This is an article from David Brooks whose book, Bobos In Paradise, my seminar class read a month or so ago.
His definition of moderation in the article is along the lines of ‘balance the competing wants of the various political constituents’. He even specifies that this could be a decade long dialectic movement.
…which I suppose is sort of amorphous. As the market fluctuates so must the regulation or deregulation. (This pendulum must be the only option…) Moderation in this sense would prevent any fundamental changes in the system. It theory it would allow for anything, that is any type of institution, as long as the behavior of it is moderate.
I think this is an accurate description of Obama.
I like to think that libertarianism is a form of moderation. It satisfies both sides of the political sphere on certain issues. Unfortunately anarchism, which would seek to transfer the scenario of the moderate state society to the moderate stateless society, is seen as too radical.
Haha. Moderation was the basic tenet of most old Pagan cults. Maybe they were on to something.
His book Bobos in Paradise makes the case that the 1960’s bo-hemian counter culture (thesis) integrated with the 1980’s bo-urgeois corporate culture to create the world we know today. Anti-corporate mentality is present everywhere only because the corporation is everywhere. (Ingsoc) So, I think he seems to look at everything as this ‘moderation dialiectic’ at work. It is a form of Hegelian dialectic referred to within the contraints of moderation. Further, this form of moderation avoids making moral judgements of political issues seeking only to temper the power that each group strives for. We could always just endorse the old Roman consul. You can’t get more ‘moderate’, in this sense, than that!
Something’s being moderate refers to its having a certain kind of relation to other things: namely, to its being “in the middle” of other things in some sense. Saying you favor moderation of political opinion in general is gibberish, as it would require that all political views somehow line up on a single spectrum, and that you favor those views located in the middle of this spectrum. Of course, one can plot all political views on a spectrum, but to do so one has to choose some criteria in terms of which to order those views. And there are any number of such criteria and so any number of spectra. You can’t somehow sum up all the possible spectra and get one universal spectrum. Likewise, if someone asked you what kind of food you like, what sense would it make to say “I like moderate food”? You could say I like moderately spicy food, or moderately salty food, or moderately expensive food, but not just moderate in general. And you couldn’t just somehow sum up the spicyness, saltyness, expensiveness, et al spectra and produce one spectrum on which you could locate food which is moderate in general: i.e. not in respect to any particular criteria.
Right or wrong in terms of what the democratic factions vote for.
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This is not what it is saying at all. Did you read the article? He is making the case of having balanced factions of political powers. It has nothing to do with valuing ideology that it what he calls at the beginning the wrong approach. He says this right away concerning your assessment;
Please make sure you understand the concepts before writing lengthy paragraphs expousing nothing.
I see this as an institutional question, do you? If that is not th case, than I have fundamentally misinterpreted the text at hand incorrectly, and you can disregard anything else I write in this post.
If this is an institutional issue:
All political institutions (be they one of custom and contract, a liberal order i.e. open society, ancap, ansoc, or whatever you want to name) already have set perameters of actions it will not tolerate.
a) In one case, we could say that anything existing within the order of the insitution on a social level is acting moderately. In order to make use of this outlook, further clarifications would have to be made and drawn to take us out of inane abstraction or a useless tautology. This can probably be done.
b) In another case, we could take a look at the fringes of what can be tolerated in the social order and say that anything not in that “fringe” is moderate, as it is more “centered” (for lack of a better word). I would find this outllook to be virtually useless, as it would seem to me to be too difficult to quantify and qualify, and I simply don’t see why the end results would be a very interesting use of the word “moderate”.
c) In another we can simply ask what the “moderate” is in Fox news, MSNBC or whatever mainstream pop culture politics wants to throw out at hand. This is useful only in the context that you don’t care what moderate “really is” in a comprehensible outlook at political theory and just wish to move on to a more important topic at hand. This may be what’s going on here, as the author may just be addressing a cultural concern.
What is probably of more interest is how various policies affects the institutions in place, and on what basis are these institutions founded. That is to say, are the institutions resting on a firm (as US, a government that could reasonably be stated to be built off of compromise and moderation) or flimsy basis (as the Weimer Republic, a govt built off of compromise and moderation)
As for the bobo observation, I have to say I sympathize and have thought the same thing many times, however I don’t think it’s a proper use of a Hegelian dialectic, as much as it would be a proper use of a geneology.
My honest question is, who defines the center? If we took the political spectrum as an aggregate total of human history, starting with Paleolithic hunter-gatherer family units and moving on down to modern democracies, the mainstream West is extremely far to the left and authoritarian ends on the political compass. Even restricting this sample to the last 30 years in first world Western democracies only, there is still a sharp statist bias in Nolan terms and a culturally leftist one; I can hardly picture Margaret Thatcher going all gung ho over global warming or homosexual marriage like David Cameron is, and the neoconservatism of Jonah Goldberg makes the like of William F. Buckley look like Thomas Hobbes on both a cultural and political scale. One generations radicalism is the next’s orthodoxy, and ultimately an appeal to moderation as a goal in and of itself (as opposed to a virtue of another political ideology) is either a vulgarized conservatism or a simple exercise in the Golden Mean fallacy.
As I said, insofar as this article says anything at all, what it says is that moderation in general is good: i.e. a political programme which is somehow balanced between a multitude of dissimilar views, which sort of proportionally represents those views, which is at equilibrium between the extremes of those views, etc (more bad analogies to physics). And that’s nonsense, for the reasons I explained already. The reality of political moderation is that it’s the self-ascribed position of those who are incapable of forming their political ideas into a coherent whole, and/or those who really have no political ideas at all, but need to say something when asked in order to avoid sounding stupid.
Pretty much. I tend to think of institutions as networks more so than singular entites. So the occupation of several positions of interlating powers becomes “institutional.” This is an effect of elites centralizing their powers in a workable form (so they don’t have immediate and formidable oppositions) as much as can be done. I’m not sure who the linked article is directed at other than the author referenced and Obama. The politicians know how to pander to the “undecided voter” and it doesn’t involve complicating their traditional Chrisitan values with moderate French liberalism.
RE: 1) Yes, and those are not in question.
a) Yes. Anything that is not causing the powers to struggle to extinguish or to epitomize something is considered within the sphere of moderate behavior.
b) I don’t quite get this, but it doesn’t sound like it matters.
c) I think the author is saying what you said. Politicians have no idea what moderation means, well Romney doesn’t (it looks as if Brooks is making the case that Obama is closer to Continental moderate political thoughht than Romney who is using the word to take votes from Obama), and the news isn’t helping.
He does allude to the debt and inequality being “out of whack.” Although, he doesn’t say anything on the ends of political institutions, but I don’t think the integrity of the foundation of the U.S. government is in quesition for him.
How so? He refers to it as a synthesis in the book. He says that there are those who refuse the synthesis and they will become the new push of progress when the new synthesis becomes the Establishment (partly my addition of concept).
That is a helluva conjecture. I would also guess that you aren’t that well read on Continental thought, so…
Moderation is a position for politicians. Politicians don’t need to be ideologues. They need to temper the exercise of power that is requested from the democratic factions. The democratic factions are the ones with political ideas that are a “coherent whole.” You aren’t willing to consider this notion. And still miss the point he is making.
It’s important to understand how politics is participated in by the outside world. You could say that battles in politics are so feirce because the differences are so minute but people live and breathe these differences as if they were the most important things ever. Realistically though the apathetic observer is in a morally superior position than the bungling activist, since they at least abide by the precautionary principle.
Now that’s a blind conjecture…and an especially amusing one considering what I do.
You must have a magic decoder ring, because that not what he’s saying in the text of the article. He’s explaining what it means to be a moderate (voter), and thus what politicians need to do to court them; and he’s not speaking as a disinterested political analyst, he sounds very much sympathetic to the moderate cause…lol, if one can speak of such a thing.
Voters, not politicians.
You think he means moderates in the House or the Senate? …or maybe he means moderate voters?
It would be strange for politicians to pander to themselves, don’t you think? Seems like he’s, once again, talking about moderate voters.
…he hopes this column will help politicians pander better to moderate voters by explaining what it means to be a moderate voter.
Then you should have no trouble finding some statistics to prove it…
He is appealling to Obama in the article to tell people (moderates, yes, voters) that he, Obama, is moderate. It is just a vague appeal to Obama to pipe up.
By what is means to be moderate in general. You are the worst roadblock to discussion on here.
Well, you are either lying or a pussy. Your use of language doesn’t at all resemble a philosphy student. And you could just post your thesis topic, but you didn’t even do that…What class/classes are you teaching? “Burkean influence in the French Liberal intelligentsia in the aftermath of the French Revolution,” I bet.
I also noticed that you didn’t bother with an stats to your claim that moderation is really just a position for those without a definite set of ideals, but still need to say something. I bet it is easy to prove things like that empirically…
As for the rest of it, about “moderation,” do you concede that the author is talking about moderation as a political position among voters (I’m not saying that’s all he’s talking about)? If so, then do you concede that, indeed, my initial comments (criticizing moderation as a political position), were not irrelevant as you claimed?