What Does It Even Mean to Be a Moderate?

I’ve long protested against the scourge of imprecision in American political shorthand, including when it comes to delineating ideological gradations on the left. (No, “liberal” and “left-wing” do not mean the same thing.) Lately, the narrative of progressives taking the fight to moderates in key primaries, from New York City to Colorado, has sometimes elided a more nuanced portrayal of both the challengers—some, but not all, of whom are really socialists—and their quarry, some of whom could themselves reasonably be labelled as progressives. But that may reflect a looseness of application more than any inherent problem with the shorthand, which is, probably, a necessary evil (fine, I plead guilty!), and, at least some of the time, adequate to illuminate broad truths. The Michigan race would seem to be a particularly sharp example.

Even there, though, the terminology grows fuzzier the further one descends into the rabbit hole—and, in general, the closer one examines the political lexicon, the more it starts to dissolve. This is perhaps especially true of the word “moderate,” which smacks of establishment centrism until it doesn’t, and has a fixed meaning only to the extent that our shared political world is stable. That’s not often the case, and it certainly isn’t right now. In the Trump era, it seems, what passes for moderate can actually be extreme, what is extreme can plausibly pass as moderate, and protecting moderation may require acting immoderately.

It may feel like it at times, but we are not living through the peak of world-historical turbulence. The late sixteen-forties, for example, have a better claim: the King of England was executed, for starters, and a republic briefly instituted. That period may also have brought the first usage of “moderate” as a noun. Certainly, as print media took off, one newsbook covering the chaos was called the Moderate Intelligencer. It was, apparently, worthy of that name; it was published, per one historian, by a “middle-of-the-road journalist” who presented goings on in a “mostly non-controversial” way. (Its strapline was “Impartially Communicating Martiall Affaires to the KINGDOME of ENGLAND.”) At some point, a counterfeit edition of the publication appeared, possibly to trick punters into buying it; when the copycats were ordered to change the name, they opted, simply, for the Moderate. This, however, proved to be a misnomer: the Moderate would eventually be associated with a reformist group known as the Levellers, and, in its insistence on liberal civil rights and press freedom, was radical indeed for its time.

This parable captures, if only indirectly, the enduring appeal of claiming to be a moderate: many people, after all, are liable to see their views, however idiosyncratic, as common sense, and many politicians want to sell their program, however radical, as mainstream. It helps that moderates have no universal creed. What it meant to be one England in 1648 looked different from what it did in America in 1776, when, in turn, it looked very different from what it means today. The idea is, still, defined primarily in the negative—as the avoidance of perceived extremes. Earlier this year, in this magazine, Nikhil Krishnan wrote in defense of the moderate, drawing on a book by the academic Krista Lawlor to paint such people less as carriers of a specific set of views and more as being animated by the essential spirit of democratic reasonableness that allows a person to be O.K. with the other side occasionally taking power, rather than viewing every election as existential. Another academic, Richard Carr, reminds us that “moderate” can also be a verb—truly moderate politicians, he argues, “moderate” between the preferences of their own partisans and those of the wider electorate, and between the past and the future—as well as an adverb. Leaders talking “moderately” implies prim and proper limits on what they should say.

Today, perhaps the foremost image of a moderate is that of a centrist on a left-right spectrum. Whether this voter actually exists, and in what numbers, is a matter of furious and ongoing debate. Some argue that many Americans who are counted as moderates are secret partisans, or harbor views that may aggregate at the center but are individually all over the place—“Medicare for all!,” say, but also “Build the wall!” Under such a definition—and others that see bucking party orthodoxy and prioritizing broadly popular policies as signs of moderation—some have posited that Donald Trump might be a moderate, at least on issues such as Social Security and abortion. Others argue that moderates qua centrists are real, that there are a lot of them, and that they are the key bloc to which Democrats (and the G.O.P., for that matter) ought to appeal. In a swing state, they say, it is the moderate over the progressive who wins.