Beyond Left and Right: Reviving Moderation in an Era of Extremism

We live in an angry new era. All around the world, the forces of the center-right and center-left are losing ground to the extremes. In the United States, the Republican Party has fallen prey to both Donald Trump’s resentful populism and the plutocratic designs of the party’s donor class. At the same time, increasing numbers of Democrats are drawn to oppositional identity politics and vaguely defined ideas of democratic socialism.

The political process has become polarized and tribal, rendering government dysfunctional. The market economy no longer seems to generate mass prosperity and in many ways operates against the public interest. Society has become increasingly divided along lines of class, education, and geography. The outdated nostrums of both progressivism and conservatism seem unable to cope with new problems of widening income inequality, crumbling communities, unaddressed long-term threats to public welfare, and a growing loss of faith in both the American Dream and American democracy.

The Niskanen Center believes that the best way to counter the false promises of populism, ideological rigidity, and the toxic brew of hyperpartisan extremism is to develop a new politics of pragmatism and moderation. We will explore this new way forward at a conference on February 25, 2019, which we are calling “Beyond Left and Right: Reviving Moderation in an Era of Crisis and Extremism.”

This one-day conference will advance a model of principled moderation, one that rejects the shibboleths of both left and right while avoiding the tepid mush of compromise for compromise’s sake. We will consider moderation as an effective alternative for the “exhausted majority” of Americans who feel unrepresented and frustrated by the false dichotomies and limited choices of our current politics.

At another turbulent and divisive moment in American history, President Abraham Lincoln declared to the Congress, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. ... As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” In the face of new divisions and crises, we too must disenthrall ourselves from the seductive but false certainties of ideology and populism. We must pursue the more difficult — but also more rewarding — path of pragmatism and moderation.