Jes Beard: What is a Moderate?

Heated political discussions quite routinely at some point end up with the

opposing positions being voiced by those holding the more extreme positions on

that side and with someone criticizing both and urging moderation, asking why

people can’t all just be moderate, why they can’t “meet in the middle,” much

as Rodney King asked a city which had descended into violent riots in 1992,

“can we all get along?” For many being moderate, meeting in the middle, or

having a determined goal of moderation is a desirable option.

Except that it is not.

If you look at any issue in a linear fashion with polar extremes represented

by 0 on one side and 100 on the other, 50 is the “moderate” position.

Unfortunately this does not take into account whether either position is sane

or not (and often NEITHER are).

We could be discussing human sacrifice, with one side opposing any (the 0

position) and the other calling for 100 human sacrifices. The “moderate”

position is to support 50 human sacrifices. It is an incredibly stupid

position, but it is the moderate one.

Now, once you have bought into the lunacy of 50 human sacrifices, the folks

who had supported 100 begin calling for 1,000 human sacrifices, and the other

side still stands at zero, but now the “moderate” position becomes the

midpoint of the two poles and those seeing “moderation” as a desirable end in

itself start to support 525 human sacrifices, more than ten times as much as

they had just moments before been supporting.

If the aggressive teenage boy is pushing his virgin girlfriend for anal sex on

a first date, is the “moderate” position consenting to conventional missionary

sex? Or perhaps “meeting halfway” is just giving him a blow job?

“Moderation” as a political tactic inevitably leads to increasingly liberal

policies, policies which thru the process already described become

increasingly radical. “Moderation” as a societal norm in looking at social

behavior marches toward ever wilder deviant behavior, with those who had only

a few years earlier been the “wild extremists” coming to be viewed as

unacceptably rigid and conformist, or at least their former positions do if

they themselves do not join in the march to deviance.

“Moderation” as a political or social goal is simply stupid.

It is not just “foolish,” some sort of innocent, but misguided, mistake. It is

aggressively stupid, and no rational person who bothers to think would support

it.

Jes Beard is currently a teacher in the state of Tennessee. He previously

worked in local TV news, worked as a lobbyist before the Indiana General

Assembly, the media advisor on a successful Congressional campaign, and a

trial attorney. He politically identifies as libertarian, even if not always

supporting the Libertarian Party.

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