Fecking Brooks and the Moderates Up

David Brooks has received mostly taunting for his trouble in writing a New York Times op-ed last week lamenting Obama’s failure to govern from the center. Most of taunts have come from the right, deriding Brooks for failing to recognize earlier that Obama is a classic, dyed-in-the-wool, tax and spend, big government liberal. That taunting may be fair all told, but I think it misses the more intriguing element of Brooks’ piece: that moderate on both the left and the right band together to influence the political process.

I can’t help but think that Brooks dead-on when he writes,

Those of us in the moderate tradition — the Hamiltonian tradition that believes in limited but energetic government — thus find ourselves facing a void. We moderates are going to have to assert ourselves. We’re going to have to take a centrist tendency that has been politically feckless and intellectually vapid and turn it into an influential force.

What Brooks; however, fails to do is to outline what step number one in the moderate resurrection project must be. Namely, Brooks goes on to talk about all the things that moderates must do before first articulating what it is that has led the majority of Americans to see moderates as “politically feckless and intellectually vapid” and how moderates can effectively seek to overcome that barrier.

For as much as Brooks may tout the first principles of centrism/moderatism as laying in the vein of the Hamiltonian tradition, the shadow that moderates must current seek to escape from underneath remains that of Bill Clinton.

Despite Clinton’s prowess as a political beast, his centrist method of governance left one word in people’s minds: traingulation. Clinton’s politics, effective though they may have been, were interpreted as graceful power grabs attenuated to the median path of public opinion. Pouring over polling results, the Clinton administration sought to find the door that would kick up the least ire amongst those loud voices of Washington. In turn, moderates/centrists are often now seen as political invertebrates because their movements as perceived as lacking in first principles.

If Brooks wishes to formulate a moderate movement that can exert some of the influence he would like to see operating in Washington, his first step has to be an effective rebranding campaign of that political class. Indeed, such a campaign would be well-advised in that I don’t think it is necessarily the case that moderates are solely pragmatic balls of wax.

Without setting out to fully articulate that project here, let me identify what I take to be the most important element of that campaign: decoupling from notions of moderatism from notions of centrism and doing away with the negative definition of moderatism.

Ask anyone what it means to be politically moderate and they will invariably tell you that moderates are the class of folks in the middle who remain averse to the extreme views, which is a fine definition insofar as it goes. Except that it doesn’t generally tell you what the politically moderate individual actually stands for in any meaningful way. Common definitions of moderates are negatively charged and leave as much of a void in political sketching as the one that Brooks himself identifies.

Moderates seek above all not to become ideologues and endeavor to maintain a certain flexibility in their political perspective. That flexibility and the revulsion to demagoguery is born of a recognition that despite their leanings, no political party or ideology has a monopoly on the truth and that at times both liberals and conservatives, as well as libertarians and progressives, will have useful and valuable input to provide to our political discourse. It is not so much then that moderates are leery of extremism for extremism’s sake, but rather that they tend to recognize the folly of assuming one’s political outlook to be correct in all cases and temper their approach with a healthy respect for the fallibility of any systematic approach.

The approach of the moderate then is quite the opposite of feckless timidity, it is an intelligent recognition that full-blown ideologues choose slice the pie with an exceedingly dull blade and serve up results that reflect that crude protocol. The moderate, on the other hand, sharpens his/her blade from a variety of stones and seeks to more carefully cut the pie based on precision, acknowledging of the variety of facts on the ground and mustering the prescriptive dexterity that those facts demand.

To be a moderate then is not to be timid, nor is to be the careful centrist whose only goal is to maintain his/her power by toppling no apple carts. Rather, to be a moderate is to be intelligent, adept, and alive to the dynamism of the world’s contexts in a way that remains necessarily unavailable to the ideologically shackled. For most conservatives and libertarians, government is the enemy to which we apply eternal vigilance. For liberals and progressives it is oppression and economic disparity that require our watchful eye and helpful hand. For moderates, it is the unquestioned influence of ideology itself that we must be wary of when navigating the political process. We must at all costs seek a clear eye in determining what lies before us and what we are to do about it; ; we must cultivate ideological modesty.

With that story told, all of Brook’s suggestions appear in a different and more favorable light. But action before explanation only leaves moderates wallowing the deepest in the same light that politicians currently appear: shady, secretive, and untrustworthy.

(Cross posted from The Moderate Voice)

(Ed. I realized late last night that I had mis-titled this post and have changed it appropriately while maintaining the permalink)

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