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Tacking Toward the Center
Where, between lying and truth, is moderation?
How often do we hear pundits and ordinary citizens saying something like this: “I’m tired of far right versus far left! Why are no politicians moderate any more?” Sixty years ago, that might have made sense. As a general rule, Democrats and Republicans agreed on the basic facts. Their differences were about their interpretations of those facts and their predictions, often due to personal experience, of what value would result from specific actions.
Even then, Republicans tended to be less adventurous and more fearful of change while Democrats tended to seek out change and accept more risk. In those days, it was rare for one party or the other to accuse Haitians of eating pets or to claim that a growing economy was, in fact, shrinking or that members of the other party sacrifice children in Satanic rituals.
In those days, before Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, Republican Senators were godparents to Democratic Senators’ children. Members of both parties met in the bar after adjournment to wrangle out the details of important bills, alcohol lubricating the tribal tendencies, and together their divergent views (right versus left, regressive versus progressive, liberal versus elitist) were incorporated at various levels into legislation that reflected the strength of the…
