This week’s letter will read rather like one of Nicholas Clairmont’s “Word of the Week” columns. Nick’s meditations are excellent, so perhaps I flatter myself. But either way, the word I want to pick apart is “moderate,” one of the most misused terms in our politics.
I am prompted to do so partly because our cover story this week focuses on Sen. Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, who is often referred to in political journalism as a “moderate.” Our author, Andrew Donaldson, has chosen not to do so, rightly in my view.
That is not to say Manchin’s views are not moderate in the common sense of being tempered, considered, reasonable, and pleasant. No doubt many of them are. But it is much more accurate and thoughtful to describe a pol who happens to be to the right of his own lefty party and to the left of the opposition party on the right as a “centrist.” This describes his position on the ideological spectrum precisely without suggesting approval by deploying the adjective as a noun.
The problem with “moderate” as a political label is that it implies that only people in the political center are reasonable and that our elected representatives are somehow “immoderate” — extreme, unreasonable, unpleasant, beyond the Pale — if their opinions place them somewhere other than in the political center. Years ago, for this reason, I banned my news reporters from using “moderate” as a supposedly neutral descriptor of the denizens of Capitol Hill.
There is truth in what Barry Goldwater said in 1964 when accepting the Republican presidential nomination: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” It didn’t help Goldwater, of course, for he lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson. But there was, to coin the term, virtue in saying what he said.
Two no-doubt excellent young men quoted in Nicole Russell’s fine feature article about Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s youth summit show how the misapplication of “moderate” continues today and has trickled down a generation into the lexicon of those who are only now emerging from childhood and starting to take an interest in politics. Walter and Liam Drawdy, ages 17 and 15, told Nicole that even their “more moderate” friends would be open to ideas expressed at the summit.
The trap they’ve already stumbled into is to adopt biased language common in the great majority of news outlets, largely of the Left, which implies that traditional and conservative views at a summit intended to join a necessary “fight for the America that their parents knew” is somehow out of the mainstream, immoderate, untempered, ill-considered, unreasonable, and unpleasant.
It is time to dispense with the idea that to be moderate, one must not lag too far behind the leftward drift of our politics and culture toward nouveau socialism. That is the weak way of seeking respectability at the cost of national decline.
