Figure Skating

The figure skater is my most graceful model for enlightened centrism. They skate, alternating between their left and right, just as a healthy politics regularly shifts its balance. The exchange is sometimes regularly spaced, if the skater intends on going forward, or one spinning around the other, if the skater intends on turning. These turns can be up to fairly tight circles, even. The goal of the skater, or body politic, is to put a lot of effort into mastering their coordination between left and right, so that they can be integrated into a higher whole.
An image of a figure skater, where their right foot is red and their left foot is blue, and they leave red-and-blue tracks on the ice behind them.
In this view, the enlightened centrist sees their jobs to play the role of the skater, to be able to alternate as needed between left and right and attempt to gain mastery over both.
The figure skater model advances over the balance beam →, by better presenting the exchange through time. A balance beam may make one think of steady, evenly matched efforts between the two, when instead it works better as a playful and skillful alteration →.
The main shortcoming that the model of the skater, the way that it fails to reflect the current political reality, is that the skater is a model for each member of the political body, and together as a whole, the economy makes for a very sloppy skater [1].
[1]In a certain sense, another aspect of the "enlightened" in enlightened centrism is that these models can be used as proxies for the overall development of the body politic. Are your politics at a tug-of-war → stage? Or are they performing a balancing act? Or are they dancing around each other? Gracefully? The higher you can go, the better mileage you get out of your politics. Tug-of-war doesn't go anywhere, and skaters are skating laps [1-1].
[1-1]It's worth noting that the following meme is roughly true. An enlightened centrist should be able to move around the spectrum as the situation demands, OR should be able to stand in the middle, and concentratedly avoid bias.
r/PoliticalCompassMemes
Two example political compass maps. The one on the left is labeled
These two actions resemble the give-and-take in skating of relaxing or tensing a foot, depending on whether it's weight-bearing. Centrists tense into 'chad' mode above [1-1-1], and relax into 'virgin' mode.
[1-1-1]
Q:
Is this the same as playing devil's advocate?
A:
It can seem that way. The difference is that in devil's advocate, the position is taken from uncertainty, and an enlightened centrist tries to only take it from illumination; i.e. sharing what you figured out when you were there yourself.