COLUMN: Gas pedal and brake need each other

via Khmer NZ News Media

Philip Grey • Community editorial board member • July 4, 2010

A recent column in this paper attacked political moderates as "mindless, gutless, and scrupleless," to considerable applause. As a lead-in to that neat thesis, the author used a Nazi-era analogy to argue against moderation in politics. I have to admit, that one sailed right past my head, because I don't understand how it is possible to miss the epic logical fail implicit in the idea that the answer to extremism is to get rid of moderation. Of course, the point becomes easier to understand if you accept the hyper-partisan notion that in the absence of a middle ground, what's left is... good and evil.

That, of course, is the way political extremists tend to break everything down. Whether coming from the left or the right, those on the fringes tend not to believe in the idea that extremism exists on both ends of the spectrum. If they acknowledge it at all it is to defend their extremism as a virtue. The problem with that approach in a country like this is that it implies - actually it demands - the institution of one-party rule and the annihilation of dissent. Spin it any way you want; if you reject the idea of moderation in politics, then that's the end-state.

Fortunately, the vast majority of Americans who identify as conservative or liberal are no where near advocating that we go there. The fact is, nearly the whole of the American electorate is politically moderate to one degree or another (whether they know it or not) since mainstream American liberalism and conservatism each proceed from the same stream of thought, which is classical liberalism. Within the framework of American politics the two diverging approaches have served a function analogous to the gas pedal and brake pedal in a car. Like those two devices, they work best in concert.

No nation (and coincidentally, no business, or sports franchise, or any other thing) can stand pat and survive. The idea that this nation could continue to be run as though it were still an agrarian republic of three million people should be seen as the ridiculous notion that it is. Had our forebears put the parking brake on at the year 1789, the United States would not exist in 2010. Likewise, if we were to allow our national leadership to simply hit the gas and drive us into the future at an unhindered speed of 100 miles per hour, we would have gone off a cliff as surely as did the French Revolution and Pol Pot's Cambodia.

There is a time to move forward and a time to hit the brake. To keep the vehicle from crashing into a wall or, just as bad, getting rear-ended by whatever is coming up behind, requires that this simple thing be understood. The gas pedal and the brake need each other, even if they have ceased temporarily to recognize the fact.

Can I suggest an idea here? Can those of us on each side of American politics stop looking at the political extremes of left and right as good or evil? Is it just possible that good is the middle ground between two destructive extremes?

What is the alternative? To argue that the majority of Americans are extremists or that they support the idea of one-party rule? Do we not understand that to achieve that level of conformity of thought would require the most thorough tyranny imaginable?

In plain fact, moderation implies thought and choices and argument and every other thing that differentiates between freedom and the tyranny that is part and parcel of forcing the electorate to think one way and one way only. The notion that moderation is somehow un-American is the most un-American notion imaginable, and to utter it is to proclaim loudly that you don't understand the least thing about what this country is or why it has lasted this long.

Today, the thing that ails us more than any other thing is the idea of ideological purity and the belief that it can be achieved and enforced. It is an idea that should be discredited by now beyond redemption. It is the Shangri-La concoction of those who don't understand or refuse to see what lies at the end of that road. However, history has shown us repeatedly and clearly what awaits us there, and it isn't Utopia.