The Myth of The Moderate

Since Kamala Harris' defeat to President Trump Democrats have been rudderless. Tune in to any cable news channel, however, and you will hear a political pundit opine that the solution to the Democrat's woes is to moderate. In fact, the solution for any given politician or political party struggling electorally at any given time is to moderate. A brilliant solution, if it were so simple! You might listen a bit longer, waiting to hear how exactly the Democratic party should moderate, but what you will invariably hear is what amounts to little more than platitudes—"we need common sense reform that all Americans can get behind"; or "we need to speak to the real America, not the coastal elites"; or "we need to appeal to the median voter" which is really just defining the approach with the approach. 

Looking at the problem superficially a play for the middle does seem strategically sound. After all, our political system is structured as a competition between two parties that stake out positions on the opposite end of the spectrum on any given issue. It's reasonable then to assume that the party closer to the center of an issue will be able to gather more support on that specific issue. Do this across all issues and you have a winning platform. At least in theory. 

 

If you start to press, however, this theory starts to break down. So lets press. There are two ways in which a party can moderate; in issue stance and in issue selection. Issue stance is how a party positions themselves on a specific issue, whereas issue selection are the issues that a party chooses to prioritize. While neither issue stance or issue selection is immutable for political parties—priorities and policies change over time—it is not as straightforward as simply declaring a change in position.

Looking first at issue stance; the calculation in shifting positions on an issue is that some base voters may be lost, but by shifting positions more than enough voters will be gained to offset any losses. This too is true in theory but there is a very practical risk in this strategy. If a shift in position is not ideologically consistent with the broader set of policy objectives then more base voters may be lost. Further, if the shift is viewed as disingenuous political pandering the moderate voters the party is courting may not be swayed. An example of this may be the Biden, then Harris, campaign's shift to a tougher immigration policy. Right leaning voters saw this as nothing more than a political calculation for the upcoming campaign and Democrats were left trying to rationalize how the harsher immigration policy fit in their broader social justice framework. 

Further, this approach is only possible if the current political dynamic of an issue allows moderation. Take the issue of abortion as an example. If one party has taken the position that life begins at conception and all abortion is murder then to moderate is to legalize murder. Democrats can put all the restrictions they like in place but so long as the opposition believes there should be no exceptions there is no middle ground. You can run down a list of issues like this; you cannot moderate from the position of denying the existence of trans-individuals, or that homosexuals do not deserve the right to marry, or that immigrants do not have basic legal rights. 

It is also worth pointing out that there is a difference between the midpoint between the policy positions of the two parties and the true moderate position. For this let's look at health insurance as an example. The current Democratic position is somewhere between the current status quo with a government health insurance option to compete with private insurers and additional regulations, such as requiring insurers to cover preexisting conditions. The Republican position is to eliminate the public option and deregulate. In this instance the Democratic party is already around the true moderate position with Republicans solidly on the conservative side of the spectrum. This shifts the Overton Window to the right half of the political spectrum. So if by moderate we mean to pick the midpoint between the parties current positions it would mean for the Democrats to move to a center right position. If we mean to select the true moderate position then the Democrats are already there.

Already it has become extremely unclear what it would mean for either party to moderate. Do their current political positions allow them to moderate? Even if they can moderate, should they? What if they already hold the moderate position, should they compromise further and move to the midpoint? 

These questions only become more muddled when moving from evaluating individual issues to evaluating issue selection. Is a party to moderate on all issues or only social issues? All social issues or just some social issues? Should the party moderate on some social issues, some economic issues, and some foreign policy issues? 

 

If you were to survey 100 voters on their positions on issues you will get 100 different variations. Herein lies the problem that the call for moderation ignores—voters are complex with unique lived experiences informing their individual political perspective. The idea that a moderate candidate will look the same to every voter, or even a plurality of voters, is absurd. 

There is no moderate ideal for the parties to attain. Even if we were able to come to a consensus on what the moderate ideal is it is not clear to me that in a two party system this would be the political juggernaut that pundits suggest it would be. The instinct of this commentary is correct, though. We should be striving for the most broadly representative government possible. The problem is attempting to achieve that goal within our current framework. A two-party system requires voters to compromise on certain positions to vote for the party that most closely aligns with their beliefs, or vote against the party that most greatly diverges from their beliefs, or they choose not to vote at all. What is needed is a multiparty system that allows for a greater diversity in issue stance and issue selection. This wont create a moderate party, but it will the representation of voters beliefs.