ENOUGH.
In the day that has passed since yesterday’s horrific act of terrorism in Tucson, AZ, the conventional wisdom has taken exactly the shape I would have expected it to: our discourse is too divided; partisan pundits and elected officials have taken their fiery rhetoric off the rails; the vitriol is too great; all sides are guilty; extremists of all ideological persuasions are culpable.
And yet there’s one particularly pernicious brand of extremist that goes completely unimplicated in this analysis, and that’s the mythical moderate.
Now the extremism of the mythical moderate is rooted in the fact that he does not walk among us in anywhere near the magnitude we are told he does, because he is merely the invention of a small cadre of Beltway villagers, of disconnected pundits who position themselves atop some noble pedestal of dispassionate reasoning, people who fancy themselves the sole arbiters of levelheadedness in American opinion making and who imagine the actual doing of politics to be little more than an unending series of emotionless, objective determinations of who’s winning and who’s losing.
A moderate in this country, in essence, is the sort of person who wouldn’t upset David Broder at a cocktail party.
The mythical moderate derives his extremism, initially, from the fact that he exists in numbers roughly equivalent to the fringe elements holding down either end of our political spectrum. But the extremism of the mythical moderate becomes incalculably more dangerous than that of his counterparts on the fringe as soon as one realizes the unique role he occupies in the framing of our national debate, for it is said that he, uniquely, aspires to a happy medium of political persuasion, such that positions which differ from his must therefore be fundamentally partisan, and must therefore be fundamentally more extreme in proportion to the intensity with which they are held.
And the perniciousness of this particular extremism results directly from the false equivalencies it brings along with it. Because of the mythical moderate we occupy a space in which passionate people of differing opinions can be considered equally crazy, simply by virtue of the fact that they both disagree with the mythical moderate (albeit for different, usually opposing, reasons).
And so we live in a country where people who wish to repeal the second amendment are equal to those who seek to legislate that every citizen pack heat.
Where people who believe in trials by jury are no different from those who stand for torture.
Where people who wish to assist the poor are morally equivalent to those who consider unemployment assistance a frivolous government dole.
Where people who register their opposition to a president by calling for investigations are the same as those whose opposition comes in the form of attending a rally with a visibly holstered sidearm.
Where people whose elected officials never preach a rhetoric of violence are equivalent to those who regularly do.
And this must stop.
Once upon a time Daniel Patrick Moynihan told us that everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not to his own facts, and yet now we live in this bizarro reality where a late night comedian can get away with saying that one pundit who registers his anger over verifiable facts is just the same as another pundit who issues hate-fueled rants based on little more than patent lies.
And it is destroying us.
Now obviously no one in his or her right mind explicitly called for yesterday’s monstrosity in Tucson, but that is no reason to let them tell us that the left and the right are equally implicated. Because that is preposterous.
All speech may be free, but it is certainly not equal in kind, and we should no longer tolerate a status quo in which a rhetoric of compassion and love is rendered equivalent to one of hatred and fear.
