What Does It Even Mean to Be a Moderate?
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Recently, Haley Stevens, a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan, spoke in Ecorse, a suburb of Detroit. She reflected, as she has done throughout her campaign, on her work to help salvage the local auto industry as an official in the Obama Administration during the Great Recession. She also projected forward, to how she plans to represent Michigan if elected. “I’m gonna be articulating on our behalf. I am gonna be working on our behalf. I am gonna be telling the stories on our behalf,” she said, waving her arms as she warmed to her theme. “And you better believe I’m gonna be doing it with a little bit of joy, a little bit of enthusiasm, a little bit of energy, and a little bit of ‘stick it to ’em.’ ” By now, she was leaning forward, punching her left hand to the rhythm of her words. “Because that’s the Michigan way. All right!”
A clip of the remarks went viral—and not in a good way. Commenters likened Stevens’s delivery, variously, to that of a Depression-era baseball coach and a bad Chris Farley impersonator. Most notably, the video became the latest artifact in an increasingly nasty flame war between Stevens’s backers and those of her leading Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, some of whom had already made vicious fun of what they see as her exaggerated folksiness and accent. El-Sayed (who previously suggested that Stevens can’t string together “two coherent sentences”) condemned such commentary as “unkind and unhelpful,” and called on his supporters to knock it off. Stevens leaned in. She took aim at the “cool kids on the internet” who were “doing the cool-kid chatter,” suggesting that some of them were “coastal élites” who look down on Michiganders. She also mocked up yard signs bearing the slogan “STICK IT TO ’EM.” “You know who I sound like? I sound like the people who I talk to in Michigan who are getting screwed right now by Donald Trump,” she told TMZ, in an interview that also went viral. Most Americans, she added, have been living paycheck to paycheck while the “bozo” in the White House prioritized extra funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “I sound like the people who I’m trying to fight for,” Stevens said. “I am fighting for Michigan.”
This back-and-forth was silly, but it reflected an underlying ideological fight that is very serious: the Michigan primary, which culminates on Tuesday, has long been watched as an internal Democratic power struggle, and has recently morphed into the Platonic ideal of a clash between establishment moderates (Team Stevens) and populist progressives (Team El-Sayed). (As if to prove the point, Mallory McMorrow, a state senator who sought to carve out a middle lane, found herself squeezed, and dropped out.) The race seems to encompass both the past and future of Trump-era Democratic factionalism. The Very Online meanness, and attendant allegations of sexism and élitism, carries echoes of the rift between the Clintonites and the Bernie Bros; El-Sayed has talked openly of using a victory to shape the 2028 Presidential field. On a recent donor call, he spoke of wanting to put an “ogre on a pike”—a reference not to Stevens but to Senator John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, a perpetual disappointment to progressives whom El-Sayed would like to see primaried. (Fetterman replied that he would “pick being Senator Shrek over being the Pontiac Platner any day,” a reference to Graham Platner, who recently dropped out of the Senate race in Maine following an allegation of rape.)
More immediately, the two candidates hold neatly opposed positions on the questions dividing the Democrats in the present: El-Sayed supports Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and an immediate embargo on arms to Israel, which he accuses of perpetrating a “genocide”; Stevens speaks the language of technocratic incrementalism, and once said that “Israel comes to me in my dreams.” (At least one group affiliated with AIPAC has spent tens of millions on her Senate campaign.) El-Sayed has campaigned with the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, and been endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Stevens boasts the support of a growing list of establishment bigwigs—including Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and the state’s outgoing senator, Gary Peters—who clearly view her as more electable. “In a swing state,” the Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto, who heads a PAC known as the ModSquad, warned, “it is the moderate over the progressive that wins.”
I’ve long protested against the scourge of imprecision in American political shorthand, including when it comes to delineating ideological gradations on the left. (No, “liberal” and “left-wing” do not mean the same thing.) Lately, the narrative of progressives taking the fight to moderates in key primaries, from New York City to Colorado, has sometimes elided a more nuanced portrayal of both the challengers—some, but not all, of whom are really socialists—and their quarry, some of whom could themselves reasonably be labelled as progressives. But that may reflect a looseness of application more than any inherent problem with the shorthand, which is, probably, a necessary evil (fine, I plead guilty!), and, at least some of the time, adequate to illuminate broad truths. The Michigan race would seem to be a particularly sharp example.
Even there, though, the terminology grows fuzzier the further one descends into the rabbit hole—and, in general, the closer one examines the political lexicon, the more it starts to dissolve. This is perhaps especially true of the word “moderate,” which smacks of establishment centrism until it doesn’t, and has a fixed meaning only to the extent that our shared political world is stable. That’s not often the case, and it certainly isn’t right now. In the Trump era, it seems, what passes for moderate can actually be extreme, what is extreme can plausibly pass as moderate, and protecting moderation may require acting immoderately.
It may feel like it at times, but we are not living through the peak of world-historical turbulence. The late sixteen-forties, for example, have a better claim: the King of England was executed, for starters, and a republic briefly instituted. That period may also have brought the first usage of “moderate” as a noun. Certainly, as print media took off, one newsbook covering the chaos was called the Moderate Intelligencer. It was, apparently, worthy of that name; it was published, per one historian, by a “middle-of-the-road journalist” who presented goings on in a “mostly non-controversial” way. (Its strapline was “Impartially Communicating Martiall Affaires to the KINGDOME of ENGLAND.”) At some point, a counterfeit edition of the publication appeared, possibly to trick punters into buying it; when the copycats were ordered to change the name, they opted, simply, for the Moderate. This, however, proved to be a misnomer: the Moderate would eventually be associated with a reformist group known as the Levellers, and, in its insistence on liberal civil rights and press freedom, was radical indeed for its time.
This parable captures, if only indirectly, the enduring appeal of claiming to be a moderate: many people, after all, are liable to see their views, however idiosyncratic, as common sense, and many politicians want to sell their program, however radical, as mainstream. It helps that moderates have no universal creed. What it meant to be one England in 1648 looked different from what it did in America in 1776, when, in turn, it looked very different from what it means today. The idea is, still, defined primarily in the negative—as the avoidance of perceived extremes. Earlier this year, in this magazine, Nikhil Krishnan wrote in defense of the moderate, drawing on a book by the academic Krista Lawlor to paint such people less as carriers of a specific set of views and more as being animated by the essential spirit of democratic reasonableness that allows a person to be O.K. with the other side occasionally taking power, rather than viewing every election as existential. Another academic, Richard Carr, reminds us that “moderate” can also be a verb—truly moderate politicians, he argues, “moderate” between the preferences of their own partisans and those of the wider electorate, and between the past and the future—as well as an adverb. Leaders talking “moderately” implies prim and proper limits on what they should say.
Today, perhaps the foremost image of a moderate is that of a centrist on a left-right spectrum. Whether this voter actually exists, and in what numbers, is a matter of furious and ongoing debate. Some argue that many Americans who are counted as moderates are secret partisans, or harbor views that may aggregate at the center but are individually all over the place—“Medicare for all!,” say, but also “Build the wall!” Under such a definition—and others that see bucking party orthodoxy and prioritizing broadly popular policies as signs of moderation—some have posited that Donald Trump might be a moderate, at least on issues such as Social Security and abortion. Others argue that moderates qua centrists are real, that there are a lot of them, and that they are the key bloc to which Democrats (and the G.O.P., for that matter) ought to appeal. In a swing state, they say, it is the moderate over the progressive who wins.
The degree to which this is true is both of crucial importance and hard to pin down. The jumble of competing definitions and data points is enough to melt the brain. (As the data journalist G. Elliott Morris has pointed out, a single recent Times poll found that majorities, or strong pluralities, of potential Democratic supporters wanted to see the Party move toward the center, but also thought that it was positioning itself just about right, but also had a favorable view of socialism.) One needn’t resolve the debate, however, to note some basic inconsistencies. If moderates believe in compromise and lowering the political temperature, for instance, then appending the label to Trump is clearly laughable.
The problems pile up when one starts to consider how the idea of being “moderate” maps onto adjacent concepts, like “the establishment.” Often, these terms seem to be used interchangeably in discussion of the Democrats, and much of the Party’s establishment is indeed moderate as conventionally understood. But one can, theoretically, be of the establishment and not a moderate; after Democrats in Maine selected Troy Jackson, a progressive, to replace Graham Platner as their Senate nominee, Republicans instantly attacked him as at once too radical and a tainted political insider in cahoots with D.C. power brokers. (The latter is a stretch, but he did serve as president of the state Senate.) A richer discourse has bloomed, of late, around the possibilities of moderate populism, and around supposed avatars thereof: Jared Golden, the retiring Maine congressman; Rob Sand, the nominee for governor in Iowa; Ruben Gallego, the Arizona senator. Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign, in Alaska, has emphasized bipartisanship, but has also promised reforms to the “rigged” system in Washington, including term limits and a congressional stock-trading ban.
The politics of such candidates are meaningfully distinct, but they often share some similarities. If being moderate once implied support for pro-business neoliberalism, this is no longer unquestioned; as Nate Weisberg wrote in Washington Monthly last year, Gallego and others have run to the left on economics but have been able to sound moderate “because they’ve rebuilt a moral vocabulary around work and place,” focussing on “the price of milk, the closing factory, and the bridge that finally got fixed.” Perhaps above all, moderate populists, or populist moderates, have been credited with throwing out the adverbial form of the word, and its associated decorousness, and with showing a full-throated willingness to confront Trump on behalf of the People—good politics, to be sure, but also, given his authoritarian designs, likely necessary in order to reëstablish a politics in which the typical debates over ideology and policy mean anything at all. Increasingly, leaders across the Democratic Party are saying that the relevant divide isn’t moderate versus progressive but, in the words of the Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin, “fight versus flight.” Or, as her possible future colleague put it, caving versus “a little bit of ‘stick it to ’em.’ ”
Stevens has consistently tried to position herself as a fighter, and at least some voters appear to be buying it. Her campaign has taken on some other populist accents, including in its focus on manufacturing and its disdain for coastal élites; at her final debate with El-Sayed, last Monday, she was asked what she’d do on Day One in the Senate, and talked about a broad stock-trade ban and standing up to “abuses of power.” She also, during that debate, sounded like a classic moderate; one answer—in which she characterized El-Sayed and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently attacked her for saying that he has made American Jews less safe, as opposite “extremes”—echoed the dictionary definition of the term. Of course, politicians say a lot of things at election time, and Stevens’s critics would reject her populism as inch-deep, pointing, as El-Sayed did at the debate, to her AIPAC money and her corporate donors. Nor would they necessarily agree that she’s a moderate. The writer Hank Kennedy, who lives in the district that Stevens currently represents in the House, has argued that her past support for Israel has been so unconditional, even through Netanyahu’s brutal campaign in Gaza, that she herself deserves to be called an extremist.
In a similar vein, leading progressives have sought recently to paint their ideas as the real moderation. After several democratic-socialist candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani prevailed in the recent New York City primaries, conventional moderates suggested that they were extreme, leading a spokesperson for Mamdani to retort that the “only thing extreme is defending a status quo where working families can’t afford to live.” Before he was forced from the Senate race in Maine, Platner insisted that, when it came to ICE, the moderate position was to dismantle it. After Third Way, an avowedly moderate Democratic advocacy group that has separately criticized excessive “wokeness” in the Party, upbraided El-Sayed for campaigning with Piker earlier this year—citing the latter’s “years-long record of anti-American, anti-western, antisemitic, and misogynistic comments”—El-Sayed attacked those practicing “cancel culture.” “For the last two and a half years, they smeared people like myself and people like yourselves,” Piker told a crowd at Michigan State University, apparently referring to Democratic critics of his stance on Israel. “They claimed we were radical, said that we were wrong, and yet we persevered because we understood the violence that was taking place.”
As the Moderate taught us, there’s nothing new in such posturing. But it does, perhaps, feel more convincing than ever—or, at least, more defensible, under an Administration, and in a world, in which the extreme behavior of those in power is blurring the categories into which pundits divide our politics. By any conventional metric, the pledge to abolish ICE, for example, sounds radical—and it is, at least in the sense that it would be a mammoth administrative undertaking. At the same time, the recent, deadly brutality of the agency and its partners has led, according to some polls, to strong support for such a policy; those espousing the slogan have included Bill Kristol, the neocon anti-Trump writer. Nor would abolishing ICE necessarily entail ending deportations; at the recent debate, El-Sayed reminded viewers that ICE is a relatively recent invention and that the rules can be enforced without it. Cortez Masto, of the ModSquad, is no abolitionist—but she has branded ICE agents as “thugs,” and she supported shutting down the Department of Homeland Security in a bid to rein them in. “The moderates are people who work to get things done, who work in a bipartisan way, who think that good government is important, that we still have to work together to do our jobs, that we still have to deliver for the American public,” she told the Times. “But they also know that there are times to be out there and pick a fight and say, No, this can’t occur.”
In July, El-Sayed, in an interview with Vox, was asked to weigh in on the claim, made by Cortez Masto and others, that moderate candidates tend to be more electable than progressives. “If we think that voters walk around asking, ‘Where do I sit on some theoretical left-right spectrum?,’ then, in theory, the bulk of the voters are somewhere in the middle,” he said. “The problem, though, is that that model hasn’t really accurately predicted our politics for a very long time. If Michiganders wanted ‘moderate,’ why would they have elected Donald Trump twice? I think the better way to think about politics is top-down: people who are locked out versus people doing the locking out.” Michiganders, he also said, are “pretty steady Eddie. It’s not that we keep whiplashing back and forth from different extremes of the party. It’s that we keep going back to the buffet and not finding what we want.” ♦