Centrist

"The Moderate Middle is a Myth" proclaims the headline at FiveThirtyEight. The analysis by Lee Drutman doesn't actually deny the existence of moderates. Rather, Drutman merely questions the notion expressed by several pundits that Democrats can win in 2020 by "moving to the center". Drutman's research indicates that the approximately 40% of voters who identify as moderate or independent are not a cohesive voting bloc, and no candidate can win them over by adopting a centrist policy position.

This might actually work.

The current environment in Washington reminds me of the story of the two Russian farmers who were each farming their small one-acre plots of potatoes. Over time they'd grown to hate each other. They hated each other for so long they no longer even remembered why. One year, one of the farmers saved up enough money to buy a cow to provide milk for his family. The other farmer was envious and angry. He was walking on his land, kicking everything in sight out of anger—a rock, the dirt—eventually he kicked an old lamp and out came a genie.

California is dry. Really dry. Historically dry. Life-alteringly dry. Dry enough to bring out the political extremists, as if they had crawled up through those cracks in the ground.

It's a longstanding tradition in American politics that presidential candidates spend most of the primary season trying to appeal to the party's base, liberal or conservative. Then the nominees of both parties try to do an about face and present themselves as the more moderate and reasonable candidate for the general election. The thinking behind this strategy is that primary voters tend to be extremist, but most voters hew to the center.

In his recent column Why I Don't Like Bill Maher Leonard Pitts succinctly describes what is wrong with American politics today:

Jon Stewart nails it. When politicians can't determine whether an action is right or wrong until they've determined which political party is doing it, the system is broken.

More than a half century ago, philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a little essay he called The Hedgehog and the Fox. The title is based on a line from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows only one big thing." Berlin used this as an analogy for how different writers and thinkers approach the world. Plato and Dante, for example, were hedgehogs, always keeping within one overarching framework. William Shakespeare, on the other hand, was a fox, exploring many ideas and themes throughout his writing career.