A moderate’s manifesto
(Draft — feedback welcome)
2 min readApr 1, 2017
- Any ideology taken to the extreme is bad. The optimum is somewhere in the middle, and it is a moving target, in both time and space. Vacillating between the extremes is likely to miss the optimum policy in the middle. It is better make incremental steps toward the objective, and evaluate and adjust as necessary.
- Consistency is not that important. Trying to be consistent is how you get to the extremes. I am a pragmatist; if evidence indicates that it works, we’re good, even if it violates some deeply held principle.
- Immoderation is easy, lazy, and wrong. It is much easier to advocate for something based on principle, because then you don’t have to evaluate whether what you did worked or not. Yes, we should keep revisiting the same decisions over and over again, and that’s not a bad thing. These are weighty issues; it is worth it.
- If I cannot properly articulate the arguments against my position, I haven’t done enough research or thought. Any issue worthy of consideration has good arguments on both sides. Any position I hold, I hold with some amount of diffidence. I am not wishy-washy, but I recognize the possibility of error, which is why I prefer small steps rather than extreme.
- Legislation should be moral, but morality should not be legislated. Morality is the most potent argument immoderates on both the left and the right use to justify their immoderate demands. We should require better justifications for what we do than because it is the right thing to do. Sure, everything we do as a nation should be the right thing to do, but that is not sufficient. Both sides of an argument think they are right; the winner should not be the one who can say it more emphatically.
- Just because I prefer small steps doesn’t mean I am happy with the status quo. I might want to end up a long way from where we started, but the moderate approach is to take small steps to get there, evaluating and adjusting as we go, not one big massive one.
- Character matters. I’d rather have a leader of good character with whom I have serious policy differences than an immoral leader who agrees with me. By my own admission as a moderate, the actual optimum policy is unknowable, so it is better to have a leader who has a good framework for decision-making than a corrupt one with whom I agree.
- Sometimes significant changes really are necessary. Yes, as a moderate I prefer to avoid extreme swings in any direction. If the extreme really is better, we will get there eventually. But sometimes — occasionally—large-scale changes are called for. Two justifications for this are: (1) to counter large-scale immoderate legislation already enacted; (2) when there truly is no reasonable path toward the objective using small incremental steps. However, I am wary of large-scale changes, for not only must they justify why they’re right, they also must justify why we cannot get there incrementally.
