About once a month I willingly surrender an afternoon to serve as
a tour guide at Wyck, a 300-year-old Quaker house in the ancient
Germantown district of Philadelphia. The work suits me. The hours
are short, the environment is soothing and I never have to contend
with cramped cubicles or bellicose bosses. The worst crisis I can
remember was the time a mischievous visitor fondled the antique
ostrich egg on display in the back parlor. The egg survived, as it
has every year since the Monroe administration.
I look forward to my monthly assignment at Wyck. I generally
bring a book to read while I grow drowsy on the sofa waiting for
visitors to find us. The pre-Revolutionary grandfather clock chimes
every hour on the hour, and my mind drifts amid the benign Quaker
spirits who haunt the place.
On my last visit, a few days after the American elections of A.D.
2002, the director and the curator of Wyck both stopped by my
station for a friendly chat. They were lamenting the Republican
victories that seemed to provide a clear and potentially disastrous
mandate for a war-whooping president. I found myself in glum
agreement with them, and I observed that Bush the Younger now had
all three branches of the federal government securely in his pocket.
Even if Iraq consented to disarm down to its last squirt gun, I
suspected that the Leader of the Free World wouldn't take yes for an
answer. He would have his war, if only to avenge the political
martyrdom of his beloved pappy ten years before.
Betsy, the curator, seemed heartened that I had finally swung
over to the Democratic camp. But no, I insisted, I hadn't gone
liberal. It was simply an optical illusion: the country (and
particularly the current administration) had veered to the right. My
views were the same as ever -- I was still a raving moderate, God
help me. As always, I was the soldier stranded in no-man's land,
caught perpetually in the crossfire from the opposing trenches. And
as a perceptive college friend once observed about me, I wouldn't
have it any other way.
Ever since the Vietnam era I've been acutely sensitive to the
evils and follies that lurk in both trenches. In those turbulent
days you had your choice of siding with insolent crypto-Marxist
insurgents or the equally offensive right-wing jingoism of
"America -- love it or leave it!" There was no comfortable
middle ground, though I managed to erect a makeshift political
lean-to for myself midway between the warring factions.
America has managed to trot along on a moderate course for most
of my adult years, yet the ideas that shape our politics still seem
to originate from the extremes of right and left. (The next time you
visit a good newsstand, try to find a political magazine for
moderates. You'd have better luck searching for a unicorn.)
Who exactly are these denizens of the trenches, these tireless
ideologues who make life miserable for moderates like me?
On the right we see corporate chieftains and other fattened
plutocrats rubbing elbows with new-money suburbanites, small-town
merchants, revival-tent Fundamentalists, pro-life Catholics, gun
hoarders and survivalists, wearers of white sheets, ruddy-faced
country clubbers in navy blazers, decent Midwestern farmers, feisty
entrepreneurs and legions of hardworking Archie Bunkers struggling
to make mortgage payments on their impeccably manicured quarter-acre
plots. What unites this mongrel band of brothers in such unlikely
harmony? Why do we call them conservatives when most of them would
gladly raze nine-tenths of the Alaskan wilderness for cheaper gas to
fuel their sport utility vehicles?
The American right is a quiet but effective machine dedicated to
the preservation of property and privilege. Even Archie Bunker has
his hard-won turf to protect, and he resists the incursion of
foreign ideas and peoples into his native habitat. He still lives in
fear of Negroes and other unruly minorities. He harbors an
instinctive distrust of gays, Jews, artists, rock musicians and
other agents of change. For him the clock should have been stopped
somewhere around 1955, when right was right, cities were safe,
Eisenhower was president and the vast majority of Americans still
agreed upon certain universal decencies.
And who populates the left these days? Gone is the old stereotype
of the burly union laborer shaking his fist at sharp-featured men in
gray suits. Sure, the left still shakes its collective fist at such
men, but the union old-timer wouldn't recognize the folks doing the
fist-shaking today. The new stereotype of an American liberal would
be a sandal-shod lesbian professor of Women's Studies who volunteers
at the local organic food co-op when she's not listening to National
Public Radio. Chances are she demonstrated to have Rush Limbaugh
barred from speaking on campus. Funny, isn't it -- and a bit sad --
that liberalism used to be synonymous with tolerance.
The sniffish attitudes wafting from the left wing disturb me
because they seem to define a weirdly unsettling oxymoron: the
liberal elitist. I find myself suspecting the motives of these
generally affluent brie-eating lefties, especially the ones who send
their children to exclusive private schools. Yes, they devote
themselves to worthy causes like equal opportunity, but apparently
some people (notably their own offspring) deserve to have more of
those equal opportunities than others. In fact, I suspect that the
brie-eaters come by their politics not so much out of solidarity
with the downtrodden masses (how many liberals invite the
downtrodden to their dinner parties, after all?), but out of a
shared disdain for all those sweaty lower-middle-class contractors
and sales reps who populate the ranks of the right. Good liberals
want their children to associate with the progeny of other
certifiably P.C. families -- discerning people who read Harper's and
keep a collection of California varietal wines in their
thermostatically controlled cellars. Throw in the almost ubiquitous
Hollywood celebrities who endorse their causes, and you can see that
liberalism has undeniable social cachet. In certain favored circles,
cheering for the underdog is the surest way to ingratiate yourself
with the best people.
And what of the underdogs themselves? Most of the down-and-outers
are too busy dodging bullets and scrambling for bread to believe
that politics will transform their lives. Many of them have become
cynics, crusty and resigned to lifelong squalor. But their leaders
are vocal enough; all they want is for the entire republic to
perform cartwheels in their honor.
For example, nearly everyone agrees that the
great-great-great-great grandparents of today's African Americans
were degraded by the cruelties of slavery. So, according to numerous
left-wing black leaders, today's white Americans -- most of whose
ancestors were innocently digging potatoes from the soil of Europe
during the Civil War -- must pay reparations to the slaves' fifth-
and sixth-generation descendants, most of whom have already been
treated to special-preference programs like affirmative action. Some
justice.
Disingenuous euphemisms like "affirmative action" (for
pro-minority discrimination) and "reproductive rights"
(for abortion-on-demand) are typical currency of the liberal-left
fringe -- and of the conservative fringe as well (think of
"family values" and "pro-life," for starters).
Both left and right seem to have embraced the euphemistic way of
life, disguising their vaguely unpalatable causes with a coating of
verbal candy.
Euphemism is always the enemy of truth, just as dogma is always
the enemy of individuality. If the folks on the fringes dared to
think for themselves, they might be able to strike a welcome blow
for truth and individuality. But for now at least, that task must
fall upon the rounded shoulders of hopeless moderates like me.
Remember, we're the ones caught in the crossfire, the ideological
misfits with no political magazines of our own. So where do you go
if you lust after honest unskewed opinions, untainted by received
wisdom and deceptive verbal flummery? You're welcome to browse here,
though I feel sorry for anyone who depends upon my half-cracked
tirades for intelligent discourse.
Am I ranting too much? Do I mock the liberal and conservative
banner-carriers with unfair generalizations? Let me assure you that
I've known and befriended honest representatives of both left and
right. You might be surprised to learn that my best friends tend to
be outspokenly liberal or conservative. (And I hope we'll remain
friends after my verbal lambasting of both their camps.) It could be
that I enjoy sparring with my ideologically inclined compatriots, or
that I admire them for their convictions. Or that they're simply
more interesting than the average vanilla middle-of-the-roader. It
might be that the moderates I know tend to keep their mild political
views to themselves. Or that they suffer from the Moderate's Curse:
no political views at all.
Maybe it's not an accident that we moderates have no distinct
platform, no magazines of our own. By the very nature of moderation,
we're simply a convenient midpoint between more vociferous extremes.
Take the Marxist ravings of a congenital leftist, mix briskly with
the weasely greed of an Ayn Rand capitalist, let them boil down, and
we're left with a bland but palatable stew of enlightened free
enterprise. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis -- Hegel would be proud of
us.
But it's not good enough for me. We moderates seem to have no
original ideas. We're too much like the politicians of the American
mainstream, who tend to be moderate mainly because they graciously
compromise their personal beliefs to win elections. But they're no
model for thinking moderates. We need a more radical middle, a
middle with the courage to write manifestos and stage dramatic
rallies that receive televised evening news coverage. I can see our
moderate demonstrations now: "Support a woman's right to
choose, but only before the second trimester!" "Save the
whales, but let's not get silly about it!"
For far too long the creed of the true moderate has been
"Yes, but..." We see a few virtues amid the follies of the
left; we spot some legitimate conservative arguments amid the naked
self-interest; we find the average and live with the results. Maybe
we're constitutionally incapable of agreeing wholeheartedly with
anyone. Maybe all those years in the crossfire of no-man's land have
deepened our skepticism. Then there's the matter of intellectual
laziness. Why bother to create our own original agenda when we can
sift through the idea-baskets of the left and right?
What do we moderates need to shake us from our slumber? Why
should we put ourselves perpetually at the mercy of dueling
extremists? When we develop some ideas of our own, moderates
everywhere will finally be able to stop saying "Yes,
but..." We might actually feel like shouting "Yesss!"
But don't hold your breath.
