I am grateful to Jonathan White and Lea Ypi for raising a host of interesting and difficult questions in their perceptive review of Faces of Moderation. The difficulty has to do, in part, with the little faith that some of us may have in the power of moderation at the present moment. How can one fight against people like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin with the aid of moderation?
Having written two books on this concept, I am aware that moderation is an inconspicuous virtue prone to understatement and misunderstanding. Moderation is sometimes equated with docility and indecision, and is perceived as a bland and incoherent virtue. Occasionally, the initiatives and ideas of moderates are dismissed as expressions of political opportunism or are criticized for being insufficiently democratic. Lastly, moderation is sometimes invoked by impostors who adopt the moderate pose purely for strategic reasons that have nothing to do with moderation.
As far as I can see, White and Ypi believe that moderation is more a sensibility than a defined body of specific commitments. In their view, it amounts to the willingness “to question oneself, to avoid “Manichaean” simplifications and ideological rigidities, to engage in dialogue with adversaries, and to resist the temptation of ethical monism.” I agree that moderation implies a certain political style and it is a virtue displayed in practice, but I also want to emphasize that it involves a robust core of normative commitments. While the moderates’ ideas do not fit well with any “-ism,” they defend the principles of an open society and constitutionalism and seek to maintain balance among various groups and interests in society. As trimmers who seek to prevent the ship of state from capsizing in rough seas, moderates are also committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive community. To this end, they favor change and reform but recognize that they must always work with many shades of gray and contradictions. Last but not least, moderates favor complex political systems and hybrid solutions, including checks and balances, veto power, judicial review, neutral power, subsidiarity, and federalism, among other things. They prefer competing centers of power over centralization.
After noting that much of the focus is on thinkers—that is, on individuals who thought and wrote about politics—White and Ypi ask whether moderation can also be exercised collectively, or whether it is the stuff of individuals acting alone. This is an interesting point. When choosing the main characters for my book, I made a deliberate decision to have an ideologically diverse group, including thinkers like Aron, Bobbio, and Michnik who were directly involved in politics or participated actively in the political life of their countries. What might moderation mean for the practices of ordinary citizens, though?
As I mentioned in the book, we have a few examples showing that moderates can successfully organize at the grassroots level in order to propose concrete reforms, put pressure on elected politicians, and keep them accountable. For example, the Charter ’77 was a moderate dissident movement based on what Vaclav Havel called the “power of the powerless” that was supposed to create a “parallel polis” (Vaclav Benda, “Parallel Polis,” 1978) in which people could “live in truth.” Similarly, at the heart of the Solidarity movement in Poland were the concepts of “self-limiting revolution” and “new evolutionism.” Both movements marked the beginning of the end for Soviet power in Central and Eastern Europe. They show that moderation can be effectively practiced by political activists pursuing concrete and well-defined goals.
One last point. While moderates respond to various forms of immoderation, their positions are not merely reactive, nor are they an endorsement of the status quo. Aron, for example, suggested a bold agenda for education reform in 1968 in France while simultaneously reacting to his critics (whose reformism limited itself to slogans such as “Be realists, demand the impossible!”). The same goes for Michnik and his colleagues in KOR (Committee for the Defense of Workers) and the Solidarity movement. They reacted against the unjust practices of the communist authorities while also proposing concrete measures for political reform meant to secure the rule of law, political pluralism, and toleration of dissent.
These refreshing examples prove that in a society in which these principles are missing or underdeveloped, moderates can (and must) become politically active on their behalf. That is why moderation remains a virtue that we still need today, in a world in which the rule of law, constitutionalism, civil dialogue, and toleration are again under assault from the extremes.
