When I read E. J. Dionne’s latest column, my immediate reaction was that the editor that wrote the slug on the column pretty clearly hadn’t read the column. Here’s the slug:
They’ve got eight months to dispel the GOP myth that they aren’t governing as moderates.
From that I would have expected that Mr. Dionne was endorsing moderation in politics, asserting that the Congressional Democratic leadership were moderates or were acting as moderates, and, possibly, proposing a “move to the middle”. Those are not conclusions I think can reasonably be drawn from the column itself.
So, for example, on the Congressional moderates Dionne writes:
The dreadful Senate is a major culprit here, and that’s why Sen. Evan Bayh’s complaints in explaining his retirement rang partly true, but also partly false. What’s true is that the Senate isn’t working. What’s false is that there is no room for moderation. The fact is that the legislative outcomes on both the stimulus and health care were driven by moderates.
Is that an endorsement? I don’t think so. Or this:
On health care, months of delay in a futile quest for Republican support got the Democrats the worst of all worlds. The media gave them no credit for reaching out to the other side but did blame them for an ugly, gridlocked process.
From this I draw the conclusion that E. J. Dionne doesn’t even have a vague understanding of political moderation. It does not consist of left Bolsheviks and right Bolsheviks finding common ground. Or seeking a middle position. That’s centrism at best.
Moderation in politics has two facets: moderation in style and moderation in substance and both are necessary. When a White House chief of staff refers to members of his own party as “f*ing retards”, it is immoderate. I can only speculate on how he designates members of the political opposition.
Moderation in substance consists of things like gradualism, organic approaches, and subsidiarity. Is Olympia Snowe a moderate? Or is she a limp progressive?
Our current system with its safe, gerrymandered seats rewards radicalism and we shouldn’t be surprised that we’re getting an increasingly hostile political environment. As I’ve said before I think that mirrors a transition in the practice of law in which we’ve seen a change over the period of the last half century or so between a system of (elitist) colleagues trying to hammer out workable and mutually acceptable agreements to no holds barred advocacy between opponents who see each other as vile.
