The Moderator’s Voice
When I joined this blog (middle of 2005) I was significantly more “moderate”, in the usual sense of the term, than I am now. I freely admit that since then, I have drifted distinctly off to the left. It actually probably looks worse from your vantage point, because on the issue I most care about (race relations), “drifted” probably is less accurate than “ran with reckless abandon.” Preparation to join the academy, I guess. But at the end of the day, the subjects I blog on definitely place me on the left-wing of this site.
A while ago I would have apologized for this. After all, this is The Moderate Voice, and folks can expect to come here and read Moderate posts–which my treatises on how structural racism maintains a de facto system of White Supremacy in America really don’t qualify as. But the more I think of it, the more I’m actually quite comfortable in my role here. This has to do with my personal conception of what it means to be moderate as a virtue, rather than an affiliation, and what the ideal “moderate” site consists of.
Even when I joined TMV, I never really identified the virtue of moderation as being at the midpoint of all political disputes. Rather, it was more closely affiliated in my mind with pragmatism. I was (and remain) committed to identifying and advocating for solutions based on whether they work, not based on whether they fit within particular ideological parameters. Admittedly, one’s ideals affect both what problems you want to “solve”, and what types of solutions are said to “work.” But even still, I think a more flexible identity in this regard is a superior virtue than moderation for its own sake. And pragmatic outlook can lead to policy positions that are nowhere near the center. For example, my leftist views on race are heavily influenced by pragmatism–I’m less concerned with making sure my proposed solutions fit within an overarching meta-framework (like “color-blindness”) than I am in “solving the problem” of racial hierarchy (y’all may disagree as to whether what I propose actually will accomplish that, I’m just talking about my outlook–an ideological position like “color-blindness” is meaningless to me except insofar as it is instrumentally valuable to ending racial hierarchy).
The second issue, one which was always present but has emerged recently as quite dominant in my thinking, is my belief in pluralism. Pluralism, in my opinion, is essential to effective democratic deliberation, because nobody has a monopoly on truth, and because perspectives are non-substitutable. I cannot adopt the standpoint of another–nobody can give voice to the experience or life of a given body, but that body. Since no democratic body can include everybody (every body), the closest approximation is to insure that our deliberative institutions are drawn from a representative cross-sample of the community. As Iris Marion Young argues, “Normative judgment is best understood as the product of dialogue under conditions of equality and mutual respect. Ideally, the outcome of such dialogue and judgment is just and legitimate only if all the affected perspectives have a voice.” (Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), 59 (emphasis added)).
One of the things I’ve noticed about TMV is–ideologically speaking, at least–we have one of the most diverse arrays of contributors one will find blogging together while identifying as part of the same community. There are some sites that are specifically set up to be polemical (“the right and left square off!”) and others which host a huge array of writers but whose members don’t necessarily see themselves as “co-bloggers” as much as atomistic contributors. Few, however, have managed to create such a vibrant community of posters expressing different views while still seeing themselves–at least somewhat–as being part of a single interpretative community. This is a tremendous asset, and one that I think is far more valuable than it would be if we all were clustered together “in the center.”
This is important, and I think cuts to the heart of the ideal “moderate voice.” I think Young is definitely correct that democratic decision-making only justly occurs in a forum where all affected perspectives have a voice and all voices are treated with dignity and respect. However, such fora are few and far between. As Cass Sunstein warned in Republic.com, the internet has assisted in the extreme balkanization of our political communities, such that there is very little deliberation among the “we”, replaced by self-reinforcing cheerleading by “us” in opposition to “them” (who, of course, do the same).
A common misunderstanding (one I admit I used to buy into) was that only those in the middle could hope to bridge these gaps. In this view, the “moderate voice” should be made up of a council of people, all roughly in the center of the political spectrum, mediating between the dueling poles. I no longer hold that belief. For one, I’m not even necessarily sure I know what such a “center” would look like. The political center is a nebulous concept–it is both contested and shifting. I’m not confident I’d be able to identify the ground, even if it exists. For two, I think it overstates the solidity of our political positions. As I said above, I know my views on a variety of issues have evolved considerably even during these past few years. It is far from guaranteed (and, I’d argue, far from ideal) that even those who are in the center will stay there through hell or high water. For three, insofar as anyone actually does identify, in a hard sense, as “sitting in the center”, I’m not sure that type of static viewpoint is anymore conducive to mediation than a similarly ossified position elsewhere on the spectrum. It seems at least as likely that a “hardcore” centrist might be reflexively resistant to an otherwise good socialist or libertarian idea, because it strikes them as extreme or out of the mainstream.
Rather, I believe that the true Moderate Voice is the Moderator’s Voice–people of varying and diverse perspectives, agreeing to come together in mutual discourse to debate and discuss the issues of the day. The moderator is the appropriate metaphor because the goal is not to create false uniformity, but rather to create the appropriate conditions within which pluralized perspectives can spark dialectic. The best moderators construct panels of people who hold positions encompassing as much of the political terrain as possible, and who are committed to sparring with their interlocutors both vigorously and respectfully. The diversity is important because it is the only way to create an effective microcosm of the public–10 people who all share the same views, even if those views constitute the middle or average position of the citizenry, are not in any meaningful sense representative. In every meaningful sense, the type of discourse that flows out of difference is advantageous vis-a-vis homogeneous back-scratching. Hence, the moderator’s voice should actively seek views from all over the political spectrum–left, right, center, up, down, all around. And while I want the debate to be respectful, I do not want it to be deferential. If the subject is race relations, then you’re going to hear folks arguing that a given position perpetuates racism–as they should, if they believe that. If the topic is national security, then whether a position “makes America less safe” is absolutely fair game. Respectful means refraining from assuming bad motives on the part of one’s interlocutor, but deferential means refraining from assuming bad results. Adopting the latter course leads to just as impoverished a civic discourse as one that has no diversity at all. Political discussion is a contact sport–so long as the arguments are made in good faith, there’s nothing inherently wrong about showing some teeth.
When I wrote about what my ideal Supreme Court would be, I did not urge that it be stacked with nine centrists. I do not think such a court would really serve the American people. Rather, I advocated a Court whose membership encompassed all of the major schools of legal thought–from originalists and textualists, to pragmatists, to “active liberty” types and crits. Imagine the type of legal discourse we could have in such a judiciary! Imagine if these camps were forced to be part of the same interpretative community–to think and deliberate (and ultimately decide cases!) with reference to each other! I want to put Clarence Thomas and Charles Lawrence III in a room on affirmative action cases. I want to see what happens when a textualist runs into a post-modernist. Even if there isn’t always synthesis, the fires of intellectual combat should at least invigorate the theories, in a way that a bland, tasteless “moderation” (in isolation) can never hope to achieve.
So, back to me. I am happy to take my place at the Moderator’s Table as the resident Critical Race Theorist. Is it a “moderate” position? No, not really. But it contributes to the wonderful array of ideas and perspectives that circulate this forum–and that, ultimately, ought to be the ambition of the The Moderate Voice.
42 Responses to “The Moderator’s Voice”
David – You have eloquently given voice to what I suspect many of us have been thinking. Well said and well done … and thank you.
David,
I’ve definitely thought of you as a more left leaning contributor here, for the reasons you’ve mentioned. However, I’ve also thought of you as one of the more moderate. Why? Because even though you obviously passionately support your views on race relations, you’ve never once assumed that those with different views are racists. I’ve had strong disagreements (I think on nearly every race related post I’ve read by you, which is probably a majority of your posts) but I’ve felt that you didn’t insult me in your post and you’ve engaged in thoughtful discussions with me and others who disagreed with you.
I don’t think everyone has to be a centrist or even near the center on every issue; I do think that one veers way off from moderate tone when one presents one’s viewpoints by presumption of negative motivation among those who oppose one’s viewpoints.
I wonder if other blogs have as many introspective “what it means to be a liberal/conservative/libertarian” as we have “what it means to be a moderate” posts. I guess that this constant self-questioning has to do with the fact that almost all definitions maintain the need for dialog in moder…uhmmm, moderism? (we could do with a word for it, BTW). The very fact that dialog is so important probably causes the multiple self-reflections of what it even means to be moderate.
I think that the confusion centrist vs. moderate is as follows: being moderate is not the same thing as being centrist, but a centrist is more likely to be moderate than a partisan. It stands to reason that someone who takes a middle-of-the-road position on issues is likely to appreciate dialog, since they are likely to be in that position because they see merits in the arguments of both sides. Moderates are not only centrists, I think that it’s even more common amongst those that consider themselves moderates to be a mixed bag; people who have positions on one side AND the other side. This is reflected in a huge number of TMV posters and commenters. You’d never guess it if you only read my comments to your posts David, but I’m actually pretty liberal in most respects, though my views on race, immigration and crime are all very conservative. I’m hardly the only example. Holly is liberal, until you mix Israel into the conversation. MvDG is the very best example, conservative and liberal almost in equal proportion depending on the issue.
That certainly doesn’t mean that someone who is entirely liberal or entirely conservative (definitions which themselves change) can’t be a moderate, but tendencies towards moderation (read: dialog and compromise) probably come up more easily when you fail the “purity test” and realize what it is to be in the sights of those who theoretically are on your side. Gives you a taste of the other side and makes you realize that maybe, just maybe, the other side has something worthwhile to say.
David, you are just fine even when I disagree with you!
There has been a lot of talk around here lately of this board being left and no longer moderate. I think what we have here is a case of politcal relativity going on. Many many of the posts here excoriate Bush and his decisions and I think that is largely responsible for this apparent shift. But I think thats only because the president is so far right, and not just right but every big boogeyman aspect of the conservative movement. Super religous, starts wars, on the fence about evolution, in bed with big corporations who happen to be really doing well under his administration, and apparently willing to circumvent the constitution using executive authority whenever possible. People respond less to posts about supporting Bush and the war because simply put this country as a whole doesn’t do that anymore.
So I think many of the responses we get on this sight are EXACTLY what I’d expect from moderates. We are supposed to be really pissed when the scales are so far out of whack. Its seems left because its moderate in a world where the far right is calling the shots and pulling the strings. When it rolls the other way, when we have a screaming atheist anti-capitalist socialist UN kowtowing president you’ll hear screaming just as loud traveling the other direction.
Not sure how much this meshed with the original post, but its seems connected with some sentiments going around here the last few weeks. No need to pigeonhole yourself David.
Good post.
Better to be moderate than try and hit the political “center”.
Good post David and I am 100% sure no one was criticizing you in this regard. Good, introperspective post. Moderation is not always about centrism. We had a big debate about this a while ago and I don’t think that today’s post was about that, at least that was not the intention, but some soul searching is important every now and then.
Sam,
Most conservatives don’t have a problem with specific criticisms of Bush (well, not most of the thinking conservatives like the ones who tend to comment here). There are two issues though; one is that the criticisms sometimes go beyond what is legitimate (BDS stuff, like linking every problem to the world to somehow show that it is Bush’s fault- just as a lot of dumb Republicans said everything was Clinton’s fault) and second is that the criticisms of Bush are often unfairly posited as criticisms of conservatism in general. In fact you even allude to this when you say that Bush is made into the ‘boogeyman of conservatism’ (AKA the strawman). A lot of us object to that because many of Bush’s faults and bad policies actually have nothing to do with conservatism (note that I said a lot, not all), and also because citing one thing as wrong should not logically determine that it’s opposite is right. A lot of us are concerned that the ‘centrists’ aren’t holding up the middle right now, they’re tacking hard to the left instead- and that kind of pendulum swing isn’t very helpful, it just leads to overcorrection.
I think choice of topic has a lot to do with things around here as well.
Some topics seem to stay within a framework of theoretical discussion tone, even if there is difference and some melt into very predictable one line antagonisms quickly (if not provided in the post itself).
Your topics, David, tend to avoid the sterotypical death trap topics, so even a ravingly polar view doesn’t seem to me to ever destruct decorum.
And funny thing is, just the mere presence of decorum tends to connote “moderation”.
I want to clarify that I didn’t think anybody was criticizing me (as in “what is that raving liberal doing on this site?”). For awhile, I myself felt uncomfortable, in that I felt I was misrepresenting myself by being here–styling myself a “moderate” when I really wasn’t. This post is more to elucidate how I sorted that issue out than a response to non-existent external criticism.
I will say to Sam that while I agree that many folks’ leftward drift is a function of really disliking this administration, I don’t think I can fairly chalk my shift up to that. For one, back in the early days of the administration, I said that “I’m drifting to the right, but the administration is racing off the right fringe, so I’m relatively more left than I was before.” But more importantly, the particular issues that I’ve prompted my left swing (race being the most prominent) really haven’t been provoked by any Bush actions, nor do they represent a switch the Democratic position. On race, I’m pretty radical, and thus I think we were in a pretty bad state all the time (W, Clinton, H.W., Reagan…all the way down). So for me, I think Bush has only so much to do with my particular political oscillations.
David,
I may come back to your Supreme Court proposal later, which I think would set up about the most arbitrary and capricious tribunal imaginable, but first I want to clarify something about what exactly you’re arguing. As I understand it, you’re saying that although you’re very definitely on the left, it makes perfect sense to post here, because there are also posters on the right, and this produces a balance (to be very clear, I’m not attacking you or questioning your contributions here). In other words, “diverse” and “moderate” become functionally synonymous in your conception. But presumably, following the logic of this position, if you had a blog featuring posters Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias, Michelle Malkin and David Duke, that would be a “moderate” forum, because (in your words) it would be a forum composed of “people of varying and diverse perspectives, agreeing to come together in mutual discourse to debate and discuss the issues of the day.” And if it seems dissonant to call such a forum “moderate,” that is a false dissonance, because in creating a moderate forum, “the goal is not to create false uniformity, but rather to create the appropriate conditions within which pluralized perspectives can spark dialectic,” right? Am I understanding your argument correctly?
All I wanted to say was “Amen.”
Chris (12:13 pm comment), I think that’s a slightly different issue. Of course one can deviate from the party line; you can be a liberal and be pro-life, for example, or conservative and be for stem cell research. And of course, you can be a moderate on most issues, but very strongly pro-life, or opposed to the war in Iraq, for example. But surely it isn’t good enough to say “I self-define as a moderate” – if I told you I consider myself a legal liberal, you’d laugh me out of town, because it’s wholly apparent from what I’ve written and what I believe that I can call myself anything I like, but I’m still a legal conservative. George W. Bush called himself a compassionate conservative, but you don’t take him at his word: you look to what he does, not what he says, in determining what he is.
What I’m getting at is this. While surely you’re correct that one can still be a moderate while veering off on certain issues, and one can take a moderate tone while holding immoderate positions (or take an immoderate tone while being substantively moderate), nevertheless, there must be something other than how one labels oneself that defines what it is to be a moderate. For anyone to be something, there must necessarily be a definition of what that something is, and such a definition necessarily includes some while excluding others. If there is such a thing as a moderate, there must be a definition of what is a moderate, one which includes some people and excludes others. Right?
Well, your proposed blog wouldn’t really represent “a representative cross-sample of the community”–it would just match up poles. Plus, I sincerely doubt that Malkin, Duke, Yglesias and Greenwald would be able to commit to serious, good-faith deliberation on the issues with each other–it would be more akin to the “two poles” style blog that specifically divides its contributors into sides and has them duke it out, which isn’t what I want. Just because I don’t want 100% pure centristy goodness doesn’t mean they should be entirely absent. My more leftist contributions are fine in a moderate forum because there are center and right voices too, but the point isn’t to “balance” based on some metaphysical sense of fairness, it’s to accurately simulate the sort of forum in which a public of diverse viewpoints might deliberate (and, I guess, because I think deliberation is better when a variety of perspectives are present–its less about fairness than efficacy in that sense)
But yes, I am saying that “moderate as centrist” is not particularly virtuous, but “moderate as moderator” is, and that’s the direction I work from.
Cf., ahem, my post on the history and philosophy of moderation in politics.
Simon,
I get your point (1:17 pm comment) but I think it makes more sense to define differences between centrism and moderation. Centrism, to me, is a position that’s near the political midpoint and from there you have people just to left and just to right, who aren’t too extreme and tend to be more interested in pragmatic compromise. I don’t think that’s the same as “moderate”, though I have no idea if there’s a technical definition which proves me wrong. To me, moderate has more to do with tone and tenor of debate. People with strong ideologies or political philosophies can debate in a very moderate way, by focusing on ways to convince those of opposing views rather than taking a divide and conquer tack.
Don’t know if I’m right or wrong to define the terms that way, I only know it works for me. I don’t mind reading and discussing with far leftists who are moderate in tone; I do mind it from even slightly left of centrists who insult those who are not occupying their idea of the center.
Excellent post, David Your introspection shed light on a lot of ideas for everyone to ponder.
I think that when debate jumps the fence to become antogonism, it has a lot to de with persoanl perceptions and sensibilities. I would say that’s the case more often than not. When conservatives see the latest derogatory comment about Bush, thrir antennas light up, but all comments about the “Left’ being the root of all evil remain unnoticed.
When liberals see The Democrats or Progressives being bashed, they take immediate note, but they pass criticisms about the “Right’ without paying particular attention..
It’s a very common phenomenon, even in emotionally neurall areas. I fyou walk down the street with the color green on your mind, you’ll begin to see it everywhere, until green seems to reach plague propotions. If the color green is far from your mind, you’re not likely to notice it much.
A little inrospection would do all of us some good.
Well, I’m sorry, David, but I don’t think that’s in any coherent or cognizable sense being “moderate.” It suggests not moderation, but an “on balance.” Or perhaps even more literally, an average: a line of best fit, if you will, wherein even though no particular post is recognizably moderate, the line, which is an average, charts a course that viewed in isolation one would call “moderate,” but that in fact passes through no charted point on the graph. It would be, I think, literally fictitious moderation in aggregate only.
(This by the way, is an even more acute problem for an entity such as Unity ’08, which seems to measure consensus based on whether people disagree with an existing policy, not whether they agree on an alternative policy; on average, the audience may appear moderate, but when that veneer of consensus is stripped by the need to agree on a specific position that everyone can sign onto, the enterprise fails.)
Your Supreme Court proposal is problematic, I think, when one imagines how it would operate in practise. I have a friend who’s a legal liberal, and he once observed that in many ways, it would be better to have nine Brennans or nine Scalias than the present situation where you have two formalists, two conservatives, four liberals and a guy in the middle who swings like a weathervane deciding who wins in nine out of ten cases. Your proposal is the complete opposite – it would, I think, exacerbate the problem. What you would see is an almost incoherent case-by-case resolution that would depend less on any particular legal principles than shifting and ad hoc voting coalitions. In fact, if you got the mix just wrong, one could easily imagine a functional return to seriatim decision-making. That would be the very antithesis of law, and would be corrosive for the rule of law because it would make it very hard to rely on law built on such shifting foundations.
Moreover, you of course know how much instability plurality decisions create, but because of the incoherent and transient nature of the majorities I think your court would have, one can certainly imagine every case being like Bazemore, or worse yet, I can actually imagine every case being like Furman – a very vague per curiam that does little more than annouce the fate of these particular litigants, and then the lower courts (to say nothing of the society that has to try and conform its behavior to the law) have to try and distill from a galaxy of concurring opinions what exactly the law is that prompted the result. (This, by the way, will also cripple the Supreme Court, because it will lead to endless circuit splits as each circuit tries to read the tea leaves, creating an unresolvable pressure on the court’s docket.) In essence, your position, IMO, would test Justice Scalia’s postulate that the rule of law requires a law of rules by eliminating the possibility of clear rules. Law that is unpredictable is functionally capricious, and law that is capricious is basically tyrannical; I really think my friend has it completely right and that you have it completely backwards – you describe the worst possible Supreme Court. Even a court that was wrong in 85 cases out of 85 but that was wrong in a predictable fashion that fostered stability and reliance in the rule of law would be better than the consequences I foresee of your bench of bickering philosopher-kings.
I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired.
I’m certainly not! But I’m sick and tired of being told that I am.
Simon: I am pro death penalty and pro-abortion. If you factor in a hundred other positions, they will on a 0-100 scale, be all over the board, with the only defining characteristic being pragmatism and the right of an individual over the mob, and the average being 50ish. But, to expect any person, or group to be 50-50 on all things is to ask for a zombified state, as much as a 0 or 100 across the board view would be.
Instead of chiding Shaun for being a Lefty, show why that is silly- specifically or generally.
But, specifically is better because it focuses the issue with more clarity.
David: I think, rightly or wrongly, you have bought into an identification of race issues as a ‘Left’ or liberal argument. I find this specious reasoning prominent in claims of liberal bias in the media- when topics are tossed off as showing a ‘liberal bias.’ Those topics wd be poverty, race, gay rights issues.
Yet, the daily Wall Street reports, esp. if the Dow has a bad day, are not seen as pervasive evidence of a Con bias.
Similarly, figures like 70% of reporters IDing as Dems is proof of a liberal bias, even if 98% or more of media barons are wholeheartedly Republican. And who has more influence, the master or the slaves?
I recall arguing w CS some time back about race, and to me, acknowledging that systemic racism still exists- be it from spurious number-crunching, as in The Bell Curve, to Ebonics, to PC, to Katrina’s aftermath, is not a thing that defines liberality, but reality.
Now, if your solution is to impose a de facto Commie state, or some loopier ideas, then one can state that your take on something is Left of center. But the issue was, is, and will be, extra-ideological as long as it persists.
While it is important to try to understand what terms like ‘moderate’ mean, I think it’s a mistake to get stuck on definitions. It leads to pigeonholing people and ideas, and eventually, hampers the evoluion of thinking.
It’s much less important whether David self identifies as being Left, or is identified as such aby others, than it is to read his thoughts on a particular topic to see what we can learn from them and what we dislike about them.
It’s isn’t he title of the book that matters, it’s what between bhe covers.
In fact, this identifying by label IMO, is a very divisive phenomenon.
Simon: I think your objection is a lot stronger for the Supreme Court example than it is for the blog case. On the Supreme Court side, though, I think you may be underestimating the institutional factors which push judges into some measure of accord. Nobody wants seriatim opinions (for all the reasons you say), and most (if not all) of the varying legal schools express at least some respect for precedent. I just have a little more faith than you that the Justice-philosophers can engage in the type of discourse I’d like to see without it collapsing into utter anarchy. There probably are some interesting commonalities and fusions if one works at it (consider legal liberal trailblazer Jack Balkin’s recent conversion to a reformulated originalism). But the risks you identify are genuine — albeit extant only in groups in which stability is a very strong virtue (which describes judiciaries a lot better than democratic bodies, which are designed to enjoy significantly greater flux).
C Stanley said,
If so, then surely you disagree with David – or at least, add a qualification. David argues that being “moderate” has to do with the “people of varying and diverse perspectives, agreeing to come together in mutual discourse to debate and discuss the issues of the day.” Yet, as anyone who’s watched C-SPAN recently will tell you, Congress comes together in mutual discourse to debate and discuss the issues of the day, but they do not always do so in what one would consider “a moderate tone and tenor of debate” (which, by the way, is another problem with David’s argument: by David’s definition, every Congress has, will and definitionally must be a moderate Congress, which is experientially false). While David emphasizes that a moderate forum will presumptively be characterized by “vigorous[] and respectfull[]” debate, which isn’t on the surface in tension with your “tone and tenor” position, digging deeper, he seems to consider the essential element to be that debate should not be “deferential,” and warns that “[p]olitical discussion is a contact sport–so long as the arguments are made in good faith, there’s nothing inherently wrong about showing some teeth.” In other words, for David, tone and tenor are at best seconary to the key points, which are “creat[ing] the appropriate conditions within which pluralized perspectives can spark dialectic,” because “[i]n every meaningful sense, the type of discourse that flows out of difference is advantageous vis-a-vis homogeneous back-scratching” – something that requires disagreement but says very little about tone and tenor.
Good analysis, David, but I want to add one thing. One of the things that inhibits the sustenance of a pluralistic “moderate” forum is when anyone who is just slightly to one side is constantly treated as being extremist to that side. Thus, when posters or commenters take a view that is slightly more conservative than their own and lump it in with the most extreme elements of that side (as when anyone who posts a slightly conservative viewpoint on foreign policy is immediately labeled a “neocon” or a “warmonger” — this happens on TMV very frequently, as it does in much of the “progressive blogosphere”), the distinction that you make between “moderate” and simply “matching up the poles” breaks down discursively. And it is unsurprising that the victims of such strawmanning often choose to invest their energy elsewhere.
Your vision of a “moderate” site requires a willingness of not just contributors to maintain it, but also a critical mass of the commenters willing to abandon easy stereotypes and acknowledge the individuality of contributors’ diverse perspectives. And I honestly cannot say that we have had that on TMV during many recent periods.
Well, let’s give David his self-labeled due…..
In my interpretation, David is taking the color-blind provisions of 1964 (you can’t just hire the white guys anymore) and morphing them into the racial preferences of 1994 (you need to hire x black guys)..
I’ll concede his pasting the liberal label on his lapel for that.
cosmoetica said,
That’s a strawman. I didn’t suggest for an instant that any person or group ought “to be 50-50 on all things; quite the opposite, I argued that:
There must be some core understanding of what it means to be a moderate, even allowing that people in one tent will frequently hold views at odds with others in the same tent.
I didn’t say anything about Mullen in this thread, and Joe has made it quite clear that I’m not allowed to comment on that subject, so I think it’s unfair for you to bring it up.
David,
Re Balkin’s putative conversion, Far be it for me to cast aspersions on Jack’s motives, but I think it’s pretty clearly inferable from what he’s written that his conversion is somewhat utilitarian. Recognizing that originalism is a much stronger foundation to argue from than naked instrumentalism, Jack has discovered – some would say cut from whole cloth – an idiosyncratic strain of originalism that happily leads him to exactly the same results he’s been advocating for some time. What he’s changed is the rationale that he advances for his positions, not his actual positions. And with all due respect, that does rather lead one to doubt the sincerity of
A friend of mine – not the same one mentioned above – is a Catholic, and his ex-wife recently converted to the faith. Before, she was hostile to the church’s positions on women priests and [IIRC] abortion; having converted, guess what? She’s still opposed to the church’s position on women priests and [IIRC] abortion. It doesn’t work like that – not for originalism, and not for catholicism. God imposes obligations on the faithful; it’s the worst mistake I ever hear people make, and it really is idiotic, to say that God doesn’t want you to change. If a person thinks that, they really haven’t got it. And similarly, originalism often leads you to change your positions. It often leads you to positions you don’t like – I don’t like that the Constitution doesn’t give Congress power to ban abortion, coast to coast; I’m lazy, I’d far rather buy 269 votes on Capitol Hill than lobby fifty state legislatures. But that’s what the original meaning says. I don’t like that the original meaning of the Constitution fully allows states to ban sodomy; I think such laws are really silly, but the original meaning says nothing. My originalism is sometimes a pain in the ass! We’ll discover the limits of Jack’s originalism – and I will believe in the sincerity of his conversion – when he consistently follows it to a result he finds it a pain in the ass.
By the way, also to David – I think it’s unlikely that anyone who’s fit to be on the Supreme Court would join an opinion they disagreed with purely for the sake of comity. There’s certainly an element of “go along to get along” on fine points; there’s “I can join this if you can take that bit out” so the author takes it out or “I don’t really agree with that bit, but it’s not a big enough deal that I’m going to write separately.” That certainly happens (although sometimes with deleterious consequences when a key member of the majority later realizes that they should have objected to or sought a clarification of something and didn’t, allowing the opinion to be cited for a proposition that justice would never have gone along with – which is exactly what happened in the Casey-Carhart-Stenberg line of cases. And to be sure, there are genuinely exceptional circumstances in which unique and crushingly important context pressures a Justice to join an opinion they may not agree with. An example of that, I have argued, is the willingness of Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas to join Kennedy’s wretched per curiam Bush v. Gore, even knowing it was wrong. “As Ann has well-put the point, the 5-4 result was not the worst possible outcome – ‘imagine if the Court’s critics had been able to say that the Court gave the presidency to Bush citing two completely different reasons, both of which were rejected by a majority of the Justices!’ Althouse, The Authoritative Lawsaying Power of the State Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court, 61 Md. L. Rev. 508 (2002)).”
Still, I don’t think those cases come up very often, and I really think that the court you envisage would be about as poisonous for the rule of law as it’s possible to imagine.
Simon: You’re not fully grappling with the parameters of the position I’m outlining (I will clarify though, that a moderate institution can be made up of a collective of decidedly not-moderate people — moderateness-as-moderator is an institutional definition, not a personal one. Liberalism [philosophically speaking] works the same way — one can have a liberal community that is not made up of liberal individuals). It isn’t enough for people to talk with each other for an institution to be deliberative in the sense I’m talking about. Again, come back to Young’s quote which grounds my entire argument: “Normative judgment is best understood as the product of dialogue under conditions of equality and mutual respect. Ideally, the outcome of such dialogue and judgment is just and legitimate only if all the affected perspectives have a voice.” Congressional debates a) aren’t under conditions of equality, b) aren’t really particularly respectful (even if they are normally civil, “respect” in a true sense requires critically grappling with and responding to the arguments and positions of your interlocutor, which doesn’t happen in Congress at all) , and c) definitely don’t give all the affected perspectives a voice (Congressional representation has serious demographic skews — a lot of ink has been written on how to make Congress more representative). Hence, it falls well outside the type of organization I’m talking about.
What Jason said.
“Pro-abortion?” Isn’t that a rather radical form of ZPG advocacy? Or did you mean pro-choice?
Just sayin’.
CO: I’m aware what David has labeled himself. My point was that the issue chosen is not something that exemplifies that label.
Simon: You stated, ‘Well, I’m sorry, David, but I don’t think that’s in any coherent or cognizable sense being “moderate.†It suggests not moderation, but an “on balance.†Or perhaps even more literally, an average: a line of best fit, if you will, wherein even though no particular post is recognizably moderate, the line, which is an average, charts a course that viewed in isolation one would call “moderate,†but that in fact passes through no charted point on the graph. It would be, I think, literally fictitious moderation in aggregate only.’
I replied, ‘I am pro death penalty and pro-abortion. If you factor in a hundred other positions, they will on a 0-100 scale, be all over the board, with the only defining characteristic being pragmatism and the right of an individual over the mob, and the average being 50ish. But, to expect any person, or group to be 50-50 on all things is to ask for a zombified state, as much as a 0 or 100 across the board view would be.’
You denied that being across the board is moderate. Calling it average is just another colloquial variant.
So when you state: ‘That’s a strawman. I didn’t suggest for an instant that any person or group ought “to be 50-50 on all things; quite the opposite’ you are arguing both sides. It’s a good dodge, but a disingenuous claim of being strawmanned.
‘I didn’t say anything about Mullen in this thread, and Joe has made it quite clear that I’m not allowed to comment on that subject, so I think it’s unfair for you to bring it up.’
But, people have memories, even if posts or comments disappear.
Tuly: ‘Pro-abortion.’ Good term, sensible position, and best of all, an honest assessment of a POV. Among many reasons I am it.
I would like to put AustinRoth on the silly ticket, but I’ve read his posts. He’s only slightly silly.
And I will be changing my name to Jasoniffynashimonnnnnnnnnneeeyased-^$%^$%^-whoop-whoop-whoop Smith and affiliating with the Very Silly Party.
Finally! Someone got it.
David Schraub said,
David, I’m not “not fully grappling” – I’m disagreeing.
I don’t accept either of those statements as valid postulates.
Imagine a hypothetical faculty, Gandelman University. GU’s faculty are comprised of two dozen lecturers who routinely publish their views in papers. Notwithstanding offshoots and idiosyncratic variations, ten are liberals, ten are conservaties, and four are somewhere in between. If you charted the positions on any given subject of the faculty and drew a line of best fit, you might say that “the faculty” takes position X based on that line – even though not a single member of the faculty actually takes that position. And I’m genuinely mystified how you can conclude that “one can have a liberal community that is not made up of liberal individuals.”
cosmoetica – if you’re going to describe yourself enthusiastically as “pro abortion” and offered the chance to redeem yourself still cling to the label, we’re done discussing things.
Simon: Wouldn’t it have been simpler to type: I have no real answer?
Or, Damn, you nailed my dodge?
Again!
cosmoetica – no, I meant what I said.
This is my first comment at Moderate Voice. I was moved to write by this discussion of race, which is one of my specialites. And my thoughts here: Prompting a dialogue of competing perspectives, using a “moderator’s voice,” is going to be difficult from the perspective of “critical race theory.”
I’m no expert in the paradigm, mind you, but discussions of contemporary black politics, grounded theories of “institutional racism” and the “structural” or “accumulated” disadvantages facing African Americans, will not go far to advance the cause of upward mobility for the race. Such an approach will perpectuate victimology and the worship of a “blood of martyrs” strategy of blame-shifting and irresponsibility. There’s little, if any, introspection in these theories. At the same time, decades of anti-poverty experience in social policy have demonstrated the primacy of individual-level variables as the most promising factors in generating mobility for the “lower-third” of America’s black underclass.
I could go on about political moderation, too, but I’ll hold off for now. I think writers here might set out some of the definitions of terms and concept in debate. Political moderation is fine, as sometimes ideology is dysfunctional for the resolution of society’s problems. The difficulty with this – moderation – is that it often takes those with very strong ideological orientations to create the foundations for the “mobilization of bias,” that is, those with strong views may serve as a privileged group, mobilizing those on the sidelines toward greater participation than might otherwise be the case.
In any event, the way things are going in American politics – with the intense demonization of political enemies – it helps to have a strong foundation in fundamental beliefs to navigate various philosophical and policy debates, as well as to provide a grounding in ideational projects that might provide promising steps toward the amelioration of nagging social problems.
I don’t know if an essentially radical, critical race perspective is the “right” orientatation toward those ends, but, frankly, I do think it’s an improvement over seeking refuge in high-minded (yet-unfocused) non- partisanship.
http://burkeanreflections.blogspot.com
Let’s deal with the side issue before I get back to the main. To quote Chandran Kukathas: “[A] liberal society is one in which different ways of life can coexist, even if some of those ways of life do not value equality and autonomy.” For example, take the Amish in America. The Amish are not liberal people. The constraints they impose on themselves and their peers are not consonant with liberalism in the philosophical sense. They are not big on personal autonomy nor equality. Nonetheless, our liberal polity accommodates their way of life. That’s because we’re institutionally liberal, without demanding that every individual adhere to this same form of liberalism. Admittedly, we do infringe on some parts of Amish lifestyle when it seriously infringes on liberal norms. But, by and large, we allow the Amish to construct and live a lifestyle that wouldn’t pass muster if it were to be used as a template for a “liberal” society. I envision a moderate(-as-moderator) institution in the same way. It is one that facilitates respectful, equal deliberation between its denizens, even if some of those denizens aren’t themselves looking to create a society that equally represents/treats their and their interlocutors views when making policy decisions (they want their position to win out).
I also think its worth clarifying whether or not your objection is to the philosophical model I proposed in this post, or that I’m calling it “moderate”. These are presumably separate questions.
But anyway. I said you’re not grappling with the totality of my position, because the disagreements you stated didn’t actually match up to the position I took. Your Yglesias/Malkin blog objection, for example, missed the mark because it replaced the plurality and respect I was advocating for a bipolar shouting match. The “Congress” objection was mistaken because it assumed that having a diverse array of viewpoints and putting them in a room together was sufficient for the ideal I’m putting forward, when I actually articulated significantly thicker norms as essential to my vision. In those posts, you weren’t disagreeing with “me”, you were disagreeing with some malevolent phantom that apparently impersonated me.
So let’s review my (actual) claims. I argued that people have a diverse array of perspectives, ones that probably don’t match-up well as simple left-to-right (hence my call for opinions “left, right, center, up, down, and all around”). I articulated a moderate-as-moderator institution as being a body that was able to bring a representative cross-sample of these voices into the conversation in a manner where they deliberate under conditions of a) equality and b) mutual respect. In such a body, it is not essential (in fact, it’s qualitatively bad) for all the participants to be in the middle, because then you don’t have a cross-sample. The body’s moderation (as moderator) stems from its enabling of this deliberation under the preceding parameters.
The objections you’ve made (that have been vaguely on point, anyway) have been the “line of best fit” analogy, and (in the last comment) questioning whether there can ever truly be “conditions of equality.” The first one only follows under a truly impoverished view of positionality (ten liberal, ten conservatives, and four centrists) that operates within a bipolar framework that can be mapped (and graphed). I’ve been arguing against that description of positioning the whole way through, so I don’t think it’s a valid objection (I think that, properly understood, positions are not commiserate with each other and thus can’t be “ranked” along a polar axis. The graph metaphor really doesn’t speak to any deep conception of what a “position” is). The second objection is probably true (I doubt there is such a thing as “true equality”, for the reasons you describe), but doesn’t carry much weight. Equality is an ideal. Like most ideals, we’re never going to achieve it in total, but we can move closer. Ironically enough, representation proves the point. Since not everybody (every body) can be in a representative body, the representation is always an imperfect approximation. But surely, we know that some institutions are less representative than others. Ditto with conditions of equality. Even though getting a totally equal condition would probably be impossible, we can still distinguish between greater and lesser inequalities.
Simon:
As I said: it have been simpler to type: I have no real answer!
Haha.