What is Excessive Moderation?

I started this Substack to share my thoughts and get feedback from other people. I’m hoping for thoughtful and respectful discussions. I discuss and debate issues with a few friends, mostly by email. I’m hoping to widen the number of participants in these interactions and make them more organized. I plan to write a free-standing essay every week or two, but my posts will mostly be extended comments on pieces of journalism I have read.

I am not a journalist or a scholar, but I am a lifelong political junkie. I remember when I was 12 years old in Vista, California, in the summer of 1956. I watched the Republican and Democratic national conventions live on my family’s first television, a 15-inch table model Hoffman. In the Democratic convention, the presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, broke with tradition and threw open the nomination for Vice President to the floor. A young Senator, Jack Kennedy from Massachusetts, threw his hat in the ring. There was a lot of excitement, but eventually, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee clinched it. This was only the second time US political conventions had been televised.

When I registered to vote before the 1964 election, I registered Republican partly to poke my dad, a staunch New Deal Democrat, and partly as a tribute to my maternal grandfather, who was a progressive Republican. Another reason was that I believed in fiscal responsibility and social stability. So, I am something of an institutionalist. However, I never identified as a conservative, and I voted for LBJ over Goldwater in my first presidential vote.

I was in the Army from May 1966 to May 1968, and I clearly remember considering the virtue of my support of the war by volunteering for the draft versus some of my contemporaries who became protestors and activists. I reasoned that in a democratic republic when the majority votes to commit the nation to war, the citizenry, even those who doubt the consensus, should support it. I’m still not entirely confident I was right.

In 1980, I worked on the Presidential campaign of John B. Anderson, the Progressive Republican, who ran as an independent against Reagan and Carter. In 2016, in disgust with the rise of Donald Trump, I switched my registration to Democratic in the belief that independent voters were shirking their duties as citizens; you should be on one team or the other.

I identified as a center/lean when I started training as an analyst for Ad Fontes Media in 2019. When we analyze media, we do it as a triad: right, left, and center. One of the right/lean analysts I worked with bugged me about being an undercover liberal. Over the years with AFM, I've taken two or three rather extensive surveys that have placed me as a center/left politically. In my efforts to become a more dead-center centrist, I've read a lot of more conservative material, especially from the never-Trump conservatives like Jonah Goldberg.

In the months before the 2022 mid-term election, I decided that if I was going to be a virtuous center, I should disaffiliate from the Democratic Party. So, I registered as unaffiliated. Despite all that, I think I'm still a left-leaning centrist. Those commentators closest to my view include Rui Texaria, Chris Cillizza, Damon Linker, David Leonhardt, and Willian Galston.

A significant influence on my worldview is my identity as a Christian. I was raised in the Church of the Nazarene, an evangelical denomination in the Wesleyan tradition. I attended a Christian college. We Christians believe man is in a morally fallen condition, but each person is of incalculable value. In secular terms, that is what James Madison was getting at when he said in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” I believe good governance is essential but never fully realized.