A "Moderate?" What Is That?
Seems like a relevant 2024 question.
Years ago, as Trump vs. Biden Round 1 (oh wait, we never got a Round 2) raged among COVID, I had a friend tell me: “Most people don’t care about this shit. They’re just trying to get their kids to Little League.” Indeed. That statement is largely true, although maybe we should say “kid,” because the live births per woman in America is 1.6 now.
We bemoan the loss of the moderates a lot, but I think the moderates still exist. It’s just that all the oxygen of social media and cable news and YouTube is consumed by the furthest 5–10% on each side. The far left gets x-amount of attention, usually as derision. The far right is the same, although conservative commentators prop up the far right, which is troublesome. Most of the people in the middle, who maybe are socially liberal but fiscally conservative, get drowned out. Over time, they just opt out of the process because it’s so driven by brand and ideology as opposed to actual policy issues.
The other thing happening here that’s different than previous generations is Trump and his family almost completely remade the GOP in his image. There is no real platform or policy other than fealty to Trump, which is concerning because even if he wins, they have no back-up plan for four years hence. Vance? LOL. He’s awful. And don’t sleep on Trump trying to get SCOTUS to let him be an emperor. I mean, could happen. But he’d be 83 too. Father Time arrives for us all.
I’m not some whiny liberal, although I’ve been accused as such, but while the current DNC in Chicago has many problems, the RNC in Milwaukee was pretty much just about Trump and nothing else. It’s hard to be “moderate” or “center-right conservative” when everything is about Trump, and most of how Trump does speeches is to riff on some concepts until he gets a bunch of applause, and then stick with those concepts to get more applause. Usually the stuff that gets applause? It’s not moderate in nature. It's usually about banning something or jailing someone. ** Crowd pops **
We talk a lot about primaries and their role in killing off moderates, because you need to run to the core of the base in a primary, and by the time you throw them enough red meat, you cannot say stuff that appeals to a moderate, because you’d look like a hypocrite, so you keep throwing red meat to the base. That’s what Trump has done for a decade now, basically. I don’t know how true the whole “he calls his supporters basement-dwellers” thing that Melania’s old attache said, but I wouldn’t doubt it. Trump and Elon are remarkably similar: it’s almost as if they got “fuck you” money, got bored, and needed to cultivate some new base of people who would adore them outside of the real estate and tech worlds. They realized a bunch of perpetually-online losers love it when you call Kamala “Cum-La” or talk about boys in girls bathrooms, so they just kept doing that to fill the hole in their soul that they assumed money would one day fill.
One thing that’s always been sad to me about American politics, aside from polarization —
— is that, honestly, most Americans want the same stuff from their life. It’s just that we have a small argument over how we get that stuff, and in the era of 24–7 news and YouTube and Twitter/X, those small arguments become the whole story.
The final thing I’d say here is that the conventional, classical idea of a “moderate” was supposed to be someone who borrowed from both sides, which usually happened after you had kids — because you saw a different kind of love, which allowed you to be socially liberal, but now you had a new generation to protect and care for, which afforded you fiscally conservatism. First and foremost, we are having less kids for various reasons, so this line of thinking is evolving. Secondly, there's some evidence — not a ton yet, and it’s not in “the mainstream media” — but some evidence that people are sticking to their ideology even after having kids, which makes sense, as ideology and identity basically replaced religion.
If a couple having a kid keeps them MAGA or keeps them far-left, then there's no hope for moderation in the American political future. And it seems like that might be happening.
Tribes are obviously very powerful and it’s how we evolved as people. In the absence of major World Wars or the need to band together (which COVID should have been, but wasn’t), we resort back to tribes — and the attention that tribes get is on the furthest side of each tribe, not in the middle. So it makes sense, but it’s sad, because the “moderate” may be lost forever.