Moderation In All Things?

Shouldn't we apply that rule to moderation itself?

Matt Yglesias has been laying out the case for moderation in all things (except for housing deregulation) for most of not all of his career, and he’s one of the best at it. And I’m generally on board with that case; I’m a moderation-in-all-things kind of guy. But in a number of recent posts, he’s backed out to the biggest-picture version of that case, and something has been bugging me about it. I’m going to try to articulate that something here.

The three posts are:

• “The Politics of Weirdness,” in which he applauds the “they’re weird” attack on the Trump/Vance GOP, but argues that Democrats need to try harder to genuinely not be weird themselves by moderating substantively on policy, by framing those progressive positions they do hold in moderate terms, and by downplaying progressive values generally, as a basis for policy or for anything else.

• “What To Make of the Global Far-Right,” in which he argues that it is actually normal for the rise in immigration to have increased the salience of anti-immigration politics, and for the determination of mainstream parties not to cater to anti-immigrant sentiment to have given an opening for far-right parties to seize the issue.

• “Reds in the Family,” in which, by way of recounting his family’s history of radical politics, he highlights their belief that even when radicalism failed, it succeeded by forcing the mainstream to deal with their issues to forestall greater radicalism, a belief with which he disagrees—he thinks that radicalism provokes a reactionary response more than it prompts cooptation by the mainstream.

I tend to agree with each of these arguments. But seeing them all together, I felt like they interacted in potentially distressing ways that ultimately stifled the possibility of any dramatic change, even when necessary.

Take his first argument, in “The Politics of Weirdness.” In a democracy, those who govern have to get an explicit grant of power from the people via elections. Logically, to get that grant they should meet the people where they are, pandering to their views and values rather than challenging them. Once given a grant of power, they should focus on doing things that will be rewarded so that the grant is renewed. Obviously, left-wing and right-wing folks will have different ideas about which policies will achieve results that the people will appreciate, but it’s ultimately the results that ought to matter—and if your ideology doesn’t achieve good results, then you should probably change your ideology.

This is all well and good, but it’s obvious that “good results” aren’t unidimensional, that “the people” are an abstraction rather than a real thing, and that what politicians actually do is try to construct a majority, which is something you can potentially do by promising good results for that majority regardless of what the minority thinks. You can soak the rich or balance the budget on the backs of the poor; you can cater to the ethnic majority or the most populous region; you can divide the people in any number of ways, and thereby make your job of majority construction easier, not harder.

Should the Democrats do this as a general rule? I suspect that Yglesias would answer: “moderately.” They shouldn’t be doctrinaire in foreswearing any politics of division, but neither should they lead with such a politics; they should try, moderately, to transcend such a politics, while recognizing that it’s a real thing that they can’t will away. They shouldn’t promote prejudice, but neither should they feel obliged to challenge it at every turn. They shouldn’t get too far ahead of the people, in other words.

Well and good—but then who should get ahead of the people, morally-speaking? The logical answer is that this is the job for radicals; they shouldn’t try to take over or cripple political parties with their demands, but should be out there changing hearts and minds and challenging the system from the outside. Yglesias rightly notes that, for example, the Communist Party was one of the most forthright voices challenging segregation and racism in America in the 1930s. But, as he argues in “Reds in the Family,” Yglesias thinks the radicals didn’t actually help the cause of racial justice thereby. He thinks, on the contrary, that the more threatening radicalism is—in the extreme, if it appears to be backed by a powerful ideological competitor with nuclear weapons—the more determined the power structure becomes to thwart it. Even radicals, then, need to be moderate.

It’s a fair thing to ask whether he’s right about that. But let’s grant him that proposition for a moment. Suppose that the polity has a normal spectrum of views from right to left, with a vibrant and vital center, and that center becomes more enlightened and liberal without needing to be pushed by the threat of radicalism. That’s a reasonable description of how Germany, for example, evolved on immigration over the past 25 years—the subject of “What to Make of the Global Far-Right.” Both the center-left and the center-right got more liberal, and not because they got wildly ahead of the center of the country; the center itself moved to the left. The result, though, is that those who did not move to the left—a sizable minority—were left politically orphaned, the salience of the immigration issue increased, and now the German far-right has revived. Yglesias himself describes this development as totally natural.

Put it all together, and it feels like a grand unified theory of how social change is impossible—or, at least, how it is always incredibly risky. But Yglesias doesn’t actually think that, I don’t believe. I understand his theory of how electoral politics and policymaking works, and I largely agree with it. But what’s his theory of how social change happens? And how should politics interact with it?

Yglesias has made it clear, for example, that he thinks Bayard Ruskin’s style of politics—one that embeds the struggle for racial progress in a larger narrative about liberal democracy and social solidarity across racial lines—is one that the Civil Rights movement should never have abandoned. Leaving aside whether it is plausible to demand that more radical currents never come to the fore, in that counterfactual world what happens to the core racist rejectionist minority, which was unquestionably still very large? Don’t their grievances wind up having greater “salience” in a world where the left remains more “reasonably” focused on class? Are we sure that the worst outcome for America was for the George Wallace voters to be captured by the relatively moderate Richard Nixon and then by the right-wing liberal Ronald Reagan?

Or consider gay marriage. Yglesias definitely favored opening up marriage to same-sex couples. He also thought the Democrats were right to move slowly on it, that Barack Obama was right to say, in running for president in 2008, that he believed marriage was of its nature something that can only be contracted between a man and a woman—but by the time of the Obergefell decision public opinion had moved far enough that the change was arguably no longer radical. What’s happened since? Well, in recent years we’ve seen a notable rise in opposition to marriage rights and to gay rights more generally. Why is that? If you’re one of those rejectionists, you’ll probably talk about the extremism of the transgender movement, or the huge rise in the percentage of young people (particularly women) identifying as queer, or even the collapse in fertility, and say “see—we told you this would happen!” But even if you hold no such reactionary views, you might recognize the dynamic Yglesias highlights with regard to immigration, of the center moving left and stranding a significant minority on the right for whom this issue thereby becomes more salient. He doesn’t think that’s a reason to have continued to oppose gay marriage though, does he? But if not, then what follows?

Or let me offer an even more uncomfortable example. By the 1920s, Jews who were now able to compete freely achieved extraordinary levels of representation across European society. I would argue—and I’m sure Yglesias would agree—that this was an unalloyed positive development. Nonetheless, not everyone was happy with it, particularly not those who were either antisemitic to begin with or who drifted toward antisemitism due to a perceived or actual loss of relative socioeconomic status. It is entirely understandable that those who did not like this development—which amounted to significant social change—might organize around it, forming explicitly antisemitic political parties. If I understand Yglesias right, the only practical way to mitigate that development would have been to cater more to the antisemitic prejudices of the society before antisemitism became such an organizing principle in its own right. And furthermore, it would have been a bad idea for Jews to respond to such a development by going Communist (which a great many Jews, particularly in the most repressive countries like Tsarist Russia, did in fact do). But that isn’t really what he thinks, is it?

Yglesias ends his “Reds in the Family” piece by saying that while he’s a moderation-in-all-things guy now, he’ll concede that the radicals may have had a point at various points in the past. But leaving aside how he knows everything is great now (I actually have a pretty good idea how he would construct that argument, but I don’t want to get into it here), the dilemmas he presents regarding significant social change were real ones in the past as well; even if the radicals were “right” then, that doesn’t mean they didn’t generate backlash effects and so forth. Heck, had the Soviet Union not arisen out of the collapse of the Russian Empire, there probably would have been no Nazi Germany, and had the Romanovs not been so determinedly reactionary and stupid there might not have been a Russian Revolution in the first place. If everyone were more chill, things would be better all around. But you can’t mandate that other folks stay more chill; you can only actually moderate yourself.

Mutually contradictory effects can nonetheless both be true. Radicalism can prompt the power structure to try appeasement so as to forestall the growth in popular support for radicalism and also prompt it to support a more vigorous reaction to crush radicalism before it gets out of hand. It can prompt it to do the one in some circumstances and the other in other circumstances, but it can also prompt it do both things at the same time. Moderate reformism, meanwhile, can indeed prompt everyone to be more chill, draining radicalism of popular appeal. But it can also prompt radicals to get more extreme in their efforts to shatter this consensus, potentially initiating a tit-for-tat cycle of escalating radicalism—and again, both of those things can happen at the same time. Politics is an iterative game with no end point; you can’t reliably win by following a few simple rules in all circumstances. Which is why so much of the job of statesmanship is assessing what is going on in these circumstances, and what those circumstances appear to demand. “Moderation in all things” is excellent advice, but we should be moderate about that conclusion as well, because sometimes it isn’t.

And the same is true of the stalwarts, of course. Winston Churchill, for example, was a bloody stopped clock who, at one crucial point in British history, told perfect time. It was not a time for moderation, and by saving his country Churchill gave moderation in the face of tyranny a bad name for generations. In consequence, his idolators, who have aped him in his stopped-clock nature, have been wrong, often catastrophically so, almost every time for decades. And they will continue to be so, right up to the point that their dreadful hour comes round once again.