"What does it mean to be a "moderate"?
In my previous post, there's a hot debate going on as to whether Ann Althouse is a moderate, or a right wing hack. She's certainly never struck me as being particularly right wing (other than on issues of national defense); I get the sense of a Scoop Jackson Democrat, rather than a conservative. But perhaps my GOPdar is down . . .
The argument is made more difficult by the fact that my commenters seem to be using so many different definitions of moderate. Many conservative commenters are saying "Ann Althouse is a moderate, because she usually votes Democratic, but crossed the line to vote for Bush!" And some of the Democrats aresaying "Ann Althouse is not a moderate, because she crossed the line to vote for Bush!" This latter definition of moderate seems to include voting for Kerry as one of the defining criteria. This does not seem to me to be a reasonable criteria. "Moderate" means "of the centre, not at the extremes", and though I know it pains you, my little pink chickadees, the centre voted for Bush last time around.
Now, again, perhaps I'm just insensitive to these things, but I haven't found Ms Althouse to be an apologist for Bush. She clearly does not hate his policies as much as my more liberal commenters do. But of course, that would probably be why she voted for him. She, and Instapundit (who is also being singled out for opprobrium), have criticized the administration; it's just that when they criticize the administration, it's in a tone of "The Bush administration is doing something I don't like", rather than "The Great Satan is again unleashing the powers of Hell to destroy a Once Great Nation." I haven't noticed her, or Instapundit, criticising the administration's conduct of the WOT, but--I'm going out on a limb here--maybe that's because they generally agree with it, not because they're "apologists" for the administration.
I readily concede that those who supported the war, have, in general, displayed substantial confirmation bias in their blogging about Iraq; they seize on the good news, ignore the bad. But that's not being an apologist; that's being a normal human being. The gleeful tone of liberal/antiwar-libertarian blogs when something goes wrong in Iraq or Afghanistan is not quite what one would expect to hear from your average patriotic American who is reporting that their country is getting their ass kicked. Is that because they're partisan hacks, or because we all loooooooooove information that proves us right?
But back to that slippery word, "moderate". If we remove, as I think we must, "hating the Bush administration" from the definition, what are we left with? We could say that a moderate is someone whose partisan ties are weaker than most, so that they are more often willing to cross the line to vote for a candidate outside their usual party. By that definition--the definition that most of my conservative commenters seem to be using--Ms Althouse is most certainly a moderate. But by that definition, I too am a moderate. For a libertarian, I am moderate--but that's kind of like being a "moderate socialist". It nonetheless puts you well into the extremes on most issues.
I think it's more correct to view weaker partisan ties as a symptom, rather than a condition. What we're really trying to see is how far this person's views are, on average, from the median opinion on a given issue.
That's hard to gauge, not merely because on many issues we don't know precisely what the median opinion is, but also because people may be moderate on some issues, extreme on others . . . or because they may have strong opinions on one or two issues that cross party lines. And party lines are, for better or for worse, generally how we decipher the extremeness of someone's views. Nat Hentoff, for example, is a pretty extreme lefty--except that he's a libertarian on civil rights issues, and he's pro-life. Where do you put him? I'd put him on the left, in a strain of what one might call "muscular socialism" that is rapidly going extinct (more's the pity). But I might put Dorothy Day on the right, if her committment to pro-life, "family values", and agrarian populism trumped her "feed the poor and strengthen the unions" agenda--as I suspect it would, in modern-day America.
But wherever I put her, I wouldn't call her a moderate.
Perhaps the best definition of a moderate is someone who does not derive all of their political opinions from one or two first principles and stick to them no matter where that may lead them. Those first principles may be relatively crude ("the moral environment that prevailed in the 1950s should be held onto") or fairly sophisticated ("we must maximize the power of the weak over the strong"), but regardless of their origin, they tend to make people into extremely rigid voters. People who see themselves as trading off a whole bunch of values, will have political opinions that are in general less extreme. They will also be more tolerant of other peoples' viewpoints, because they tend to assume that other people are simply weighting different values differently--rather than concluding that the difference of opinion must be caused by some terrible moral failing on the part of others.
I suppose in one way, you could see Mr Reynolds and Ms Althouse as extremists: they are effectively dancing up and down and shouting at Democrats, saying "Don't you see! This is REALLY, REALLY important!" And their tone is more than occasionally incredulous and/or intolerant. But the fact that they are talking at all would seem to me to indicate that they are not extremists; the reall hard-core partisans of left and right don't bother addressing those who disagree with them. I see them as saying "Your first principles are blinding you to a huge threat!"
Now, they could be wrong about this. I think that there is something irrational about the magnitude of America's response to a really quite small threat of terrorism--though, being the mushy, too-many-first-principles kinda libertarian I am, I'm not sure that that's a bad thing. Deterrant and all that, y'know. But if they were wrong, that wouldn't make them bad people, partisan hacks, or what have you. It would make them incorrect. One of the wonderful things about being a journalist is that your past failed predictions make you very conscious of the fact that we are all--even smart, good-looking and truly charming economics journalists with fancy degrees from top-flight universities--wrong quite amazingly often.
I seem to have wandered away from the original question: "Is Ann Althouse a moderate"? But if moderate is defined as I have argued, by someone who sees their positions as a weighting of many competing values, rather than the logical extension of bedrock principles, then yes, I think she's a moderate. I think she's a moderate who cares a great deal about national security, and who thinks that the Republicans are better on this issue than Democrats. She might be incorrect. But that doesn't make her immoderate.
Posted by Jane Galt at February 16, 2006"
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