I am irrationally annoyed when people criticize Mr Obama for changing his position on gay marriage. Yes, great leaders should lead us in thought and opinion, wisely determining what the Good position on an issue is and fearlessly striding forward in their correct beliefs heedless of the unlearned hoi polloi's outrage. But elected officials tend to represent the opinions of their constituents - that's the dang point! That's why we elect our officials! Because the point of a representative democracy is that citizens vote for officials who do what the citizens want the officials to do!
I think the confusion stems from the fact that the term « moderate » makes it seem like you sit in the middle of an issue. Wouldn’t you say that « independent » more closely describes that attitude? It’s not so much that you’re opinion is halfway from both either side’s, but rather that, when they say « black » or « white », you’re willing to accept 50 shades of grey depending of your assessment of the merits of the decision.
I think what left- and right-leaning people have in common is that their political alignment is a big part of their identity, which makes it hard for them to stray too far away from the professed opinion of their side, whereas moderates (or rather, independents) don’t tie their identity to a platform. That doesn’t make them more right or wrong (they could pick the wrong side every single time).
This is a good point. (I actually had a whole subsection on this distinction that I deleted.) It's very different to be a "heterodox" person with a mixture of views than to be a "centrist" who is in the middle of everything. It's very easy to defend the heterodox-in fact it's pretty hard to defend *not* being heterodox: "What a remarkable coincidence that your tribe is right about everything!"
This was my attempt to steel-man the (harder to defend) position that it can be good to actually be (or appear to be) a centrist, to actually sit near the middle.
I don't think the 'keep things the same / change them for the better' dichotomy really works any more, because there are many changes that conservatives would like to make, and many aspects of the world, as it is now, that lots of liberals _don't_ want to change. It seems close but there's plenty of ways in which it's wrong.
You can say things like, 'today's moderates are yesterday's progressives' but this is only true if we ignore the many ideas that were once championed by self-styled progressives, which are no longer en vogue. Being progressive in the 1920's us meant being a big believer in eugenics; e.g. Planned Parenthood was originally founded as a eugenics focused organization.
I'd come up with a similar 'left/right' division that goes like this:
“Conservativism means calling bullshit on new ideas that are bad, while finding and championing old ideas that have wrongly been forgotten. Progressivism means calling bullshit on old ideas that are bad, while finding and championing new ideas that can improve the world. A healthy mind needs both of these traits.”
So maybe one lens is, progressives generate lots of ideas about how to make things better. Some are good, some not so much. Conservatives select the ideas they agree with, eventually, after some foot dragging, while rejecting others.
The thing is, there are probably ~10 different ways of dividing left/right:
- urban vs rural
- new vs. old
- progress vs. stasis (vs. going backwards / undoing mistakes?)
- idea generation vs. idea curation
We might try to bin all these divisions into a few general categories:
- two ends of a tradeoff
- two halves of functioning whole
- two different collections of people
I find that even two people who see themselves as conservative might disagree wildly over what that means. To some it's all about coalitions, others about principles, others about bags of ideas or general trends. Same thing with 'liberal'. The conclusion i reached in all of this is that most people aren't putting a ton of thought into this; they feel a natural affinity for one side or the other, and mostly just want to live their lives.
When people put a ton of thought into it, in my experience they either become more moderate (this certainly could be better! but, who's to say, there are tradeoffs, risk, etc) or else more extreme (i have found the one true idea that will fix everything!). I think i'm becoming both at the same time :)
> “Conservativism means calling bullshit on new ideas that are bad, while finding and championing old ideas that have wrongly been forgotten. Progressivism means calling bullshit on old ideas that are bad, while finding and championing new ideas that can improve the world. A healthy mind needs both of these traits.”
This is an interesting model. I definitely agree that you can't say the the left is about "change" and the right is about "don't change". But it wouldn't be correct to say that change has nothing to do with it either, right?
> When people put a ton of thought into it, in my experience they either become more moderate or else more extreme.
This fits with my experience too. I wonder if it's connected to the sort of "hedgehog" vs. "fox" tendencies that people talk about in forecasting contexts.
> But it wouldn't be correct to say that change has nothing to do with it either, right?
I think the 'change/not change' model works best if we set something like, 'America, 1968', as the thing we are using to describe 'not change'. Then, yeah, i think 'change/not' change works pretty well to describe conservatives vs. liberals. Otherwise you get into weird states like, if someone wants to ban same-sex marriage, this counts as 'change' (because currently same sex marriage is legal) but it's also a reversion to how america was in 1968. I'm picking that date not so much arbitrarily as like, when I think america 'peaked' in terms of its self regard.
The mantra i see conservatives saying to themselves isn't "we need to preserve the current order" so much as "the current order is totally fucked up because liberals took things way off the rails."
I think it's almost impossible to talk about these terms without first defining them. Sort of like, if you ask people, "do you believe in God", a whole bunch will say yes, whereas a bunch of others say 'no'. If you ask either group to clarify further, they'll all start disagreeing with each other so much that i think it's worth considering they don't actually agree on anything, except their their side is the good side.
It's interesting, his thesis is almost the opposite of mine—his "intentional" moderates are close to what I'd have called "down the line centrists" while his "accidental" moderates are close to what I'd call "heterodox". There's certainly a strong argument for the hetrodox, but I think "down the line centrists" have more going for them than he implies.
I write software for a living. I can make it work on a computer today. I don't know if it will work on a computer 2 years from now. I would be very surprised if it worked on a computer 20 years from now. If I saw that my software that I worked so hard on no longer worked because people keep changing computers, I might become very defensive of the status quo.
20 years is an eternity in software and computing, but it's just one generation on a human time scale. We are all products of our environment, we didn't choose how we were raised.
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No one has to be empathic or sympathetic towards prejudiced people, but maybe we can be empathetic towards the mental and emotional processes that all humans have, and that lead some people down that path.
A small addendum to the section on strategic moderation:
It very much depends what your goals are.
Under normal circumstances, ordinary voters and elites alike do not want extremists in power. They view radicals as a threat to prosperity, common or individual, and want someone who they think will preserve stability. Extreme views thus carry a negative perception to the in proportion to the amount that they scare people.
If you are extreme, and you want power, it therefore pays to hide your extremism, and make your audience as comfortable as possible with your most radical positions.
On the other hand, if you have no interest in holding overt power, but do want to get people talking, stake out a radical position. Elites in particular are always fascinated by iconoclasts--just don’t put them in a position to threaten their fortunes.
Without threatening the studiously moderate tone of this post, I think much of the supposed “radicalism” of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo is elites living voyeuristically as radicals, while also resisting any attempts at true reform.
These kinds of radicalism make a lot of noise, and generate enemies and allies in abundance, but are rarely provided access to the actual levers of power. Despite their “woke” ads, Coke is still selling diabetes water, Nike had to be forced by Congress to remove Xinjiang cotton from their products, and the CIA is still, well, the CIA.
That’s not to say wokeism doesn’t have some serious reform efforts behind it, and some serious intellectual opposition, but I think I’d put it closer to veganism than socialism on the spectrum of mere-attention-grabbing radicalism to world upending radicalism.
Woke tangent aside, the interesting exception here is how this pattern flips during extraordinary circumstances. If [insert extremely valued thing] is threatened, and for a large group of people, suddenly reality is more terrifying than the radicals. There is a reason why Fascism arose during the Great Depression, why Communism has only ever successfully taken power in semi-feudal peasant societies, and why the French Revolution occured immediately following a sovereign debt crisis.
Strategic moderation only works so long as people are convinced of the benefit of the current system, that the intertia of that system will take it in the right direction through all necessary obstacles. If the system stumbles, those radicals who have attracted devoted followings will rapidly take power--and they’re unlikely to be as harmless in their radicalism as Peter Singer, or even Robin DiAngelo.
In general, I feel like I don't have a very good classification of in what situations you'll have the most impact by putting out an extreme position vs. a more moderate one. It's a great point that if you want explicit power (at least in a democracy) then being seen as extreme probably isn't helpful. But just for normal people, I feel like it's hard to say when it is/isn't popular. Intellectuals and "thought leaders" often seem to have impact by staking out extreme opinions, but what about for "normal" people? It's hard to say.
Here is a thought. Is there a meaningful a difference between the following two kinds of moderation (moderatism?). First, we have moderate policy positions between extremes. Yet they are rarely stable over time as you point out. But then one can look at taking moderate policy positions as a process or strategy.
You already wrote about the "strategic moderation" under subtitle #4, but I have something else in mind. (Your "strategic moderation" also begets a question, was such Machievellian strategic moderate ever a truly moderate? Is that then being moderate at all, but rather a strategy for extremist to effect a change, and thus better called "effective extremism"?)
The strategic moderation I am thinking is more like generalized Chesterton's fence. You already alluded to it in point (1) about Right and Left, but it is fully applicable to any directions, including Up and Down and In and Out: A true generalized moderate believes any abrupt changes to society often come with destructive chaos and thus are harmful, so whatever changes there are, they need to take place gradually. And to enable that, one must make the principled decision always take the position in the middle of the Overton range, whatever it is.
(One can disagree with the justifications the generalized moderate provides, and thus obtain generalized other positions: Radical could argue that all / some / their favorite radical changes are actually quite good, a true generalized conservative that any further change should be avoided, and reactionary is alike radical, but in the other direction, arguing that some changes should be rolled back.)
Interesting point. Personally, my biggest reason for considering myself a moderate is #2: I think society as a system is too complicated for us to fully understand, so usually we can't be totally confident of the effects of even small changes. I think this is a slightly weaker version of what you're suggesting—I wasn't suggesting that abrupt changes are necessarily harmful, just risky. But I think it's a valid to suggest that even if we totally understood what the impact of all policies would be, we'd still want to go slow to give society time to adapt, etc.
Re: VP practicallly I fear that if presidential nominees precommitted to VP picks in primaries they would end up picking really extreme VP nominees to draw votes from the party extremes. For both rational and irrational reasons the canidate is likely to underweight negative effects that only occur upon their death.
Also, arguably it's better not to know so one has to make the decision based on your judgement of the judgement of the canidate. One of the most important things presidents do is select people to run things and their choice of a VP is a very poor signal of that ability to those who vote in primaries (canidate will have extra info etc etc).
I am irrationally annoyed when people criticize Mr Obama for changing his position on gay marriage. Yes, great leaders should lead us in thought and opinion, wisely determining what the Good position on an issue is and fearlessly striding forward in their correct beliefs heedless of the unlearned hoi polloi's outrage. But elected officials tend to represent the opinions of their constituents - that's the dang point! That's why we elect our officials! Because the point of a representative democracy is that citizens vote for officials who do what the citizens want the officials to do!
I've long had this idea for a kind of "impossibility theorem" for what we expect of politicians. We seem to want them:
1. To have views that agree with what we want now.
2. To have deep experience in elected office.
3. To have consistent and clearly stated views over time.
If public opinion changes over time isn't it impossible to achieve all of these at once?
I think the confusion stems from the fact that the term « moderate » makes it seem like you sit in the middle of an issue. Wouldn’t you say that « independent » more closely describes that attitude? It’s not so much that you’re opinion is halfway from both either side’s, but rather that, when they say « black » or « white », you’re willing to accept 50 shades of grey depending of your assessment of the merits of the decision.
I think what left- and right-leaning people have in common is that their political alignment is a big part of their identity, which makes it hard for them to stray too far away from the professed opinion of their side, whereas moderates (or rather, independents) don’t tie their identity to a platform. That doesn’t make them more right or wrong (they could pick the wrong side every single time).
This is a good point. (I actually had a whole subsection on this distinction that I deleted.) It's very different to be a "heterodox" person with a mixture of views than to be a "centrist" who is in the middle of everything. It's very easy to defend the heterodox-in fact it's pretty hard to defend *not* being heterodox: "What a remarkable coincidence that your tribe is right about everything!"
This was my attempt to steel-man the (harder to defend) position that it can be good to actually be (or appear to be) a centrist, to actually sit near the middle.
I don't think the 'keep things the same / change them for the better' dichotomy really works any more, because there are many changes that conservatives would like to make, and many aspects of the world, as it is now, that lots of liberals _don't_ want to change. It seems close but there's plenty of ways in which it's wrong.
You can say things like, 'today's moderates are yesterday's progressives' but this is only true if we ignore the many ideas that were once championed by self-styled progressives, which are no longer en vogue. Being progressive in the 1920's us meant being a big believer in eugenics; e.g. Planned Parenthood was originally founded as a eugenics focused organization.
I'd come up with a similar 'left/right' division that goes like this:
“Conservativism means calling bullshit on new ideas that are bad, while finding and championing old ideas that have wrongly been forgotten. Progressivism means calling bullshit on old ideas that are bad, while finding and championing new ideas that can improve the world. A healthy mind needs both of these traits.”
So maybe one lens is, progressives generate lots of ideas about how to make things better. Some are good, some not so much. Conservatives select the ideas they agree with, eventually, after some foot dragging, while rejecting others.
The thing is, there are probably ~10 different ways of dividing left/right:
- urban vs rural
- new vs. old
- progress vs. stasis (vs. going backwards / undoing mistakes?)
- idea generation vs. idea curation
We might try to bin all these divisions into a few general categories:
- two ends of a tradeoff
- two halves of functioning whole
- two different collections of people
I find that even two people who see themselves as conservative might disagree wildly over what that means. To some it's all about coalitions, others about principles, others about bags of ideas or general trends. Same thing with 'liberal'. The conclusion i reached in all of this is that most people aren't putting a ton of thought into this; they feel a natural affinity for one side or the other, and mostly just want to live their lives.
When people put a ton of thought into it, in my experience they either become more moderate (this certainly could be better! but, who's to say, there are tradeoffs, risk, etc) or else more extreme (i have found the one true idea that will fix everything!). I think i'm becoming both at the same time :)
> “Conservativism means calling bullshit on new ideas that are bad, while finding and championing old ideas that have wrongly been forgotten. Progressivism means calling bullshit on old ideas that are bad, while finding and championing new ideas that can improve the world. A healthy mind needs both of these traits.”
This is an interesting model. I definitely agree that you can't say the the left is about "change" and the right is about "don't change". But it wouldn't be correct to say that change has nothing to do with it either, right?
> When people put a ton of thought into it, in my experience they either become more moderate or else more extreme.
This fits with my experience too. I wonder if it's connected to the sort of "hedgehog" vs. "fox" tendencies that people talk about in forecasting contexts.
> But it wouldn't be correct to say that change has nothing to do with it either, right?
I think the 'change/not change' model works best if we set something like, 'America, 1968', as the thing we are using to describe 'not change'. Then, yeah, i think 'change/not' change works pretty well to describe conservatives vs. liberals. Otherwise you get into weird states like, if someone wants to ban same-sex marriage, this counts as 'change' (because currently same sex marriage is legal) but it's also a reversion to how america was in 1968. I'm picking that date not so much arbitrarily as like, when I think america 'peaked' in terms of its self regard.
The mantra i see conservatives saying to themselves isn't "we need to preserve the current order" so much as "the current order is totally fucked up because liberals took things way off the rails."
I think it's almost impossible to talk about these terms without first defining them. Sort of like, if you ask people, "do you believe in God", a whole bunch will say yes, whereas a bunch of others say 'no'. If you ask either group to clarify further, they'll all start disagreeing with each other so much that i think it's worth considering they don't actually agree on anything, except their their side is the good side.
Tangentially related: http://paulgraham.com/mod.html
It's interesting, his thesis is almost the opposite of mine—his "intentional" moderates are close to what I'd have called "down the line centrists" while his "accidental" moderates are close to what I'd call "heterodox". There's certainly a strong argument for the hetrodox, but I think "down the line centrists" have more going for them than he implies.
No object-level comment, just wanted to say I've really been enjoying your posts lately. Nice one!
I write software for a living. I can make it work on a computer today. I don't know if it will work on a computer 2 years from now. I would be very surprised if it worked on a computer 20 years from now. If I saw that my software that I worked so hard on no longer worked because people keep changing computers, I might become very defensive of the status quo.
20 years is an eternity in software and computing, but it's just one generation on a human time scale. We are all products of our environment, we didn't choose how we were raised.
---
No one has to be empathic or sympathetic towards prejudiced people, but maybe we can be empathetic towards the mental and emotional processes that all humans have, and that lead some people down that path.
A small addendum to the section on strategic moderation:
It very much depends what your goals are.
Under normal circumstances, ordinary voters and elites alike do not want extremists in power. They view radicals as a threat to prosperity, common or individual, and want someone who they think will preserve stability. Extreme views thus carry a negative perception to the in proportion to the amount that they scare people.
If you are extreme, and you want power, it therefore pays to hide your extremism, and make your audience as comfortable as possible with your most radical positions.
On the other hand, if you have no interest in holding overt power, but do want to get people talking, stake out a radical position. Elites in particular are always fascinated by iconoclasts--just don’t put them in a position to threaten their fortunes.
Without threatening the studiously moderate tone of this post, I think much of the supposed “radicalism” of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo is elites living voyeuristically as radicals, while also resisting any attempts at true reform.
These kinds of radicalism make a lot of noise, and generate enemies and allies in abundance, but are rarely provided access to the actual levers of power. Despite their “woke” ads, Coke is still selling diabetes water, Nike had to be forced by Congress to remove Xinjiang cotton from their products, and the CIA is still, well, the CIA.
That’s not to say wokeism doesn’t have some serious reform efforts behind it, and some serious intellectual opposition, but I think I’d put it closer to veganism than socialism on the spectrum of mere-attention-grabbing radicalism to world upending radicalism.
Woke tangent aside, the interesting exception here is how this pattern flips during extraordinary circumstances. If [insert extremely valued thing] is threatened, and for a large group of people, suddenly reality is more terrifying than the radicals. There is a reason why Fascism arose during the Great Depression, why Communism has only ever successfully taken power in semi-feudal peasant societies, and why the French Revolution occured immediately following a sovereign debt crisis.
Strategic moderation only works so long as people are convinced of the benefit of the current system, that the intertia of that system will take it in the right direction through all necessary obstacles. If the system stumbles, those radicals who have attracted devoted followings will rapidly take power--and they’re unlikely to be as harmless in their radicalism as Peter Singer, or even Robin DiAngelo.
In general, I feel like I don't have a very good classification of in what situations you'll have the most impact by putting out an extreme position vs. a more moderate one. It's a great point that if you want explicit power (at least in a democracy) then being seen as extreme probably isn't helpful. But just for normal people, I feel like it's hard to say when it is/isn't popular. Intellectuals and "thought leaders" often seem to have impact by staking out extreme opinions, but what about for "normal" people? It's hard to say.
Top notch post
Here is a thought. Is there a meaningful a difference between the following two kinds of moderation (moderatism?). First, we have moderate policy positions between extremes. Yet they are rarely stable over time as you point out. But then one can look at taking moderate policy positions as a process or strategy.
You already wrote about the "strategic moderation" under subtitle #4, but I have something else in mind. (Your "strategic moderation" also begets a question, was such Machievellian strategic moderate ever a truly moderate? Is that then being moderate at all, but rather a strategy for extremist to effect a change, and thus better called "effective extremism"?)
The strategic moderation I am thinking is more like generalized Chesterton's fence. You already alluded to it in point (1) about Right and Left, but it is fully applicable to any directions, including Up and Down and In and Out: A true generalized moderate believes any abrupt changes to society often come with destructive chaos and thus are harmful, so whatever changes there are, they need to take place gradually. And to enable that, one must make the principled decision always take the position in the middle of the Overton range, whatever it is.
(One can disagree with the justifications the generalized moderate provides, and thus obtain generalized other positions: Radical could argue that all / some / their favorite radical changes are actually quite good, a true generalized conservative that any further change should be avoided, and reactionary is alike radical, but in the other direction, arguing that some changes should be rolled back.)
Interesting point. Personally, my biggest reason for considering myself a moderate is #2: I think society as a system is too complicated for us to fully understand, so usually we can't be totally confident of the effects of even small changes. I think this is a slightly weaker version of what you're suggesting—I wasn't suggesting that abrupt changes are necessarily harmful, just risky. But I think it's a valid to suggest that even if we totally understood what the impact of all policies would be, we'd still want to go slow to give society time to adapt, etc.
Re: VP practicallly I fear that if presidential nominees precommitted to VP picks in primaries they would end up picking really extreme VP nominees to draw votes from the party extremes. For both rational and irrational reasons the canidate is likely to underweight negative effects that only occur upon their death.
Also, arguably it's better not to know so one has to make the decision based on your judgement of the judgement of the canidate. One of the most important things presidents do is select people to run things and their choice of a VP is a very poor signal of that ability to those who vote in primaries (canidate will have extra info etc etc).