Two former heads of the Israel Defense Forces formally launched a new movement Monday designed to bring together a million Israelis against the forces of division they say are racking the country.
…The main problem of Israeli society, Piron said, is hatred of those who are different − as a result of alienation, ignorance and a lack of familiarity.
I think that such a movement also is needed in the U.S. Hating the other–and feeling smug about it–is where we seem to be headed. But I think this is an uphill battle.
In a way, I think it gets back to narrower, deeper, older. In politics, as in other interests, people with only a moderate commitment tend to be left on the sidelines, while the more militant players take the field. Consider:
Would there be much of an audience for a talk radio program that was moderate?
Would Paul Krugman have the following he does if he were moderate?
Would readers of the WaPo reward it for being even-handed?
Would celebrities bring attention to themselves by being moderate?
Do lots of people use social media to share thoughts that are moderate?
I rest my case.
There is a difference between ‘moderate’ and what is sometimes called ‘union top and confederate trousers.’
The worst are full of passionate intensity. People love passionate intensity.
Without political conflict to distract and animate them, people would have to face the problems in their own lives.
This is why Russ Roberts’s Econtalk is such a treasure. While he is coming from a libertarian direction, for more than ten years now he has delivered a weekly podcast that often has respectful conversations with people with quite different political stances.
I am not sure it is all Moderate falling by the wasteside. Isn’t Vox fairly moderate on most issues? Also, until from 1993- 2016 the party positions were fairly stable and we might in the middle of Party coalitions moving. (The maps of 2000 – 2012 were bizarrely stable for Prez elections.) Notice Josh Barro & Conor Sen are closer to Democrats? And Donald Trump won with the grand children of the Democratic base of 1960.
1) Without the Evil Empire, there was not a singular enemy across the globe. So there is less need for connection for US citizens. (I am not sure of Israel politics…However I believe we are a single state of Israel and Palestine…The sooner we accept and the more we can move on.)
2) The internet provide a wide variety of opinions and reach across the globe and we are living in the first generation to live this reality.
3) Isn’t the world the last generation (1992 – 2016) really less at war and civil war than any other time of history? So the internet comments are where people are saying their over strong positions.
What if “moderate” solutions are just bad? Moderate mostly just means to mean corrupt, ineffectual, path of least resistance.
The moderate path on immigration means an invasion of muds taking over your children’s country.
The moderate path in economics is crony capitalism and status quo.
The moderate path on social issues is to complain about SJWs, but ultimately not do anything that stops them from getting their way.
The moderate path on culture is to lament current trends, but not be willing to do the hard things necessary to change them.
Hillary Clinton embodied this moderate path, she was more zeitgeist then flesh and blood human being. If your a moderate, why did the embodiment of moderation not appeal to you. Maybe that’s moderation as it is, not moderation as we’d like it to be.
Moderate is the wrong word. I’m probably described as a classical liberal, and I have a reading group with a Keynesian technocrat, a libertarian Marxist, and a progressive. None of us are moderates. But we are friendly and respectful of each other, because we have preexisting social ties and because we are not assholes.
I don’t know what the correct word is. Engaging? Engagable?
I think you’re right that it isn’t moderation we should aspire to; odd as it sounds, most people aren’t moderates, they just deviate in different directions.
I’m not sure what the word for it is, but a ‘more civil discourse’ is the goal, I think the means is to focus on the details of policy disagreement and move away from the grand narratives. People are passionate and hateful about ‘trickle down economics making the rich richer’ or ‘socialists taking control over the economy’, but if you distill things down to the particular policy or philosophical differences, we arrive at things easier to discuss more dispassionately:whether fiscal policy is necessary to escape a liquidity trap; whether a monopsony exists in manylabor markets; whether the government allocates capital more or less efficiently than markets, etc.
The passion and hatred largely comes with thinking about things in the context of the grand ideological narratives; focusing on the crystalline Philippe technical components is more productive.
Moderate is only defined with respect to those with ideological positions. The moderates wet their thumbs and hold them up to determine which way the wind is blowing.
That’s every politician. Opportunism and corruption are endemic to every area of the political spectrum – no more in the center than left, right or anywhere else. People vomit these same things all over the world, except if you look at where people stand, centrists here would be on the right or left elsewhere, and yet the same nonsense stereotypes are regurgitated.
“Would there be much of an audience for a talk radio program that was moderate?
Would Paul Krugman have the following he does if he were moderate?
Would readers of the WaPo reward it for being even-handed?
Would celebrities bring attention to themselves by being moderate?
Do lots of people use social media to share thoughts that are moderate?”
Japan has talk radio, intellectual hacks, partisan newspapers, clueless celebrities, and social media. Yet none of those things have impact it the way they have impacted us.
These items can only enhance real problems. If the problems don’t exist in the first place, there is nothing to enhance. The moderate desire is to ignore problems or offer token solutions that don’t work.
Is the problem the non moderates, or the moderates though? There are always fringes and everyone likes to think themselves moderate and the opposition extreme. Do moderates even exist or is there a bimodal distribution drawn by the extremity of the opposition?
The US needs a movement to counter our division into groups that hate each other, but it would be beside the point to alter current immigration policy, which increases social friction and tribalist politics.
NYT columnist Tom Friedman has often wished for a “radical centrist.” Be careful what you wish for–he’s got just such a person by the name Donald Trump. The president is a Democrat in disguise, albeit of the conservative, “Jacksonian” variety. He leans right on social issues (mostly to appease his base), but left on economic issues. In other words, he’s the opposite of a Libertarian. He’s already kicked the Freedom Caucus to the curb, and is now doing the same to the so-called “alt-right” (or what I call the “stupid wing of the Republican Party”). He despises political correctness and carries no truck for progressive Democrats.
More centrist than that it is impossible to be. So I dispute the notion that the country is becoming more polarized. Only that Misters Krugman and Cruz are being pushed to the fringe.
You don’t understand what that term means if you think it applies at all to Donald Trump. There is only marginally more support for him among centrists than there is on the left.
The impression I get from the comments so far is that we can’t even agree on how to describe what’s happening, much less what to do about it.
Hear, hear.