Political Extremists vs The Middle Path: Why I Remain a Radical Moderate

If politics is the art of the possible, then the extremes of political discourse are far from an art. In the U.S., political extremists are making it almost impossible to engage in pluralistic civic democratic discourse—to say the least. As I wrote in a recent essay published on the FAIR Substack: “As a radical moderate, I identify as neither liberal nor conservative, Democrat nor Republican. I’m an independent who is suspicious of both sides of the political aisle, especially at their extremes. So, as partisan ideologues and opportunists use race as a political football, I shake my head in disgust.”

I consider my stance as radical moderate to be a pragmatic golden mean and middle path to sanity because too often the extremes of the political spectrum are toxic and illiberal. Further, both extremes are full of anti-democratic, entitled narcissists. 

For instance, check out two paragraphs from Jonathan Haidt’s recent essay in The Atlantic titled “Why the Last Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid”:

The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes. This uniformity of opinion, the study’s authors speculate, is likely a result of thought-policing on social media: “Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.” In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.

—Jonathan Haidt

Further—and even more frightening—are the similarities between these two groups in personality type:

A recent study at the Queensland University of Technology compared over five hundred diversely representative U.S. residents whose opinions all diverged from the mainstream. They divided them into three categories: radical left, progressive liberal, and White Identity. Then they assessed how prone each group was to favor authoritarian tendencies and the Dark Triad.

As Jamie Wheal recalls in Recapture the Rapture, centrists who held pro-social values but also respected the choices of others “did not show any correlation with the Authoritarian Dark Triad. Both the radical left and alt-right did. That’s the basic contrast. Omni-Considerate win-win, versus self-interested win-lose.”

According to the study’s authors, “Our study indicates that an emerging set of mainstream political attitudes—most notably [radical left and alt-right] are largely being adopted by individuals high in Dark Triad traits and entitlement. Individuals high in authoritarianism—regardless of whether [they] hold politically correct or rightwing views—tend to score highly on Dark Triad and entitlement . . . [they’re] statistically more likely than average to be higher in psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and entitlement.”

Damn. These two groups are dominating political discussion online, which is further fragmenting the body politic and they are callous, navel-gazing, entitled, self-righteous and manipulative amoral anti-democratic authoritarians. Damn.

To those who only critique the radical postmodern progressive left who claim that White Supremacy+Capitalism is the be-all-and-end-all of social problems and disparities, while being apologists for the pillaging and violence that attended some of the BLM protests post-George Floyd, I say ‘Yes . . . And’: There’s also the alt-right QAnon looney-tunes who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and actively deny the validity of the results of the last presidential election while ginning up racial and LGBTQ resentment.

Sorry, but as regards both camps of extremists, I’m a neither-nor guy. To paraphrase Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet: a pox on both their houses.