The talk for the last two weeks in the mainstream media has focused on the need for the Republicans and Democrats to “work with each other,” to “compromise.” Like much that passes for wisdom on the front pages and nightly newscasts this one could have been spoken by a third grader. Of course, people need to work together and yes, nothing gets done if there isn’t a little compromise. The devil, however, is in the details. For example, maybe I’m not too bright but would someone please tell me what the “compromise” is on an Iraqi troop build-up? Ten thousand instead of twenty? Or what about the minimum wage. The GOP wants to add exceptions for small business people. Adding those exceptions would destroy the idea of a minimum wage.
Last month I happened to catch the end of Talk of the Nation’s discussion of the future of the Democratic Party. Like many in the oped pages and on blogs, the main theme of the discussion seemed to be that the American people hungered for moderates. No one defined exactly how one recognizes one of these moderates, maybe because they couldn’t.
As near as I can tell, as we say here in backwoods country, what the mainstream media labels as a moderate Democrat is someone who should be performing in a circus if not on “Stupid Pet Tricks” or one of those home video reality shows. A moderate, the guest “experts” implied was someone who miraculously “balanced” the agendas of various Democratic Party interest groups. One example given was of newly-elected Pennsylvania Senator Casey, who is pro-life, pro gun control, and against stem cell research but opposes a gay marriage amendment and drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and agrees we a need of change of course in Iraq. So three issues balance three other, completely different issues, making Casey a “moderate.” The venerable New York Times noted this, “But the party made many of its gains in both the House and the Senate by recruiting candidates with conservative views on abortion and gun rights, most notably Bob Casey Jr., the senator-elect in Pennsylvania, and Heath Shuler, representative-elect from North Carolina.”
The trick to being as moderate seems to be how many plates can you keep spinning before they all come crashing down on your head. Or maybe it’s like the old shell game where you had to guess under which nut shell lay the pea. A skillful slight of hand artist could keep you guessing until you had been fleeced of all your money. Or maybe it’s a high wire act, where you walk across this thin chord with one of those long balance poles that has written across it in bold letters “moderation.” A Pennsylvania newspaper tried to describe this amazing feat,
“The genuine-held fears of the ultra-right and ultra-left that the opposite realm of the spectrum will ruin the nation will not stand a chance of coming to be. Mrs. Pelosi will move to the middle.”
Whatever it is, moderation seems to be the pundits’ definition of where the Democratic Party should go and is going. So now politics has become like one of those scales that used to sit on the bars of gold mining towns, where somewhere someone weighs how much the “ultra-left” weighed and how much the “ultra right” and if they balance we have moderation. Never mind that just as in those gold mining towns, there may be a finger on the scale. It does not matter what issues are being balanced. For example, Senator-elect Casey has said he is against Roe v. Wade so if President Bush appoints a pro life justice to the Supreme Court it is assumed Casey will give him the thumbs up. But if at the same time he gives the thumbs down to Bush’s prescription drug program or No Child Left Behind, he must be a moderate.
There is, of course, another way to define moderate, that is someone who alters their positions on issues so they fit in between two alternatives. But how do you do that with something like a woman’s right to choose? Do you say a woman can choose on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but not on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday?
In The Strange Death of Liberal America I wrote about those Democrats who tried to triangulate a “middle ground” as being like a drunk trying to pass a sobriety test as he wobbles down the middle of the road. My Texas compadre, Jim Hightower has put it a little more colorfully in his book There’s Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.
The craziness of all this is that somehow venerable political tactics such as compromise and collaboration have become mixed up with moderation. Yet we all know compromise and collaboration are not the same as balancing Roe v. Wade and prescription drugs.
The current debate going on about how far to take Congressional ethics rules is an example. Here the Democrats, unlike the Republicans who did everything behind closed doors, are having genuinely open and meaningful debate that many of us hope will define the style of the Party as it assumes power. I have not seen or heard the word moderate or left or right used in any of the accounts of this important discussion.
You cannot build a party or a nation by trying to find the middle of the road or you end up like one of Hightower’s armadillos. Here is where values come in. You see, values cannot be moderated. In a previous post I quoted FDR, “When there is no vision, the people perish.” Maureen Dowd, Gore Vidal and others have made much mileage out of the fact that you cannot have a “war” on terrorism, because terrorism is a tactic not an enemy. In much the same vein I would argue that you cannot have a party based on “moderation” because moderation is a tactic not a value.
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