Moderates, Centrists, and the myth of the middle
The center is not the middle. Moderation is often uncentered.
We often use terms like moderate and centrist as though they describe the same thing—the middle of two extremes.
“Centrist Democrats” like Joe Manchin. “Moderate Republicans” like Lisa Murkowski. If Nick Fuentes sits on one end of the spectrum and Hasan Piker on the other, we imagine moderates and centrists somewhere in-between.
Reasonable. Balanced. Objective.
Conversations about how Democrats can win again after the 2024 elections have furthered the conflation of these concepts. The Abundance debates, the Schumer–Mamdani endorsement chaos, the Ezra Klein controversies, and state-election chatter have all been about one thing: Democrats need to “moderate”, which almost always means “align with more voters by moving to the center of the political ideological spectrum.”
But what does moderation and centrism actually mean?
Even Matthew Yglesias, one of the clearest voices in the “Democrats need to moderate” lane, when attempting to explain what he means by “moderate”, just ends up listing a set of electoral tactics:
"I think the moderation argument is primarily about:
Do you prioritize the issues the public says they care most about?
Do you take positions on issues the public agrees with?
Do you prioritize delivering on what the public cares about in your governance?"
I think Yglesias’ ideas about moderation are shared by most people. They describe voting patterns and coalition management intertwined with consensus on varying issues.
However, these politically-charged concepts are only an implication of a more fundamental way of reasoning.
Misconceptions and improvements of moderation and centrism
People run into trouble particularly when they use the “moderate” label as a virtuous sign of anti-extreme positioning on issues. They imagine moderation akin to balance and compromise. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The middle of public opinion reflects prevailing errors.
The essence of moderation is the willingness to examine claims on their merits, not by their distance from other claims or consensus. It’s the acknowledgement of one’s proneness to error and desire to find the best solutions. Moderates could be aligned with consensus, but they could also hold radical positions.
When people notice that the midpoint can be as bad—or worse—than one or both extremes, they reject the whole framework and look for new ideas entirely. That rejection of both extremes and the warped middle is what we usually refer to as centrism.
Centrists also carry an assumption that they occupy a thoughtful middle ground; they like some right-wing ideas, some left-wing ideas, and blend the best from each. The problem is, I don’t think anyone actually does that. More often, they find every existing side unappealing and reject all of them more or less equally. Their “moderation” is accidental. It’s the product of disliking every available option, not of holding a coherent alternative.
The irony: if a person believes neither side has good solutions, they’re implying that something new is needed. That’s not centrism at all—and it’s certainly not “in the middle” or simply a mix of public opinion. It’s a radical position!
The myth of the middle
Centrism, in the only form that actually makes sense, is solely a critique of the politically centrist mindset—it’s a more bold mentality than someone constrained by two opposing extremes. The core problem with the current understanding of conventional centrism is that it mistakes personal dissatisfaction with each side for an actual equivalence between them.
I’ve written before how figures like (the old) Richard Hanania exemplified the moral blindness this “centrism” produces. What I was recognizing then, and can articulate more clearly now, is the conflation of centrism with moderation. Someone who considers themselves in the center of two evils must necessarily think the flaws of each side are inherently symmetrical—why else would one find themselves centered?
No attention to context or moral weight. No assessments of detail. Just a condemnation of all wrongdoing. That’s how political centrism collapses into moral blindness.
True centrists don’t stand in the middle of competing ideas; they stand outside the map altogether. And deciding which ideas need replacing—and what to replace them with—requires a mindset of true moderation.
My own argument for why Democrats lost in 2024 overlaps with other analyses: they weren’t “moderate” enough. But the difference is that my argument dealt not with specific policy positions but with an underlying mentality—how Democrats approached taking positions.
Yes, sometimes they should move closer to consensus. On other issues, they’re fine where they are, or even need to move further in the opposite direction. The point is: moderation, on a philosophical level, is not about positions!
I theorized the problem with Democrats was their wokification—a dogmatic, authoritarian imposition on certain progressive views about crime, immigration, race, gender—and more. It wasn’t that Democrats were necessarily wrong on the substance of these issues. It was the refusal to acknowledge that reasonable arguments existed for traditional positions, and the disdain felt by those who dissented.
It’s only once you move up a level—to the implications—that you reach the Yglesias-type political arguments for moderation: align more with public opinion, or at least stop acting like conservatism is a crime. If Democrats had been less dogmatic about many issues—even without changing their actual positions—they likely would’ve been perceived more positively and won more votes. Maybe not enough to win, but more!
Moderation is all about reasoning.
Historic breakthroughs like heliocentrism, abolition, germ theory, quantum physics, and universal suffrage all looked “extreme” relative to the Overton window of their time.
If moderate is to mean anything intellectually respectable, it must be compatible with holding strong—even “extreme”—views.
If centrism is to mean anything reasonable, it must acknowledge that the political “center” is not where those unsatisfied with each group actually resides.