Three things:
1. Moderates serve a crucial purpose in the current system. In acting in a Justice Kennedy role in national elections, they are uniquely capable of determining elections. And deciding presidential elections is exactly what they do. Nine of the last ten presidential elections have been decided by moderate voters. As it currently stands, you can't win nationally without moderates. A full third alternative would strengthen the self-identified moderate bloc even further. Without moderates in the equation, the current political landscape would simply be a matter of busing all the mindless drones to the polling place on election day. Moderates serve the important bulwark purpose of requiring candidates between August through November to consider the entirety of the populace when making political pledges. 2. The psychologist Hans Eysenck argued that higher intelligence is associated with avoidance of extreme political views in general (moderates). A study by Heiner Rinderman, of the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany, theorized that "intelligence should promote civil attitudes, habits and norms like diligence, order and liberty, which in turn nurture cognitive development — political orientations should be related to intelligence, with more intelligent individuals tending towards less extreme political orientations." The results of the experiment showed that persons with opinions that were center-right and center had the highest IQ. Furthermore, research by the Social Science Research Network has shown that ideology can inhibit an individual's ability to process and evaluate data. The research showed that study participants readily misinterpreted and closed off data that contradicted their political beliefs. 3. There's a characterization of moderates as "people who can't decide," but this is a gross oversimplification. With at least two radically different (and often unpalatable) options in every large election, do you think it's the intelligent voters who 'know' who to support right out of the gate? Walter Lippmann made an important distinction: "But there are two kinds of uninstructed voter. There is the man who does not know and knows that he does not know. He is generally an enlightened person. He is the man who waives his right to vote. But there is also the man who is uninstructed and does not know that he is, or care. He can always be gotten to the polls, if the party machinery is working. His vote is the basis of the machine." There's also the view that they're just softer liberals. Eric Hoffer found that True Believers, individuals who look for movements, were susceptible to BOTH Left and Right movements. That is, there is documented recent history of Far Left movements drawing their support from the Far Right, and vice versa. The Tea Party and Occupy are two shades of the same color, and I don't think I need to point out the BLM organizer with the Sarah Palin patch, do I? There's also the neoconservative movement, which was almost entirely made up of disgruntled Trotskyists. The Cold War movement was similarly stocked by reformed Communists. Who were the yuppies but free love hippies who entirely fell headlong into materialism and social conformity? It's actually moderates who are least susceptible to falling in with the Far Left and Right; moderates are not joiners. If they were liberals, they would identify themselves as such. The picture that I get, overall, is that rigid ideology is most beneficial to those who can't hold two contradictory thoughts in their head. Rather than rearranging the blocks on the field or replacing a couple, True Believers clear the field, save their social prejudices, in each shot. These believers are easy votes that can be bused in to support whatever profoundly ignorant political fad is popular at the moment. Faddish, tone-deaf ideologues are the true problem. ---------------------------------- RC is pretty nimble and flexible now, but that's not always going to be the way things are. As RC grows, bloggers and commenters will jump on the bandwagon and extrapolate your general beliefs into their own axioms. You will quickly find that you will no longer have control over your own movement and it will become unaccountable to any single person. People who buy into RC in the later stages will be walking into an established political movement. Like every other big movement out there, it will inevitably calcify into tired phrases, witticisms and truisms. The existence of moderates, undecideds, independents, etc. require parties and ideologies to go back to basics periodically and break through the tired and old. In 1992, the DLC wiped liberalism clean of the legacy of Mondale and Old Left. In 2000, conservatism became "compassionate conservatism." In 2008, liberalism became "hope and change." These changes were made because of moderates. There are two big aspects about being a moderate that I suspect we'd all agree with: 1. They tend to have a set of political beliefs that are neither entirely orthodox Right or Left 2. Due to a combination of their inability to sort neatly and their lack of orthodoxy, they are uniquely capable of making political determinations on an issue by issue basis. Sounds somewhat like us, doesn't it? The difference between moderate and centrist is a matter of distinction: we are attempting to sort; they are not. We will also need them if we want to win anything. I've already shown that they, as a group, are more intelligent than average and are better able to handle data that contradicts their position. The litter of failed third parties has shown that "if you build it, they will come" is a fantasy. A successful RC movement would undoubtedly require making a large number of partners. Looking at the current landscape, rather than creating strange ad hoc bedfellows with either the Right or Left on an issue by issue basis, it makes more sense to carefully lay out your positions on issues and sell them to moderates. As we also seem to have a difficult time at sorting, I hold back on casting aspersions against the people who haven't sorted yet; the process will be much more difficult and time consuming than we suspect, and the path is littered with the skeletons of those who have fallen in their attempts. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
