Moderation and Centrism

In American politics, a record number of people identified as Independents (as opposed to Republicans or Democrats) in 2023, suggesting that folks are less than keen on the increasingly extreme (in the sense of shifting the Overton Window in one direction or another) views and platforms of the country's primary parties.

Some of these self-defined Independents use other terms to delineate their beliefs from those of their polarized kin, too, including Moderate or Centrist.

Generally (though there’s a lot wiggle-room in this terminology as it’s used by different people and in different places around the world) a Moderate is someone who tries to avoid taking too-extreme stances on any particular topic and who instead cobbles together a space for themselves within a comfortable, more-acceptable-to-most-people portion of the Overton Window’s spectrum of options that are okay by today's standards and norms.

Centrists, in contrast, will tend to look for the "center ground" in any debate, and will at times attempt to weave what might serve as a balanced solution out of whole cloth.

So rather than supporting (generally non-extreme by today's standards) components of both parties' platforms, picking what makes sense to them from any and all parties, Centrists are more likely to look at both ends of the spectrum and declare something close to the precise middle to be the proper place to plant a flag.

The oft-cited downside with opting for “common sense,” straight-down-the-middle options of this kind is that they sometimes land in ideological territory that no one really wants to occupy.

This could be construed as the political equivalent of the Golden Mean Fallacy (sometimes called the “Argument to Moderation”), which refers to the argument that the proper choice or truth or ideal in any situation will tend to be precisely at the center of two (or more) opposites, so we should identify those opposing extremes and opt for whatever’s in between them.

While superficially sound, this approach leads to obviously ridiculous scenarios, the most frequently cited example being that if one person says the sky is blue and another says it’s yellow, the logic of Centrism would have us declare the sky is green.

Moderation, on the other hand, allows us to stake-out ideological territory all over the map, agreeing with Republicans here, Democrats there, but in general aggregating our scatter-plot of beliefs near the middle of the fray, seldom latching onto ideas that are far beyond the aggregated middle (a Moderate would probably agree with whomever said the sky is blue, but they might disagree with that same person if they make a claim about taxes or abortion or military conflict that doesn’t resonate with their own beliefs).

Again, this is a fuzzy pair of terms that are used in different ways by different people in different places, but the contrast between declaring oneself to be in the middle of all things and curating a portfolio of beliefs (those beliefs changing over time as new information and arguments become available) that are generally balanced and oriented around the rough center of all possible positions, could not be more stark, despite frequently being treated as interchangeable.