue extremists.

So if the center is really what we’re supposed to strive for, I have good news. Now is our time. The center is the largest it has ever been. 

Millions of dead-center Americans are as awake, as alert, as active as they have been in a generation. We are demanding the absolute center of political ideologies and the bare minimum of responsible governance — the restoration of constitutional democracy. 

So join us. But understand this about the center. It is not the place for compromise.