Dean's World

Jack Grant has an interesting piece up on how political moderates are not unprincipled, and says a little more on Joe's site. I can't summarize it easily so just go read it. But I'll add my comments here:

The problem I see--and it's something I see from a lot of people who self-identify as moderates--is that he doesn't attempt to lay out what would define a moderate position. Okay, moderates are principled and have convictions. A lot of them say so, anyway. So, what are their principles, what are their convictions, and what objectively makes them moderate? Most self-proclaimed moderates don't attempt to say--and I suspect that the reason for this is that, in American politics anyway, there are few truly immoderate positions.

There are no real communists or fascists in our government, and those with the strongest leanings in either direction are marginalized and forced to moderate if they want to stay in office. So what would define an "ideologue" and "extremist" as opposed to a principled thinker and visionary? And if the definition of "immoderate" is "holding a position beyond all reason," who can you point to in politics who holds an unreasoned position, and what makes you think it's unreasoned or irrational?

Let us take a few recent examples:

There was recently a large-scale filibuster of a swath of judicial nominees in the Senate. I didn't much care about it either way, but: Were those nominees all really such radical extremists that the will of the majority should have been thwarted? Was it moderate to filibuster judges to a scale so much greater than it had ever been done before? Would it have been moderate to get around it by changing the rules to disallow such filibusters? Was it a moderate thing to end the filibuster and allow through some of the "radical extremist" judges? Why, how, in any of those cases, were any of those things objectively definable as "moderate?"

Or take Social Security: I have believed for 15 years that we need to phase out the terrible Ponzi scheme that is our Social Security system, which robs from the poor to give to the rich and creates a crippling and unfair burden on our children. We need to move this antiquated, out-of-date system to one of individually owned accounts made up of self-supporting equities and other reasonably prudent investments. It should be done much as most state- and corporate-run pension plans are handled, with reasonable regulation to prevent people from doing stupid things. Is that an extremist ideologue position? I don't think it is, although I am willing to support the much tamer proposals being touted by the current administration. From where I stand, it is those who absolutely refuse compromise in any way with those of us who wish to reform the system who are acting like rigid ideologues and extremists--yet others insist that any reform in the direction of individual ownership is radical extremism.

Some consider the anti-abortion/pro-life position radical extremism. But others consider the pro-choice/pro-abortion people to be the extreme one. And what would a "moderate" compromise on the abortion issue look like?

Gay marriage: is it moderate to oppose giving legal recognition and protection to gay couples? Is it moderate to favor redefining an institution that hasn't changed in thousands of years of Western culture just to make a tiny minority happy?

Is it moderate to tell schoolchildren that evolution is just a theory and may not be true? Is it moderate to go to court to forbid a democratically elected schoolboard from doing so, based on the notion that questioning Darwin is "an establishment of religion?"

To some of us, refusing to support taking out a fascist mass-murdering dictator because "war is bad" and "international consensus" is good looks like a rigid ideologue's position, putting common sense and human rights aside in favor of questionable principles, kneejerk fear of American power, or--as in the case of the governments of France and Russia--in favor of their pocketbooks.

To some, giving "massive tax cuts to the rich" is political extremism. To others, describing knocking five points off the top marginal rates and eliminating the estate tax as a "massive giveaway at the expense of the poor" is immoderate and extreme and, well, silly.

Was it moderate to allow oil drilling on 2,000 acres of frozen tundra on the far northern slope of ANWR? Was it moderate to oppose such drilling, even when it was a section that was marked aside for oil exploration when ANWR was first created, and the majority of Alaskans always favored it? Which was truly the "moderate" position?

Is it moderate to dismiss what happened at Abu Ghraib as a small series of venal crimes by unsupervised young punks who were rightly punished? On the other hand, is it moderate to describe those crimes as "human rights atrocities?"

It increasingly strikes me that in modern American politics, most members of both political parties are moderates, and that as a practical matter there is often no such thing as a moderate position, only a moderate temperament--a willingness to acknowledge that you can't always get what you want out of politics, and that half a loaf is better than no loaf at all.

Using that definition, some self-proclaimed moderates are hardly moderate at all. Indeed, is it not rather immoderate to label someone a dangerous ideologue simply because you disagree with his positions?