What is a moderate?
Back in November, I wrote a substack post describing various dimension of political moderation. You can go read the longer details, but here’s the abridged list:
You have a middle-ground position on a policy issue(s). The classic definition. Maybe You have a mushy centrist position on abortion or slavery.
You buck your party on important issues. You are a pro-gun Democrat or pro-choice Republican. The positions themselves aren’t middle ground, you just aren’t with the the party you identify with.
You don’t identify with a political party and/or you are a swing voter. An overlap with independent. Your positions aren’t centrist, they’re just all over the place. Raise the minimum wage. Ban abortion. Expand the ACA. Reduce immigration. You voted for Obama and Trump.
You are a compromiser. You prefer to cut deals and get half a loaf rather than refuse to bargain in hopes of getting your way. This is theoretically completely independent of ideology.
You are a pragmatist. A preference for incremental gains overs sweeping change. Often associated with executives who have real-world on-the-ground accountability that legislators often lack.
You are a Burkean conservative. You generally believe the system works, and you are wary of people on the left and right who want to burn it all down.
You represent a swing-district that went the other way presidentially. Don Bacon or Jared Golden. You practice a politics that isn’t necessarily out of step with your district ideologically, but is as a matter of partisan identity.
You are a policy wonk. Common in DC, you think a lot about trade-offs and complicated policy nuance. Obama and Romney sometimes slipped into this form of moderation in the 2012 campaign.
A lot of these correlate—people who are policy wonks tend to be Burkean conservatives who are pragmatic and like to compromise—but in principle they don’t have to.
A few notes:
Increasingly, it feels like national politics is headed in a direction that makes ideological moderation less important than dispositional moderation. The center-left and center-right still have their policy disagreements, but they seem increasingly united around an approach to politics, one that is incremental, optimistic, and ultimately happy with the systemic status quo.
This is visible mostly in relief; there’s a rising burn-it-down crowd on the wings in both parties that define themselves in opposition to each other but are fundamentally united in their rejection of the status quo processes of national politics in DC. There’s something to be said for the horseshoe theory of politics at an policy level, but it’s self-evidently true in the growing rejection of the existing frameworks of policymaking itself.
This also correlates highly with a core rejection of small-l liberalism as a political theory. Trumpism (and conservative populism generally) is already self-consciously post-liberal, and the rise of a bona fide proud socialism on the left portends a similar challenge. We probably are at a local maxima for general rejection of the basic tenets of American classical liberalism—the rule of law, individual rights, pluralism, free markets, limited government, and separation of powers. Moderation increasingly feels like it is first and foremost a faith in liberalism.
It’s almost certainly true that small-l liberal moderates vastly outnumber conservative post-liberals and lefty socialists in America. But the dispositional nature of moderates tends to reduce their strength and influence in the public sphere and party politics; the energy and attention largely resides with the angry wings. And the modern media environment, primary election structure, and activist-dominated parties exacerbates this effect. An America of 20% socialists and 20% conservative populists may often have more influence than a bipartisan 60% of mostly satisfied moderate liberals.
The sheer number of moderate small-l liberals implies that electoral strategy still must lean on appealing to centrist ideology and optimistic dispositional moderation. Burn-it-all-down may work well in low-turnout radical primaries, but it should be (and often is) a loser in general elections. There’s a self-correcting mechanism, at least in theory. That so many people are openly rejecting it and building sophisticated cases for the superiority of radicals who will fight is both an empirical claim, and also an indicator of the increasing strength of the party wings.