Moderates, centrists, independents – all the same thing, right? Definitely not.
Taking online quizzes, your columnist is regularly rated as a centrist – being about51% conservative. But is that the same as a moderate? Or does your columnist cleave rather extremely to these centrist positions? The Washington Post produced an example. Let us suppose someone was polling the American public to determine attitudes to pets. Someone who loves dogs and hates cats would be judged a centrist, along with someone who had no particular feelings about either animal. But these are not the same position.
Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate for President whom this column endorsed, described his views as being more conservative than Republicans on the economy and more liberal than democrats on social issues. That could be described as a centrist position, but is in no way moderate. Johnson was declaring himself as being much more extreme than either Obama or Romney.
This is important because while some polling is declaring moderates in American politics to be ‘dead’ others are saying that centrism is on the rise. These centrists are not moderate. They are extreme centrists. As Barry Goldwater put it: “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”.
Commentators often claim that moderation is dead, though that depends, in part, on looking in the wrong places. Centrism, is very much alive. It just takes different forms. The two main parties, after all, contest elections in New England, in the Deep South, and in the West. A candidate appropriate to contesting Massachusetts and one who can run well in Alabama would be very different candidates.
One of the most obvious issues would be gun control. Here positions vary as much by urban versus rural as by region or party, though both those variations exist too. In any given district the Republican candidate is likely to be more supportive of gun rights than the Democrat, but a Republican in New York is not like a Republican in New Mexico.
In the largely liberal North East, Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie are often liberal in the attitudes to abortion and gay rights while favoring lower taxes and tougher crime policies than Democrats. But few would describe such forceful centrists as ‘moderate’. Though less strident than Giuliani or Christie, former Governor George Pataki held similar positions.
In the South, it is the Democrats who feel the need to run “centrist” candidates. But who are these ‘centrists’? Are they the sort of people who would be Republicans in the North East, backing candidates such as Giuliani and Christie? Some, perhaps, would. But Joe Manchin of West Virginia, often held up as the most centrist Democrat in the Senate, seems of a different type. He voted for all of Barack Obama’s government expansions in banking and healthcare, but rebelled on repealing “Don’t ask, don’t tell”, the policy which prevented gay people from serving openly in the military. He favors restrictions on abortion. On some issues he seems diametrically opposed to a North Eastern Republican or a Libertarian in the Johnson mold. He supports liberal, Democratic, positions on the economy while siding with Republicans on social issues.
Such populists, who want to expand the government’s reach into both the economy and the bedroom are dangerous and cannot really be considered either moderate or centrist.
Quentin Langley is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Bedfordshire Business School as well as a freelance columnist published in the UK and all parts of the US. He blogs on social media and crisis communications at brandjacknews.com
Filed under: U.S. Politics
