The most bizarre thing to me is that so-called centrists are also least likely to support liberal institutions. Before I saw this, I would've guessed that centrists are liberal anti-democrats, if they harbor anti-status quo tendencies.
Right? Like, we've heard a lot about illiberal democrats in the past few years: people who want to use democratic sovereignty in order to infringe upon the liberties of certain elements within society (e.g., cracking down on immigration rates, curtailing protections of Muslims, etc).
But the flip side of that phenomenon is liberal anti-democracy. I would've guessed that centrists are anti-democratic (to the extent that they are anti-democratic) because they'd prefer to hand over governance to technocratic elites, and because they think the democratic process is a nuisance that only empowers candidates who pander to poorly educated people, rather than experts who "know things," and who are therefore best equipped to rule. At the same time, though, I would've expected that (so-called) centrists want to curtail democracy, precisely because they don't want certain liberal values to be contested through the political process. In general, liberals don't think that things like human rights should be up for debate. So democracies shouldn't have the power to infringe on them. That's what makes them human rights in the first place: they're inviolable.
But the fact that they're opposed to liberal values, too, is difficult to square with their anti-democratic views. So I'm left asking: what does it even mean to call these people centrists. Who are these people who are identifying with the center (i.e., the establishment) who are apparently the most anti-establishment elements within society? What does their so-called "centrism" even entail at that point?