How Can Radical Moderation Deal with Immoderate Injustice?
One clear concern about moderation, and perhaps why it has been given a bad name in the past, is that it seems wildly ineffectual when the stakes are highest. One of the biggest criticisms we've gotten from friends and family while starting this blog is "Moderation? Now?!?!?!" But we'll say this up front so we don't bury our lede: there will be no reform, no change, no hope, without Radical Moderation.
"...we'll say this up front so we don't bury our lede: there will be no reform, no change, no hope, without Radical Moderation."
But back to the critics: particularly in the current election cycle, where the two sides appear to be locked in an existential battle to the death, moderation seems at best like a weak call to "be kind." At its worst, it appears a cruel indifference to the gross injustices that plague our world.
Someone might very well ask us how we can support moderation after seeing videos of a police officer kneeling on George Floyd's neck for 9 minutes while he calls out for help until he dies. Others might ask how we can support moderation when 600,000 babies are aborted every year while someone else will ask how we can support moderation when U.S. policies for the past two decades have resulted in the deaths of over half a million people overseas. And someone else might reasonably ask how we can support moderation when thousands of children are separated from their parents at the border to intentionally cause suffering. Or how we can support moderation during a global health crisis when inequality is rising and the most vulnerable among us are facing unemployment, loss of health insurance, poverty, or even death. Or in the face of apocalyptic climate change that very well may threaten our existence as human beings.
All these things are awful. Full stop. But none of them will be "solved" -- if solutions are even possible -- without Radical Moderation. Here's why.
Why Radical Moderation is More Necessary Than Ever
The first and most obvious reason we need Radical Moderation is that all these problems will exist post-election and no matter what the outcome of the election, we still have to live together after it's all over. And the more we view each other as existential enemies, the less we can do that. We will still have family and neighbors and maybe even friends (though that's more rare these days) who voted for the "other side" and we need to be able to exist alongside these people in some capacity without it tearing us apart. This ability to be together isn't just necessary for some kumbaya-Mr. Rogers-neighborliness ethos. The ability to come together is absolutely necessary to figure out how to talk to each other to get any kind of reform passed at all. So let us repeat: We must relearn how to live together in communities if we're going to address the injustices our communities have allowed to fester.
So in the first place, Radical Moderation helps us stand each other long enough to start addressing some of the issues we're struggling against. But that's not all. Radical Moderation gives us the toolkit we need to start addressing these injustices and creating better communities where people all of all kinds can flourish.
Let's remind ourselves what that toolkit looks like and then apply that toolkit to one particular issue from above. A brief review: Radical Moderates are committed to humility, a respect for complexity, an appreciation of real diversity, a commitment to community and civility, an awareness of tradeoffs, and ultimately a deep respect for individual human beings. So how the heck do these principles help us with any of the issues we've discussed above?
We could go through the list of injustices above and discuss each one in turn, but that would make this post very long indeed (and we wouldn't have anything to say later!), but let's start with the obvious. No Radical Moderate who watches the video of George Floyd's death looks on that as anything other than a moral outrage, a screaming injustice, a violation of everything that humans can and should stand for. (And, in a hopeful sign, conservatives, progressives, and libertarians were all surprisingly aligned in recognizing that an awful crime was committed and a terrible injustice was done, though they disagree on causes and solutions.) There's no morally moderate response to the slow death of one human being at the hands of another. And no Radical Moderate can look at the broader statistics of the criminal justice system and the irony that the first country founded explicitly on the principle of freedom now incarcerates more human beings than any other country in the world, both in absolute and per capita terms, and see anything other than a violation of our most sacred duties to each other and to our community. These are awful, immoderate realities.
But then the question becomes: what can we do about these injustices? How can we prevent these things from happening again?
A Basic Moderate might shrug and say "it's a case of one bad apple and let's punish Derek Chauvin and move on with our lives". But Radical Moderation requires more than that, because Radical Moderation isn't just about solving individual problems, it's about creating a community where all of us can flourish. And that takes much more than punishing a single bad apple. That takes rethinking what the criminal justice system is meant to do, how it's funded, and how it affects individual lives (but we'll have more on that later).
Radical Moderation isn't just about solving individual problems, it's about creating a community where all of us can flourish.
But creating that community requires a Radically Moderate approach, as the case of criminal justice reform makes clear:
It requires humility because very often the answers we think we have are not in fact solutions at all. Since the death of Michael Brown in 2014 (and well before) police reformers were primarily focused on better police training and better transparency (body cameras, etc.) to limit police brutality. And yet, conservatives, progressives, and libertarians all generally agree that the data shows that police violence is on the rise even as violent crime is falling. There has been a lot of handwringing about why this is the case which, depending on which political side you're on, includes police culture or the culture of distrusting police. But part of why we're wrong has to do with the complexity of the issue.
Part of the reason George Floyd's death should have been completely avoidable but happened anyway has to to do with the complexity of policing in America. While the transparency provided by cellphone and body cams have animated public conversations, they have done little to actually mitigate police violence, in large part because of the institutional incentives at play behind the scenes. It's not just a need for body cams, but it's also the role of police unions, the dangerous doctrine of qualified immunity, the insularity of police departments, and the growing divide between police and the communities they serve (there's more too, which we'll touch on in another post). The circumstances that led to George Floyd's death are complicated and much deeper than they first appear and we actually benefit from a range of perspectives in trying to understand why these things happen and how we can change them.
Preventing another death like Floyd's also requires understanding and appreciating human diversity, because the needs of policing differ dramatically from community-to-community and the experiences people have with the police vary dramatically based on income, race, geography, mental health status, and so on. Even more, as the call to defund the police makes clear, the causes of crime are diverse, ranging from poverty to addiction to mental illness to cultural breakdowns to simply bad people, and the responses to each of those causes must be diverse as well. We are increasingly asking police officers to be all things to all people: a jack of all trades on the streets of our cities. That approach has been shown to be a recipe for disaster and tragedy.
But just as we must know the actual causes of both crime and of police violence, we also need to take responsibility as a community for the way in which public support for various laws has increased people's interaction with the criminal justice system and made policing itself less safe, both for police and for the communities they serve. The War on Drugs, increasingly punitive laws, the explosion of laws and regulations that require police intervention, and cuts to mental health resources all point in the direction of more and more responsibility falling on police, who are expected to engage in complicated and complex interactions with an increasingly distrustful public. All of these decisions were made by our representatives on our behalf and we as a community are responsible for them.
...We also need to take responsibility as a community for the way in which public support for various laws has increased people's interaction with the criminal justice system and made policing itself less safe, both for police and for the communities they serve.
As part of this community responsibility, we need to understand that reform will require tradeoffs. We cannot keep locking up more of our fellow citizens than any other country in the world while also striving for high quality public education while also providing high quality mental health care while also ensuring excellent police training while also lowering taxes (spoiler: we're only succeeding at one of those things). Values have value, which is simply to say that the things we ask our government to do require money and resources and those resources are not infinite. We need a more robust conversation about what tradeoffs are worth it and which are not -- and what the government should be doing and what civil society should handle -- before we can even start thinking about individual tweaks to policing that provide, at most, marginal benefits. And as part of that conversation about tradeoffs we also need to reckon with the exploding costs and bureaucratic load of potentially ineffective social programs, which are also incredibly resource-hungry and which eat up larger and larger pieces of state and federal budgets. But it's worth repeating: this kind of holistic value assessment will not happen if we keep treating the other ideological side as though they are stupid or corrupt.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, reforms to prevent other people from suffering as George Floyd suffered will require recognizing and appreciating the inherent worth of each individual and how they contribute in complicated and powerful ways to our lives together. Above all else, watching George Floyd's death meant watching an individual, a unique and irreplaceable human being, die slowly and painfully at the hands of another. Unlike other kinds of human tragedies, his death was completely avoidable and entirely a function of the rules and choices we have created or allowed to be created on our behalf. We need to take ownership of those choices and work to change those that do not serve our flourishing as individuals in community.
In Summary...
Radical moderation believes that both truth and justice exist and that they're worth fighting for. But we won't be able to fight for truth or justice by rejecting any interaction with or cooperation with the other side. In fact, by doing so we eradicate any possibility for true and meaningful reform.
The world needs Radical Moderation because a Radically Moderate approach is the only way to get people from all ideological walks of life together to address the serious injustices that people across our nation face as a result of the policy decisions that we have allowed to be made on our behalf. And Radical Moderation is the only approach we've seen so far that gives us the toolkit to start thinking about how to create true reform in diverse communities where people disagree.
...shutting ourselves off from conversations with our fellow citizens about truth and justice and how to create flourishing communities is precisely the wrong approach and one that will lead to increasing polarization, stagnation, and ever-more-entrenched injustices.
It's easy to see the current election as a fight between good and evil or that it's an existential crisis of unbelievable proportions. In the first place, that's not true. There are a lot of complicated reasons that we see politics in this way (we highly recommend Ezra Klein's book Why We're Polarized for a deeper dive than we can do here), but the reality is that most Americans (though not necessarily most American politicians) are operating in good faith. They have reasons for what they believe, though they may be wrong in a bunch of complicated ways. And Americans actually agree on a lot of complicated things when you drill down to the basic facts (more on this later). But shutting ourselves off from conversations with our fellow citizens about truth and justice and how to create flourishing communities is precisely the wrong approach and one that will lead to increasing polarization, stagnation, and ever-more-entrenched injustices. It's on us to prevent that from happening.
We'll be posting more on criminal justice and other injustices in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more concrete proposals on what you can do, but for now... Enough from us! What do you think? How can Radical Moderation help address serious injustices? Is it enough? Did we miss something? Tell us in the comments!