Dear people who "hate labels," so deny that they lean in any direction politically:
Stop it.
You are not objective. No human can be, certainly not by simply asserting it.
There is no "middle ground," because there are not two "sides."
Even if there were only two "sides," it's entirely possible for one side to be right and the other wrong, which would make you halfway between right and wrong.
Nobody makes you sign a contract with a list of positions you must hold in order to identify as, for example, "left-leaning." And guess what? That's a label.
You can change your political leanings. At any time. People learn and grow and their positions change. That's being human. Nobody will accuse you of "flip-flopping." Well, they might, but you don't have to listen to them.
It might be true that some people won't listen to a word you say if you don't identify as part of their group, but you won't get around that by refusing to identify at all-- you'll just seem cagey and indirect. Plus, once you make a couple of arguments, they'll start labeling you anyway based on those arguments.
Yes, reduction sucks. Nobody likes to have something as complex and nuanced as their belief system reduced to a simple category with a label. But you can recognize that everybody does, in fact, feel that way, and perhaps from there you can manage to see labels as a jumping off point, rather than the end of the conversation.
