“‘Alarmist moderate’ is an oxymoron.”
By amba | Related entries in Elections, General PoliticsAnd if you’re too moderate to be alarmed by the truly alarming, you’re, well, effectively a moron.
That’s my paraphrase of the language with which Jack Whelan at After the Future goes after us political moderates and centrists. His argument reminds me of Sam Harris’s condemnation of sane and reasonable religious moderates as enablers of fundamentalism. Whelan:
[M]oderates play right into the hands of the right-wingers who hope that no one mounts a serious opposition to their agenda. The longer the hard right can keep the moderates diverted in a conversation in which they seek to “set the record straight” about how reasonable and fairminded their right wing policies are, the more time it gives them to consolidate power. That’s why moderates need to wake up and throw their support to partisan oppositional candidates (i.e., Democrats). There is no other way to create a potent counterbalance to the power-grabbing agenda of the right. The right works hard to present a reasonable facade, but feels no need to negotiate or compromise unless it is forced to do so, and at the moment there is no political power potent enough to force such negotiations.
So my point is that moderates, if they really understood how serious the threat we are facing, would have no choice but to become partisans in opposing the current power grab by the far right. There is no way to communicate the seriousness of this threat moderately. And since moderates are inoculated against immoderate language, they cannot hear the alarm because it is alarmist. As such they are vulnerable to manipulation by the far right who achieve their ends precisely by playing moderates for the moderates that they are. [ ... ]
Moderates may not want to hear it, but [ ... t]hey are being played for chumps. [ ... ] Supporting moderate candidates like Lieberman is the same as supporting far right candidates because such moderates do not provide enough of a counterbalance or push back. [ ... ]
[M]oderates tend to see less danger from the radical right than they see from the radical left. This never ceases to amaze me because the extreme left wing in this country has no power and no credibility, especially when its contrasted with the power and influence of the far right. [ ... ]
So my point is this. If you think of yourself as a moderate, the days of moderation are numbered [ ... ] This is not a season for moderation. [ ... ]
it’s time to get alarmed, very alarmed.
Because, in Whelan’s eyes and those of others he quotes — like Josh Marshall — the Republican Right is already pretty far down the road towards grabbing long-term power for themselves and their moneyed friends and disabling the Constitution as much as is necessary to consolidate and perpetuate that power.
Discuss. I’m not sure Whelan is quite taking account of the sort of “moderates” who are alarmed both by the Right’s power grab and by the Left’s ineffectuality — its penchant for refighting old battles, its elitism, and its inability to find a way to communicate with the endangered, frightened and nostalgic lower middle class whom the Right is so skilled at manipulating. The Left thinks it’s gotten angry and tough, ready to play hardball politics with Karl Rove, to be “a robust opposition”, in Jack’s words. The problem is that all it has to say is No. I think Jack thinks at this critical moment, that is both necessary and sufficient; that breaking the Right’s grip is so urgent that a positive vision can come later. (”[T]he most important issue this November should be empowerment [or] disempowerment of the administration.”) I’m not sure it can be done without a positive vision. And the only one Jack himself has to offer is a shined-up New Deal.
It’s a Gene McCarthy moment over there on the left, and I find I’m still mourning RFK.
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August 18th, 2006 at 8:25 am
I normally find Jack Whelan to be fairly As insightful even when I don’t agree with him. So this is suprising. If his party is so bankrupt of ideas that the only thing he can say to me, a thinking moderate, is “vote for the left because the other side is really evil” then he shouldn’t waste his time. If we’re sitting around in 2008 and the presidential debate is “A vote for you is a vote for Al Qaeda” vs “Bush lied and people died” I may have to emmigrate.
Plus he used the word Moderate something like twice per sentence. It made my brain hurt.
August 18th, 2006 at 10:48 am
Whelan’s argument is effectively moronic. I am tired of people on all sides saying “the only reason you don’t agree with me is because you’re being fooled.”
The right blames the media for fooling us all. And the left blames the right wing for using political tirckery to fool us all. Neither side wants to admit that maybe, just MAYBE, their opponents have valid points.
Now, I’ll admit that there are a lot of moderates who simply want to slink by and keep the boat steady–more concerned with stability than doing the right thing.
But to suggest the only recourse for us fighting moderate/centrists is to just shut up and join the the left is — well, I find it offensive. And cynical.
August 18th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Now “fighting moderate” should not be an oxymoron at all (haha I actually didn’t notice that Alan just used that phrase). My problem is that even so called “moderate” polticians are just an amalgamation of extreme positions. Support the war? Offset that by being pro-choice. Support keeping the estate tax but maintain your credentials by being for gay marriage. A jumble of absolutist positions is not a moderate either. Lieberman and Hatch are two moderates under the current definition and they are making completely outlandish sound bites that don’t show any attempt to actually grasp the situation or explain how they will work to help create a more realistic plan than “when they stand up we stand down.”
In my view compromise has shifted from “let’s find a mutually agreeable solution (or agree to not try)” to “you vote for something you think is wrong but don’t care about that much and I’ll vote for your thing I think is wrong but don’t care about as much.” I think the real thing moderates need to do is cultivate their own candidates from the ground up and try to create an entirely new political movement where rhetoric is replaced by factual reasoning. Instead of creating a binary choice representing extremes and then polling to find out which one more Americans support, you craft laws around the middle…or if the middle is incorrect and it is obvious because it is about empiricial questions then you try to educate people. Of course the primary challenge to this is to get rid of the “relavistic truth” that is quickly spreading, where the defition of “balanced” has come to mean you let both sides sit there and make stuff up.