Moderation Has a Marketing Problem

If you’ve been reading these columns over the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed I’ve been circling the same idea from different directions.

A couple of weeks ago, as America celebrated its 250th birthday, I argued that what makes the American experiment unique isn’t democracy alone. Democracies have existed in many forms. What makes America different is pluralism—the radical idea that people with profoundly different beliefs can share the same country, the same Constitution and the same future.

Last week I took that idea in a different direction. I went back and reread campaign rhetoric from 2004, 2008 and 2012—not because I’d forgotten those campaigns, but because I wanted to test a memory from covering them.

I had long suspected that the caricatures Republicans and Democrats used to describe each other had slowly become reality. I wanted to know whether my memory was fooling me.

It wasn’t.

The Republican warnings that Democrats were becoming socialists. The Democratic warnings that Republicans were becoming nationalist, grievance-driven and increasingly hostile to immigrants. Twenty years ago, those were campaign attacks intended to paint an exaggerated picture of the opponent. Today they read far less like caricatures than they do descriptions.

That wasn’t a revelation.

It was confirmation.

But confirmation raised a more interesting question.

How does that happen?

How does a caricature become a movement? How does a movement become a political party? And what happens to a pluralistic democracy when enough people stop believing in the political center?

I found myself thinking about those questions again after Rahm Emanuel’s speech in Israel last week.

It wasn’t because I agreed with every proposal he made.

I don’t.

What interested me was what the speech represented.

Rahm argued that Israel cannot simply prosecute a war without a political strategy for what comes next. He proposed sanctions against violent settler extremists and entities supporting settlement expansion. He argued that the United States should rethink parts of its relationship with Israel if the political trajectory doesn’t change. Those are significant departures from decades of bipartisan consensus.

But then he turned around and delivered essentially the same message to the other side.

The people chanting “from the river to the sea” aren’t going to get the future they imagine.

Neither are the advocates of a Greater Israel.

Two different extremes.

The same answer.

That struck me because it wasn’t moderation as mush.

It was moderation with teeth.

It wasn’t splitting the difference.

It was defending the guardrails.

And that’s when something clicked for me.

Moderation doesn’t usually lose arguments.

It loses credibility.

Those are two very different things.

Compromise doesn’t stop working because someone proves it impossible. It stops working when enough people conclude it never produces results.

That’s moderation’s paradox.

It usually works better than the alternatives.

It seldom feels as satisfying.

Compromise asks both sides to accept partial victories instead of complete ones. It moves in inches rather than miles. It rarely produces inspiring slogans or viral moments. It doesn’t fit neatly into campaign messaging because, by definition, it leaves everyone a little disappointed.

Extremism has always had better marketing.

Moderation has usually had better results.

History is full of examples.

Take civil unions.

Today they seem like an unnecessary—even ridiculous—halfway measure. Maybe they were. Marriage equality was always the destination.

But civil unions helped make the destination politically possible.

Americans didn’t leap overnight from rejecting same-sex marriage to embracing it. The country moved incrementally. People saw that civil unions weren’t destroying families or civilization. Over time, the distinction itself began to seem almost silly.

Sometimes the compromise history eventually leaves behind is also the compromise history required.

That’s how pluralistic societies usually make progress.

Which brings me back to Israel.

There was a moment—not very long ago—when a negotiated two-state solution seemed difficult but genuinely within reach. We were this close.

Then came the collapse.

Camp David failed. The Second Intifada followed. Suicide bombings. Israeli military responses. Settlement expansion. Failed negotiations. More wars.

Every disappointment made moderation less believable.

If you were an Israeli arguing that negotiations could still work, every bombing made your case harder.

If you were a Palestinian arguing that diplomacy could eventually produce a viable state, every failed summit, every new settlement and every war made your case harder.

Eventually the hardliners on both sides acquired the strongest argument in politics.

“We tried compromise.”

Whether that was entirely fair almost became beside the point.

Enough people believed it.

That’s what I heard underneath Rahm’s speech.

An attempt—not to split the difference—but to restore the credibility of the political center before it disappears altogether.

America at 250.

The caricatures that became the parties.

The Spanish Civil War, whose anniversary I revisited this week for my Time Machine series on The ChuckToddcast.

Different stories.

The same question.

What causes a pluralistic society to lose faith in pluralism itself?

Spain offers one answer.

The Spanish Civil War wasn’t simply a struggle between left and right.

It was what happened after moderation collapsed.

Each side became convinced coexistence itself was impossible.

Eventually one side won the war.

Decades later, it became increasingly clear that even the winners had lost something essential.

Spain’s democratic transition wasn’t built because everyone suddenly agreed about the past. It was built because enough Spaniards became exhausted by absolutism. The transition carried enormous moral costs that Spain continues to debate today, but it also reflected a painful conclusion: living together imperfectly was preferable to fighting forever.

History suggests societies often rediscover moderation.

The problem is they usually do it only after exhausting themselves with the alternatives.

That’s a terrible strategy.

“Let’s wait until everyone gets tired of the extremes” isn’t much of a governing philosophy.

Which brings me back to America.

I’ve often thought our politics ought to work—and frankly did work more like this during much of the Cold War—a little like a child rolling a bowling ball down a lane protected by guardrails (or bumpers).

Now and then one party throws the country toward one gutter. The competition between the parties nudges it back toward the middle. Then the other party throws it too far toward the opposite gutter, and the process repeats itself.

The goal isn’t for either party to throw every ball perfectly down the center.

The goal is to keep the country out of the gutters long enough to knock down the pins.

That’s pluralism.

Not everyone throwing from the same place.

Everyone helping keep the country in the lane.

The danger today is that too many people have stopped seeing the guardrails as something that protects the country.

They’ve started seeing them as something standing in the way of victory.

If you believe the American experiment is worth preserving, that ought to worry you.

It certainly worries me.

Because those of us who believe in pluralism have probably done a poor job defending it.

We’ve acted as though moderation sells itself.

It doesn’t.

Maybe that’s because we’ve been selling the wrong thing.

We’ve treated moderation as though it means settling.

Accept less.

Lower your expectations.

Meet somewhere in the middle.

That’s terrible marketing.

The better argument is the one history keeps teaching us.

Moderation isn’t about giving up on ambitious goals.

It’s about accomplishing them.

Civil unions weren’t the destination.

They were the road to the destination.

Compromise isn’t valuable because it’s morally purer than conflict.

It’s valuable because it’s how pluralistic societies actually make lasting progress.

That’s the case we should be making.

Not that moderation asks us to dream smaller.

That it gives us the best chance of achieving the dreams that actually last.

The founders built a constitutional system to manage disagreement because they assumed disagreement was permanent. Later generations expanded who fully belonged within that constitutional promise, bringing America closer to its own ideals. The American experiment has always been about enlarging the circle, not deciding which Americans no longer deserve a place inside it.

Campaigning in bright colors will always be easier than governing in shades of gray.

Declaring that the other side has no place in America will always generate more applause than explaining why we still need each other.

Maybe moderation has a marketing problem.

Maybe pluralism does too.

Neither fits on a bumper sticker.

Neither produces many viral moments.

But history suggests they’re still the only way free people with profoundly different beliefs have ever managed to govern themselves without eventually trying to destroy one another.

The genius of the American experiment was never that we’d all throw the ball straight down the middle.

It was that we built guardrails strong enough to keep the country out of the gutters—and strong enough to pull us back when one side or the other forgot where the lane was.

Lose faith in those guardrails, and we don’t just lose the political center.

We lose the experiment itself.

America was never meant to belong only to the winners.

It was meant to be a place for the rest of us.

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Sidebar:

Every Legislature Needs Professional Politicians

In my thirty-plus years covering and interviewing elected officials, I’ve come to believe there are really two kinds of them: ideologues and politicians.

I’m stealing this construction from a film critic whose name escapes me, who once observed there are two kinds of actors in Hollywood: humans and aliens. Aliens can absorb a role and become someone else entirely—think Meryl Streep. Humans perform who they already are—think George Clooney. Hollywood needs both.

So does Washington.

The ideologues are the true believers. They define a movement’s principles, keep its activists energized, and remind everyone what they’re fighting for. They’re often the conscience of a political party. Without them, parties lose their sense of purpose.

The politicians—and I don’t mean that as a criticism, quite the opposite—count votes before they count headlines. They know where every member is, who can be persuaded, what concession might get the last vote, and when 70 percent of what they wanted beats walking away with nothing. I suspect most true politicians would have thrived in the other party had they grown up in it. They didn’t choose an ideology so much as inherit a political culture. What they chose was the craft.

They’re the people who turn ideas into law.

Lindsey Graham was a politician, as defined above.

People sometimes ask why Graham — and before him, John McCain — appeared on the Sunday shows so often. I’ll concede the caveat: maybe being on the shows (and the attention it brought with them) was part of the motivation for being involved in everything. But the deeper truth is simpler. Whether the president was a Democrat or a Republican, Graham was relevant. He made himself relevant.

Think about the Gang of Eight immigration compromise. Nearly every member came from a border state or one with a large Latino population. The exception was the senator from South Carolina. Nobody drafted Lindsey Graham into that fight. He inserted himself.

That’s how you tell a politician from an ideologue. Ideologues join the fights that define them. Politicians join the fights that need them.

It’s also why I booked them. Nobody explained what was actually happening in Washington better than the members involved in everything — and that’s how I understood the job at Meet the Press: covering politics as it was and helping viewers understand what was happening, not as I wished it were. (I’ve been sharing more Graham stories on The ChuckToddcast this week.)

His decision to align with Donald Trump after 2016 has been interpreted every way: cynical, strategic, self-serving, pragmatic. There’s probably truth in all of them. But it was a politician’s calculation: oppose from the outside and lose influence, or stay in the room and try to shape outcomes. The politician stays in the room to shape it; the permanent question is whether the room ends up shaping him. History will ultimately judge whether Graham was the right amount of transactional or whether he lost his way.

Even Trump understood which kind he’d lost. “He was actually a great politician,” the president said this week. “He got along with almost everybody. And when he didn’t get along, they knew it.”

Here’s what worries me. Our politics increasingly rewards only one of the two types. Primaries reward purity. Social media rewards certainty. Cable rewards confrontation. None of those incentives reward the person willing to say, “I can probably get us halfway there.” And democracies don’t run on conviction alone. They run on conversion. Someone has to persuade. Someone has to negotiate. Someone has to accept an imperfect bill because it beats no bill at all.

Both parties are producing fewer politicians and more true believers. But look at what’s happening to Senate Republicans right now. Graham is gone. Mitch McConnell — whatever else you think of him, the most effective vote-counter of his generation — is retiring. So are Tillis and Ernst. Cassidy and Cornyn didn’t even get the choice: they lost their primaries this spring, the first elected incumbent senators anywhere to lose renomination in fourteen years. Collins could lose in November.

If you’re on the left, your reaction to that list might be good riddance. Fair enough. But the people who should be most alarmed are the ones who count themselves more Republican than not and still care about governing. Because with few exceptions, the replacements are less skilled at governing — or not interested in governing at all. A small faction of the GOP electorate is pushing out its politicians and promoting its ideologues, and it’s only making it harder for them to actually fulfill promises. A Senate majority isn’t worth much if almost nobody left knows how to count to fifty-one.

We’ve never needed only ideologues. We’ve never needed only politicians. We’ve always needed both.

My fear is we’re losing our appreciation for the second group. And if that happens, we’ll rediscover something our predecessors understood instinctively:

Winning an argument and governing a country are two very different skills.

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From the Archives:

My Conversation with Dr. Annie Andrews

With the news surrounding Lindsey Graham, I wanted to reshare a conversation that feels especially relevant today.

Earlier this year, I sat down with Dr. Annie Andrews—pediatrician, healthcare advocate, and then-Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina—for a wide-ranging discussion on the future of healthcare, public trust in our institutions, rural politics, and what Democrats need to do differently to compete in the South. We also talked extensively about Graham’s political legacy, the direction of South Carolina politics, and what leadership should look like in an era of deep polarization.

If you missed this conversation the first time around, or want to revisit it with today’s news in mind, I hope you’ll give it a listen HERE.