Being a moderate is a tug of war between justice and injustice. The equal strength of political power on both sides creates an intellectual normativity where the moderate establishes his or herself and refuses to move. Moderates are only shifted when one side has momentum, and that side is usually the side of injustice.
History has been stained by ethnic cleansing, mass genocide, sexism, homophobia and poverty because of the moderates complicity to evil. Once upon a time, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Nineteen Amendments seemed like radical thoughts. Fear of radical thought is created by a notion that what is normal should be moral.
This phobia leads moderates to forget radicalism is only relative to present society. Civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. was considered a radical ideologist when he was fighting for minority voting rights and to desegregate the South. In his quest for justice, he was labeled an ideological
terrorist and jailed many times.
King addressed his contention with moderates in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” He expresses, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate.”
King’s legacy is built on how he transcended Gandhian civil disobedience to front a great liberation movement. He was a mediator between enraged black revolutionaries and an abused nihilistic black population. King drew intellectual prowess from many sources he considered radical. On the 100th anniversary of sociologist W.E.B Du Bois’ birthday, King said, “It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist.”
He furthers his point, saying, “Our irrational, obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.”
King acknowledged how thinking outside of traditionally conditioned thought processes could lead to ideas which could transcend our society. He would not censor anybody’s ideas simply because they did not conform to convention.
The two-party system has created an illusion of partisanship, but a study conducted by American National Election Studies from 1972 to 2012 shows most participants identified as slightly liberal to slightly conservative on the political spectrum, the greatest portion being moderates. Participants were more likely to be Democrats over Republicans and Independents, but were also more likely to be conservatives over moderate and liberal.
One can insinuate the conflict for Americans to identify with a party correlates with a lack of political knowledge. In another ANES survey conducted in 1964, 2000 and 1992, political knowledge directly correlated with ideological understanding and consistency. It is not a coincidence greater political education leads to more stable political opinions.
In “Neither Liberal Nor Conservative” by Donald R. Kinder and Nathan P. Kalmoe, they asses American politics stating, “Americans are more likely to have noticed that Lindsay Lohan violated her parole, than to recall anything about congressional debate over health care.” They further analyze, “More, perhaps 16 in a hundred, appear to understand ideological terms when put before them. Everyone else a huge majority of the public is unable to participate in ideological discussion.”
The lack of political knowledge of the American voter would explain the oscillation of U.S. politics exhibited by the election of president Donald Trump after former President Barack Obama. This failure to form opinions is also why voters are reluctant to make the connection between police killings and a flawed criminal justice system, unjust criminal punishments with corrupt institutions and many other immoral microcosms which make up evil macrocosms.
Former presidents like Obama and Ronald Reagan can hide their gravest mistakes behind their quintessential charisma because the American public seeks an arbiter over a leader who’s deeply committed to transcending society with essential ideological shifts. After all, the biggest difficulty for legislative success in this country is bipartisanship.
Many moderates fetishize Obama’s mixed ethnicity because of a need for an arbitrator.
During the Obama administration, he hugged fences on issues of police brutality and economic inequality for black Americans. As a result, very little was accomplished to combat systemic racism. Policies regarding health care, foreign policy and economic justice presented by American liberals were merely compromises rather than genuine progressive politics.
In a world where the arc of moral justice bends toward chaos rather than justice, the use of conventional thinking has grown weary.
In our current state, the idea of engaging in war is considered normal. Militarism is aided by Americans in an apartheid in Israel and democratic imperialism is conducted by Americans all over the Middle East because
Islamophobia is normalized. The media chooses to hide these issues, creating a negative peace.
They prime citizens for whatever agenda they are paid to orchestrate. King’s “turn the other cheek” philosophy is considered a radically masochist ideology still, even though a clear majority of Americans commemorate him tenaciously on his national holiday.
Perhaps this is because of a rewritten history conducted by those who incited his murder and are not informed about his real views. If peace is an extreme idea and war is normal, it is better to be a radical than a moderate. Ideological thinking is not a virtue of ideologues but of those deeply devoted to understanding justice and applying it pragmatically.
Soheil Sanee is a biological engineering freshman from Metairie, Louisiana.
