Afterword: Moderation in an Age of Crisis

It is the Right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Through the war in Iraq through the unrequited desire to dismantle public education and health services, to the decades-long project of financial deregulation, the political Right – from Thatcher and Reagan to Bush and Blair – has abandoned the association of political conservatism with social moderation which served it so well from Disraeli to Heath, from Theodore Roosevelt to Nelson Rockefeller. (223)

—Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010)

Early in his 2005 bestseller The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney describes a poignant scene. Turning up at the Washington DC headquarters of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), he meets Russell Train—who was chairman of its National Council between 1994 and 2001—packing up his corner office. His papers and files have been squared away in archive boxes, ready to be sent to the Library of Congress. Train, who is in his eighties, is retiring, after working at the forefront of environmental issues in the United States for half a century; he had helped found the U.S. branch of the WWF in 1961. But he is also a lifelong Republican. Mooney is in a reflective mood during his meeting with Train, concluding his encounter with an arresting metaphor:

Today, however, the iconic WWF giant panda button that Train wears suggests a painful irony. Train has become a politically endangered species: a moderate, pro-environment Republican in a party run by its right wing.¹

During the early 2000s, under the Presidency of George W. Bush and then continuing into the years the Democrat Barack Obama spent in the White House, the moderate Republican was an important figure that exercised an outsized presence in the national political imagination. These were politically divisive times. Some of those divisions sharpened in response to 9/11 and President Bush’s War on Terror. For example, the long-time Senator John McCain, a respected ex-POW and Vietnam veteran who would later secure the GOP nomination to run for President against Obama in 2008, emerged as a vocal critic of the use of torture and, specifically, of waterboarding in the prosecution of America’s war on Islamic fundamentalism. These policy positions led to McCain being branded, by supporters of the White House, as a “moderate,” a label that may have caused McCain some initial discomfort since he had once been the protégé of the original standard-bearer for conservative Republicanism, the 1964 Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater (whose Arizona Senate seat McCain inherited in 1976). Meanwhile, the Republican Senator for Rhode Island Lincoln Chafee—whose political pedigree was more in keeping with the progressive Rockefeller traditions of the party, which had rallied unsuccessfully against Goldwater in the 1964 Republican Party primary—was a lone voice on Republican benches, voting against his colleagues on the decision to invade Iraq and overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. Not only was he labelled a moderate—which he may have worn as a badge of pride—but he, along with others like him, was also targeted as a “RINO” (Republican in Name Only) by his enemies in the Party.

On domestic policy, however, more ideologically charged divisions took hold. The issues of access to abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, and gun ownership were amongst those that continued to help fuel the culture wars, which have raged across the United States from the febrile days of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s onwards.² In the early years of the twenty-first century, the pro-gay rights Log Cabin Republicans, boasting a national membership of 20,000, rose to prominence, joining a plethora of organisations, think tanks and political action committees (PACs) dedicated to supporting Republican advocates of progressive causes. On abortion rights, the WISH List—modelled on the Democratic Party’s Emily’s List—continued to endorse pro-choice Republican women in difficult primary contests. In addition, following the 2006 Midterm elections, former New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman joined forces with ex-Missouri Governor and long-time Senator John Danforth and Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele to revive the Republican Leadership Council (RLC), with the explicit mission of backing a moderate in future GOP presidential primary races around a platform of fiscally conservative, socially inclusive politics. In addition, Governors Whitman (2005) and Danforth (2006) each published a book in the mid-2000s detailing their views on the future of Republican politics and American democracy, the former calling for “radical moderates” to come forward and reclaim the heart and soul of the GOP.³

It was, though, the issue of embryonic stem cell research that crystallised policy divisions between moderates and religious conservatives amongst Congressional Republicans under President George W. Bush. The Republican Main Street Partnership (RMSP), led by Congressman Mike Castle from Delaware, co-sponsored a bipartisan bill that passed through the House of Representatives, overturning an executive order to ban Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. When the bill passed the Senate, President Bush vetoed the legislation. It was the first time he had exercised his right to veto, six years into his Presidency, which was even more remarkable for having been marked by the sharp ideological exchanges on the many foreign and domestic policy issues, some of which I have briefly mentioned here. By the time his tenure ended in 2008, Bush had gone on to veto legislation supporting embryonic stem cell research several more times.

It was this renaissance of national policy activism that drew my eyes to the “plight” of the moderate Republican as I completed my PhD in Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University in 2006. I was inspired initially by Nicol Rae’s pioneering 1989 study of the moderate wing of the Republican Party and then, later, by George Kabaservice’s magisterial 2012 book Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party.⁴ I have since dedicated most of my postdoctoral career to trying to define and better grasp the thinking and organisation of moderate Republicans, who in American political culture came to represent a tradition of democratic politics that many saw as being in decline, or having recently passed, throughout most of the United States. My research took me to Kansas, where I established a field site and conducted ethnographic research on the grassroots activism of Republican moderates, seeking to mobilise and counter the rise of religious extremism and the far Right in local, state and national politics. That fight continued into the mid-2010s, long after moderates had lost the national “war” over the direction and future of the GOP.

Indeed, since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, the moderates I have briefly sketched here—who exercised such a powerful presence in the U.S. political imagination under both Presidents Bush and Obama—have almost disappeared entirely from national political consciousness. They linger now as half-remembered characters from a political prehistory we recall almost with a sense of nostalgia, given the constitutional abuses, excesses and provocations of the Trump years. That prehistory only seemed even more distant following the violent insurrection on Capitol Hill that erupted on 6 January 2021, during the confirmation proceedings of the Presidential electoral college—overseen by (Republican) Vice-President Mike Pence and which elevated the Democratic Party’s Joe Biden to the White House—after Trump contested, without evidence, the legitimacy of the 2020 elections, in which he was defeated.

It now seems that the moderate Republican—that “endangered species” Chris Mooney wrote about so poignantly in 2005—has finally disappeared completely from the national political stage in the United States. Media coverage of the two “dissident” Republicans who sat on the U.S. House select committee investigating culpability for the Capitol Hill insurrection is telling here. Liz Cheney—the daughter of Dick Cheney, who had been Vice-President during the administration of President George W. Bush—and Adam Kinzinger have both been described as principled in their support for the U.S. Constitution and admirable in their opposition to the tragic events of that day, which resulted in several deaths, many injuries and hundreds of prosecutions. Rarely, however, have they been described as “moderates.” In any event, neither individual now sits in the House of Representatives.

If the moderate Republican represented a canary in the coalmine of American democracy in the early twenty-first century, we either collectively ignored or were unable to respond to the warning signs of its demise in time. I am reminded of the words, quoted at the beginning of this Afterword, of the late cultural historian and public intellectual Tony Judt in his panoramic 2010 defence of social democracy in twentieth-century Europe and North America. If the long predicted “death” of the moderate Republican has now finally arrived, Judt’s comments seem an appropriate epitaph with which to mark their passing.

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Too often, moderation is “rediscovered” at the very moment of its peril, when the forces of political, religious and cultural extremism seem to be growing unchecked and appear overwhelming in number. Today, this danger is only compounded by the contemporary sharpening of economic and social inequalities and the injustices associated with spiralling climate breakdown. It appears that the value of moderation is grasped intuitively rather than cerebrally, as we recognise it in terms of what it is not (the threat of extremism, partisanship and polarisation) and, also, by its (growing) absence, by a sense that there is a quality with which we have been hitherto able to address our collective troubles that is now passing and will soon be lost in our lifetimes. Rarely do we try to dig deeper, to define and describe the practices and principles we believe are in the process of disappearing but which we might describe in the name of moderation. Is this the tragic fate for this most ancient and misunderstood of virtues, throughout history everywhere?

It was this larger intellectual task I attempted to grapple with—a kind of late-in-the-day, urgent sociological intervention to learn what political moderation means in its time of maximum danger—in my fieldwork on the culture wars and moderate Republicans in Kansas during the first two decades of the twenty-first century; I imagined myself engaged in a project of “salvage ethnography.”⁵ I later became acquainted with the work of my two fellow editors, first with Aurelian Craiutu in Political Science during the mid-2010s, and then with Nick Mithen when he took up his Marie Curie Fellowship at Newcastle University. During initial conversations between us, it was immediately clear that we were fellow intellectual travellers trying to make sense of a lacuna in contemporary scholarship. This Special issue represents the first fruits of those discussions.

The articles collected here are an attempt to begin the scholarly work of redressing this deficit in our understanding of what moderation means. They draw on a range of canonical and lesser-known philosophers and thinkers who have devoted significant time to critically reflecting on, and writing about, moderation and its attendant virtues. At first glance, they survey a “heady brew” of sometimes contradictory intellectual traditions, which on a superficial reading might discourage many from exploring the rich philosophical traditions of moderation more deeply. However, although the thinkers assembled here wrote about moderation at radically different historical junctures, what many of these thinkers have in common—from Mary Astell to Montesquieu, Plato to Penn, Muratori to Le Clerc, and to Bernstein responding to Marx—is that they lived and worked through periods of political, social or religious upheaval, or in acknowledgement of the need to articulate a framework of principles for governing during times of crisis. Between them, we can glimpse something akin to that “silken string” to which the seventeenth-century English theologian Joseph Hall alluded to—quoted by Craiutu in his introduction to this Special Issue—when he suggested that moderation ties the “pearl chain of all virtues” together, this time captured in a handful of varied “snapshots” of often highly-consequential philosophical, political and religious debates, across two millennia of intellectual history.

For a social scientist like myself, there is considerable value in the contributions of the articles included here. Indeed, I would suggest that in addition to the reasons outlined by Craiutu elsewhere,⁶ a central reason why the social sciences have not had more to say about moderation is epistemological: moderation is confounding, resisting as it does straightforward empirical categorisation in disciplines that, at the risk of oversimplifying, approach analytical questions through the rubric of ideology and are often drawn to social phenomena that might be deemed “deviant,” “exotic” or “extreme.” Is moderation conservative or progressive? Can a Marxist be a moderate? Are there circumstances in which a moderate might also be a militant, and endorse war or political violence? Intuitively, for some social scientists, the answers to these questions might seem too obvious to warrant further consideration. Others might deem them nonsensical to ask from the outset.

It is precisely because the qualities and practices we associate with moderation confound us that I believe the social sciences need to take seriously the challenge this understudied virtue poses to our disciplinary approaches to understanding the world empirically. To me, this challenge is most clearly visible in equations of moderation with political centrism, a common misconception in disciplines like Political Science and Sociology. This mistaken view has held a hegemonic grip on the social scientific imagination through the latter half of the twentieth century. Arguably, its original articulation can be found in Arthur Schlesinger’s influential 1949 book The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. To riff again on Tony Judt, however, the self-evidence of an (electoral) political centre runs through not just post-New Deal politics in the United States and the Keynesian consensus that held between European political parties of both the right and the left after the Second World War; it was also assumed in subsequent arguments for Third Way politics, such as with the election of Tony Blair and New Labour in Britain in the 1990s.

This is not to say that these are political traditions that moderate intellectuals and elected representatives, such as the Republican moderates I have studied in my own work, have not sought to defend. Rather, it would be an error to assume that when contemporary moderates appeal to a “return” to the centre ground of moderate politics—usually in the face of the threat that the political party to which they belong is being “hijacked” by, or pulled to, the ideological fringes—such political space is pre-existing and immutable. After all, if the ground between opposing ideological extremes constitutes the largest potential bite of the electoral pie, then conventional wisdom might suggest centrism endows moderates with superior and unrivalled resources—in money, activists and time—more bountiful than those available to political extremists and hyper-partisans. So why do political moderates so often occupy liminal spaces in the political landscape?

This equation of moderation as centrism therefore does not help us understand why moderates, in recent history, have so often found themselves in lonely, marginal and often precarious positions in contemporary political systems. How do we make sense of this? In my own work (in “Democracy Begins at Home” in particular), I eschew the idea that Republican moderates “speak” for something we might call the political centre. Rather, I draw inspiration from American philosopher John Dewey in his book The Public and its Problems to argue that what we might come to consider politically “centrist” is really a “public” that remains imagined and contingent on a range of contemporary economic and socio-cultural factors and requires constant re-cultivation. Moderation, as practiced by my ethnographic subjects, is best conceived as a form of disciplined engagement with divided publics (and divisive politics) to nurture and not just defend that otherwise fragile space of dialogue and multivocality that lies at the heart of pluralist democracy. If that is what we might recognise as the political centre ground in contemporary Western liberal democracies, it is a centre that would not hold without that careful cultivation and disciplined engagement.

The articles in this Special Issue remind us that the writings of leading philosophers and thinkers about moderation predate contemporary renderings of politics as, primarily, an ideological vocation. While contemporary moderates might invoke the myth of a political centre as they seek to challenge ideological extremism, the traditions to which they belong owe their origins to this messier, more complex intellectual prehistory. Even within the development of the two-party system in Western liberal democracies like the United States, the binding of party identities to ideological positions on a right-to-left spectrum came later, in the twentieth century. In this sense, the plight of the moderate Republican in recent American history represents another “island” in that “lost archipelago” of moderation—one of Craiutu’s most evocative metaphors⁷—that also includes the many thinkers throughout history who are surveyed in the articles collected here. These islands are connected, we suggest, even if those connections lie submerged below the waterline for now, hidden from scholarly view.

Ultimately, this Special Issue can do little more than scratch the surface of the rich intellectual, political and religious traditions that those engaged with thinking and writing about moderation have inspired and to which they have helped give expression. There is much more intellectual work to do, many more possibilities to mine, for contemporary scholars to more fully appreciate the robust and vibrant intellectual legacy of moderate thinkers. Along with my fellow editors, I believe that the time has come for a sustained scholarly re-evaluation of moderation and its discontents. More importantly, there is significant potential here for such an effort to inspire, to renew and to provoke fresh thinking about the place of moderation in the twenty-first century. In this Special Issue, we hope that we have succeeded in whetting our collective scholarly appetites, to dive more deeply into the contributions made by leading philosophers and theorists of moderation, of whom a handful have been surveyed here.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Mooney, The Republican War on Science, 25.

^2. Cf. Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?; McGirr, Suburban Warriors; Sharp, Morality Politics in American Cities. See also, amongst many others, Bartels, Unequal Democracy; Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics; Hacker and Pierson, Off Center; and Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.

^3. Whitman, It’s My Party Too; and Danforth, Faith and Politics.

^4. See also Sullivan, The Conservative Soul.

^5. Smith, “Faith, Science and the Political Imagination”; Smith, “Democracy Begins at Home”; Smith, Democracy Begins at Home (forthcoming); and Smith and Holmwood, Sociologies of Moderation.

^6. Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds, 15–19; and Craiutu, Faces of Moderation, 16–19.

^7. Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds, 15.