Lyndon Furst's
A Different Perspective
"Travails of a Political Moderate"
POSTED 9/14/09
Travails of a Political Moderate
Some years ago I was discussing politics with a conservative friend of mine. In talking about a would-be candidate for political office, my friend suggested that he was too liberal for his taste. I replied that he was actually more of a moderate. "Oh, that’s worse!" he exclaimed. "Moderates are really boring people. They are wishy-washy. They don’t stand for anything."
I have thought about that conversation over the years and my own struggle to find a political identity. In my first engagement in politics I voted for Richard Nixon. At the time I considered myself a strong conservative. I believed in the trickle-down theory and hoped that if I worked real hard some wealth would find its way down to my level in society. Even Nixon was little too moderate for me. I felt closer to the philosophy of Barry Goldwater and was enamored with his book The Conscience of a Conservative. I was living in California when Ronald Reagan became governor and was fascinated by his approach to government. A true conservative, I thought.
It took several years for me to discover that a conservative approach to government works quite well for a small segment of the population but leaves a majority of the people outside the confines of the good life. I discovered that conservative philosophy rested strongly on a foundation of privilege. Certain classes of people are inherently privileged; the rest of the population should know their place in the scheme of things and stay in it. Eventually I tired of conservatism and began to search for something better, something more in tune with my own personal worldview.
My response was to go to the opposite extreme and I dabbled briefly in the far left. Theoretically that is. However it didn’t take long to see that leftist political philosophy did not fit with my pragmatic view of life. It just didn’t work. Extreme liberalism is a wonderful philosophy but it doesn’t function well given natural human inclinations.. Only in a few isolated cases has an extreme approach to equality proven workable. So, I had to abandon the radical liberal left.
What’s left? It was easy for me to come to the conclusion that the only place I would be comfortable is in the center of the political spectrum: that boring middle ground. The more I read and studied about politics and economics and other aspects of human life, the more tentative I became in my conclusions about things. The great questions of life are not so much black and white anymore but multiple shades of gray. While I do have strong convictions on a number of topics, I’ve also come to see that there are good arguments on the other side of almost every issue.
So, there I am in the boring middle, seemingly without a principled stand on any issue. I am conflicted on almost every topic. I strongly support the Western philosophy of individualism as opposed to Eastern collectivism, yet I realize that there’s much to be gained by cooperative venture.. I’m a capitalist through and through, and yet I realize that pure capitalism usually results in pure tyranny. However, on the other side pure socialism doesn’t work either. It saps the motivation for individual effort. What seems to work best, from my perspective, is a mixed economy where capitalism is relatively free but it includes a moderate amount of government oversight.
And that brings us to the place of government in everyday life. Big government, small government, no government, they all seem to have their flaws. Any of the extremes are not satisfactory. The country of Somalia has very small government with low taxation and no challenge to Second Amendment rights. Yet I doubt that many conservatives in this country want to live there.. Other places want to regulate every aspect of human life. Most liberals certainly don’t want to live there.
I am stuck in the middle, what a boring place to be. But I’ve tried both extremes and they don’t work. I will stay in the middle, picking the good parts of both extremes of the political spectrum. That seems to be the best I can do.