“I went to a centrist rally. Amazing turnout. Thousands of people chanting and holding up signs ‘we can’t hope for anything better!’ ”

So goes one of the classic tweets, which hits because it’s funny because it’s true.

We have just seen The New York Times lecture its readers about the need to elect centrist representatives, as if the US hasn’t done that since the 1950s with the inevitable end point what we are witnessing now. Its evidence was the “moderates” who won their electoral contests, but there was no examination of the “moderates” who lost.

Putting aside that centrists are usually the worst people you know – who only seem to find conservative policies “sensible” (centrist is usually the name for someone who just doesn’t want to admit they are a conservative) – the idea that people protesting against fascists, increasing authoritarian government, and the loss of what is left of the government-social contract, is just as dangerous as the people they are protesting about, is nuts.

And yet here we are.

The idea that we “all have to learn to get along together”, which the Ezra Kleins of the world love to harangue people with, and which weak-hearted politicians love to adopt because it means they don’t actually have to do anything, means accepting getting along with people who don’t think some people should be allowed to exist, or have any rights.

“Well, guess we just need to learn to get along with them, once they’ve finished all those people who aren’t us,” the centrists shrug, as if believing human life has value and what it means to be human is varied and beautiful, is an inconvenience.

Centrists will tell you that Zohran Mamdani’s policy to make New York City buses free will be a disaster, because homeless people might ride the vehicles for shelter. The fault there lies in someone attempting to change a city so it works for its people, and not with a city that has allowed so many to become homeless, of course.

Centrists will tell you that it is right and proper for Anthony Albanese and Australia to prostrate itself in front of Donald Trump and America, because that is how it’s done, and any talk of what is actually in the best interests for Australia is just radical nonsense.

Of course it makes sense to spend close to $400 billion in a strategic defence deal that gives money to the US and UK to build their submarines and ships, but offers no guarantees Australia will receive what has been conditionally promised, while telling Australians the country can’t afford to raise welfare or reinstate universal healthcare and education. It’s repeatedly asking people to meet them in the middle, while they keep taking two steps further to the right.

That’s the centrist way.

But we didn’t just get here by accident.

There have been decades of sanitising any radical progressive action in Australia, to make those successes seem as if they were just the sensible position everyone agreed on, and not the work of people pushing against the tide to fight for what was morally and ethically right.

The green bans in Sydney in the 1960s and 1970s saved The Rocks at a time when there were calls to demolish any historical and green space to build, build, build (which included, at one point the “eyesore” that is the Queen Victoria Building). This wasn’t YIMBY-ism, it was vandalism.

When the politicians refused to move, communities turned to the union movement, and giants like Jack Mundey answered the call. What happened? Politicians and police sided with the developers, until the public shift in attitude moved the politicians. Now everyone was against developing The Rocks.

It was a fight to establish Medicare (that had to happen a few times) and it was a fight to for no-fault divorce and equality laws like the sex and racial discrimination acts.

These shifts didn’t come from listening to centrists telling you to accept your lot, but from people who put their jobs, bodies and reputations on the line. It was never easy. And it wasn’t the “sensible” position, until it was.

It would be political suicide for a political party to go to an election saying it was planning on abolishing Medicare (the death by a thousand cuts of universal healthcare is for another day) and yet, at one point, John Howard vowed to do just that.

Jack Mundey at a 2016 protest against the redevelopment of the Bondi Pavilion. Photo: ABC

Now we see centrists attempt to sanitise the Eureka Stockade, one of Australia’s most famous early protests, where gold miners revolted against the administrators of the Victorian colony.

Eureka was not a group of people calmly writing letters asking for lower taxes and more cost-effective mining permits. It was a bloody, desperate and messy campaign borne of a government imposing too much upon the common (white) man. The government at the time considered it mob revolt and responded in kind.

But now, according to former Victorian Labor minister Philip Dalidakis, it was just a very effective afternoon tea that protesters in Melbourne who pushed back against anti-immigration marches supported by fascists should take note of.

“Melbourne was once the city that gave us Federation Square not riot squads, the Eureka spirit not mob rule. We can be that city again. But it will take courage – the kind that listens as well as leads, that welcomes disagreement without surrendering decency,” Dalidakis wrote in The Age.

“If there are protests for anything, let them be by the silent majority; the people who just want to be respected, to live without fear and to know that democracy is being used to protect them, not to abuse others.”

Despite what centrists will tell you, that’s what the progressive protesters are fighting for. It just won’t be acknowledged until the battle has been won. And then? Everyone will have been for it.

Amy Remeikis is a contributing editor for The New Daily and chief political analyst for The Australia Institute