"Everything in Moderation" Doesn't Prevent Extremism

“Everything in moderation” (or EIM, for short) is a hegemonic commonplace in 21st century American culture. That means, it is a belief that is so commonly accepted as to be nearly unquestionable. And it’s a serious problem for supporters of democracy in the 21st century.

The reasons for the phrase’s popularity are easy to see. We need salt and fat in our diets, for instance, but too much salt or fat is unhealthy. A little liquor can be a nice way to celebrate a holiday with friends, but too much can lead to bad behavior, addiction, and death. Solitude is restorative; isolation is destructive. Illustrative examples of things that are good in moderation but bad in excess are countless, but I’ll stop here in a nod to moderation. “Everything in moderation” is so obviously a virtue that it hardly bears a second thought.

But one major problem with EIM being a hegemonic commonplace—that is, a belief we tend to take as a given—is that it is not always applicable. “Everything in moderation” can start to fall apart, for example, when we apply it to political philosophies. “We need a little totalitarian dictatorship, but you know, in moderation.” I’d wager that most people who live in democratic societies would find such a comment curious (I’d hope enraging, but I’d bet actual money on “curious”).

For that matter, “Democracy in moderation” is not a phrase I’d seriously expect to encounter in the wild, even on the internet where anything ridiculous can be found if one looks hard enough. I’m not talking about moderate democracy, I’m talking about democracy in moderation.

The reasons people don’t talk about “democracy in moderation” are pretty straightforward. We can talk about pragmatic limits on democracy—the need for representatives, for example, or the maintenance of non-public, and therefore non-democratic, decision making—but the idea that we just need a little democracy, not too much, just a smidge, is nonsensical. How do you have just a little democracy? “Democracy in moderation” begs the question of what other systems we’re going to also adopt in moderation. Some democracy in the spring, a light communism in the summer, maybe a nice monarchy in the fall, and a hearty totalitarian dictatorship in the winter, when it’s most likely to thrive?

My point here is that “everything in moderation,” reasonable though it may initially seem, is often not very good advice for making decisions. Sometimes, frankly, it just doesn’t belong in the conversation. But, because it is a hegemonic commonplace, like any hegemonic commonplace, the taken-for-grantedness of “everything in moderation” can show up in places it doesn’t belong, and it can short-circuit thinking even in areas where it doesn’t make very good sense. As a result, EIM can appear to be virtuous even when it’s actually really dangerous. Such is the case of politics and media in the current moment in America (and really, for at least the last decades, but probably longer).

In late December, as just one example, Chuck Todd gave an interview to Rolling Stone to promote an upcoming MSNBC special about political misinformation and disinformation, which he is suddenly all worried about. Todd is the Political Director for NBC News and the current moderator of NBC’s wildly popular political show, Meet the Press. Despite being one of the most influential (and presumably most knowledgeable) political commentators in the country, Todd admitted that he was “just so absurdly naive in hindsight” about American politicians’ willingness to spread conspiracy theories and misinformation to accomplish their political goals. Todd was specifically talking about Republicans since Trump’s election in 2016, but the party affiliation is actually beside the point here.

As Jay Rosen helpfully points out at PressThink, a key premise of Meet the Press is that there is a basic symmetry between the two major political parties. Todd is just now realizing that symmetry doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. Rosen is not the only person to observe this premise, nor is it the first time he’s found good reason to comment on it. Nevertheless, the assumption of symmetry that Rosen notices really is grounded in the “everything in moderation” commonplace. EIM is the backbone of “both-sides” political press. If you have a Democrat on, it only makes sense to have a Republican for balance. Give everyone a voice and the plurality will naturally moderate the conversation.

As Todd (finally) figured out more than 2000 years into the common era, and probably at least 3000 years too late, the assumption that moderation will magically materialize if you include a little bit of “everything” is plainly not true. Never has been. There is no state of equilibrium to which political discussion naturally resolves. Apparently no one bothered to tell him, and he wasn’t smart or curious enough to figure it out on his own until, like, yesterday.

I’m picking on Todd here, but he is not uniquely blinkered. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, three supposedly liberal news organizations, are constantly playing the both-sides game, often to what seem like painfully ridiculous ends.

(The supposition that there are two sides is another major problem. In short, there aren’t two sides to every issue—there are an endless number of sides, but they’re collapsed into two because it’s more marketable. But that’s another problem for another day, or hey, read this post, which includes a fine explanation of the problem.)

But it’s not ridiculous if your guiding belief is “everything in moderation.” When EIM is your basis for decision making, even if it’s unconscious, then a little racist science—as long as it’s just a little—isn’t so bad (for an example, you can check out Bret Stephens’s recent NYT op-ed about the superiority of Ashkenazi Jews, but I’m not linking to it). Or short-circuiting discussions about whether or not a Supreme Court justice nominee sexually assaulted a woman (or several women) and lied about it is fair game—after all everything in moderation. So maybe just a little good-hearted reflection on his carpooling prowess. Don’t get carried away though! Anti-deliberative, rape-obscuring deflection should be done in moderation!

CNN, for its part, has repeatedly hosted and/or hired people pushing racist conspiracy theories (Lou Dobbs famously engaged in birtherism for months before he was taken off-air), people advocating discrimination and violence against LGBT people (at least until 2013, CNN regularly hosted guests from the Family Research Council, an organization deemed a hate-group by the SPLC), and people accused of physically assaulting members of the press (dude, they hired Corey Lewandowski). Because “everything in moderation”—taken to a logical extreme really can mean “EVERYTHING.” Not too much, of course. Just a little.

For CNN, the NYT, and WaPo, and frankly for the vast majority of politics and news organizations, EIM short-circuits their ability to think carefully about what they’re actually doing to public discourse. As a result, someone like Chuck Todd can sincerely claim in 2019 that he didn’t notice that some people weren’t playing by the moderate rules. It’s like they were taking advantage or something.

Put another way, even when “everything in moderation” starts to break down as an value for some people, it can remain an unquestioned value for others because it’s hegemonic. It’s just taken for granted. In those asymmetrical circumstances, people who are willing to act immoderately can wreak profound changes on the culture almost without challenge.

 In and of themselves, profound cultural changes are not necessarily bad. But when powerful people like Chuck Todd, CNN executives, and decision makers at the NYT and WaPo ignore those changes and carry along as if everything is the same as it always was, it’s a recipe for bad things. Because they’ve been including “fascism in moderation” and “Nazism in moderation” and “white supremacy in moderation” in their “moderate” coverage for decades without stopping for two minutes think if that’s good standard to work by. And they’ve blithely ignored everyone yelling at them to pull their heads out of their moderation.

Of course, the appropriate reaction to “everything in moderation” is not “everything to the extreme.” The appropriate next step, which Todd is hopefully sincerely beginning to take, is to begin to notice how EIM and false balance shape our thinking and how they allow coverage, commentary, and conversation to progress in ways that we don’t want them to. And when you have the chance, to act and advocate differently.

Not everyone is Chuck Todd, however, and not everyone has the opportunity to reshape the political landscape. But “everything in moderation” also has serious, and potentially damaging effects on how voters look at the candidates. In the moment, this is Democratic voters. There is a pretty common assumption—in the political press and also among individual voters—that there is a sort of moderate equilibrium on the table in the 2020 election. But moderation is a chimera. It’s a moving target in politics and always has been. Or rather, moderation as a value can appear to stay constant even when the grounds for moderation have moved radically to one extreme or another, but it ain't.

Aiming at moderation does not absolve us of the responsibility of looking carefully at our candidates, at their records, at their policies and actions. It is not a substitute for making careful, thoughtful decisions. Moderation will not save our politics any more than it’s saved Chuck “Absurdly Naive in Hindsight” Todd from looking like a novice.

Conservatives: Hanging Tough?

In the last few years, at least in the 8 years between 2000 and 2008, Americans got a good look at many forms of conservatism. One fundamental tenet of modern conservatism, especially if you recognize the views of people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Joe the Plumber as representative of modern conservatism, is that conservatives are tough. They're tough on crime, tough on terrorism, tough on foreign policy. They support rugged individualism, hard work, and making tough choices. They supported the war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, and the war on terror. They support a strong military, tough border policies, and guns for everyone. Conservatives  would have you believe that they are the only people standing between Americans and those that would massacre them.

In contrast, liberals are supposedly soft, weak-willed naifs. If Republicans are the party of strong national security, Democrats are the party of cut-and-run and surrender. According to conservatives, liberals only care about making everyone feel good with politically correct language, affirmative action policies, and massive government spending. As Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly and Beck are all too happy to announce, liberalism (also called "socialism," "fascism," and "communism" by voices of the conservative movement) is going to result in America's fall from grace.

If all you listened to was the way the two sides talked about themselves, it would be easy to fall into the trap of believing that conservatives are hardened, realistic defenders of American values and liberals are gentle, vulnerable, sentimental weenies.

And yet, conservatism is, at least in its current incarnation, nothing less than the fear of nearly everything. American conservatives' entire platform is based on the fear of something: terrorist attacks, government bankruptcy, higher taxes, divine retribution, the weakening of traditional marriages, feminists, the siege of illegal immigrants, Muslim infiltration, watering down of the 2nd Amendment, and on and on and on. I'm not saying they're wrong to be worried about some of these things, but for tough guys, they spend a lot of time cowering in fear of every shadow on the wall and breath of wind in the trees. On the other hand, those sad-sack, weakling libruls are getting pepper sprayed for protesting Wall Street abuse and getting their asses kicked in support of free speech.

Just as I'm not saying all conservative fears are misguided, I'm not saying all liberal demonstrations are justified. I'm simply pointing out that from where I'm standing, the "tough guys" look like a bunch of fraidy cats, and the supposed fraidy cats are standing tough for what they believe.

So I'm left wondering, how did conservatives get the reputation for toughness, again?

"Where Have You Gone, Joe Paterno?"

In the week or so since Jerry Sandusky was arrested for violations that don't need rehearsing here, Penn State officials have been under the microscope. In particular, Joe Paterno, the revered coach of Penn State's football team and apparent icon of moral righteousness, has been castigated for his inaction after learning in 2002 that an assistant coach witnessed Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State locker room showers. Paterno claims that he “referred the matter to university administrators,” but he didn't call the police, he didn't follow up with the people to whom he reported the matter, and he seems to have put the whole sordid situation out of his mind. This week, he paid for his inaction by being unceremoniously relieved of his position after 46 years as head coach.

A common refrain among commentators in the past week has been, "How could they let this happen?" The answer that seems to be emerging, especially in light of what looks like widespread covering up of Sandusky's crimes, is that Penn State officials and others were determined to protect the power and prestige of the school and its football program at the cost of failing to protect Sandusky's victims. In a number of commentaries, Paterno is painted as a power-monger, a back-room politician, an arrogant egotist, interested only in keeping his iron-grip on the football program. It is suggested that he knew Sandusky was raping children and simply cared more about his program than he did about children. Why else, asks ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski, "didn't Paterno contact the police when first informed in 2002 by then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary of an alleged locker room incident involving Sandusky and a young boy?"

Wojciechowski's question invites a more thoughtful answer than much of the torch-and-pitchfork analysis of the past week has allowed. I want to state unequivocally here that I have no intention of excusing Paterno's behavior or inaction. He owed everyone, especially the victims, better. And I'm not interested in arguing that his firing was wrong--honestly, I have no skin in that game. But, I have been really rather disturbed by the reaction I’ve witnessed because of the anger directed at Paterno. Not that he’s without blame, but I’ve heard far more anger directed at Paterno than I have at Sandusky. Sandusky, it seems, is just some pathetic pervert, while Paterno is the real villain.

I want to grant Paterno a modicum of humanity. However arrogant and egotistical Paterno may be, and whatever power he exercised at Penn State, (Wojciechowski says "often vast and overpowering") I imagine that Paterno must also have experienced an awful lot of fear when he learned of Sandusky's violations. Nothing that I’ve read has been willing to grant Paterno that fear in any kind of real way, and I think it’s worth considering.

The fear that I'm talking about may well include the fear of damage to the football program. After all, Paterno was Penn State football. Penn State football was his identity, and as any rhetorician worth their salt can tell you, there is an incredible, often irrational, kind of fear that accompanies any threat to a person's identity. That's why people often hold tight to ideological commitments even after they've been logically and empirically disproved. But even beyond the fear of damaging the football program, Paterno had an awful lot to be fearful of. For one, I'm sure he feared losing Sandusky's friendship. Paterno had known Sandusky for at least 39 years by 2002. They'd worked together as coaches for more than 30. It may sound stupid to fear losing a child rapist's friendship, and rationally it is. But when you've known someone, especially someone you consider a close friend, for decades, it's hard to turn on that person, even in the face of horrible, disgusting acts. You don't want to see your friends humiliated and punished, even when you know they deserve to be.

The loss of Sandusky's friendship is just the tip of the iceberg. If Paterno thought consciously about things he feared, he probably thought about losing his own job. By 2002, they'd coached for 33 years together. Certainly questions that have come up this week would have come up then. Among them, "How could Paterno not know Sandusky was a predator after working with the man for 33 years?" After all, how can you be intimately involved in everything having to do with Penn State football and not know that your assistant coach and heir apparent is a pederast? If Paterno was in the considering mood, he would have considered the possibility that he'd face serious scrutiny from university officials and the public that might have cost him his job.

Paterno might also have feared misrepresenting, and thereby ruining, Sandusky. After all, allegations of sexual misconduct can ruin a person's life, even if that person is innocent (The McCuan-Kniffen case from the 1980s is one of the more famous and sensational examples). I imagine for someone in Paterno's position, there is always the fear, probably rarely acknowledged aloud, that a disgruntled student or colleague will level false accusations about sexual misconduct as a way to get even for some perceived slight. That fear, I might add, is fairly common among men who hold positions of power, even when that power is relatively minimal. It may very well be irrational, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And I'm sure it crossed Paterno's mind that his actions could contribute to just such a situation.

What seems most likely to me, however, is that Paterno experienced a deep and abiding fear that was both indeterminate and inchoate. The kind of fear that small children feel when they're lying in bed at night. Something unnamed, but very-deeply felt. Except unlike the fear of a bogey monster, the fear I imagine Paterno felt was that everything he knew about his life and believed about himself would be slowly (or quickly) unraveled.

None of these fears justifies doing nothing. But the strain of moral damnation in newspaper articles and blog posts that elicited Paterno's removal suggests that he was malicious and uncaring, driven only by power and prestige. I don't doubt that there was an element of unacceptable self-preservation involved in his decision to “refer the matter to university administrators,” but we would have to accept that he's a monster on par with, even perhaps worse than, Sandusky to accept the characterization of Paterno as full-aware and still completely callous. The fact that he reported it up the chain of command weakens this reading, even if it doesn’t completely undercut it.

If you're still with me, you might be worried that I want here to let Old JoePa off the hook because he looked fear in the face and took some action. He may not have done enough; but he didn't exactly do nothing. I don't want to let him off the hook. But I do want to consider that his fear is indicative of a systematic failure as much as it is a personal one. To put it a different way, whether or not Paterno actually experienced the fears I introduced above, it's not hard to imagine that he did. Fear is indicative of the culture we live in, particularly where there are entrenched systems of power. Indiscretions (or crimes) are routinely covered up for financial and political gain. The examples are too copious to begin naming. Confronting those systems, most of which sustain the lives we live, the jobs we have, and the communities of which we're a part, is to risk being exiled by family, friends, and employers.

It's hard enough when the accuser is also a victim because of how injury is heaped on injury. To take a prominent example, in a recent “news” story about one of Herman Cain's accusers, the "journalist" speculated about the fact that this woman had filed sexual harassment charges at another job she'd held. The unstated verdict: gold digger. Suddenly, she's under as much scrutiny as Cain. This is not an isolated example. Bill O'Reilly famously noted that abductee, Shawn Hornbeck, found things to like about his imprisonment by Michael Devlin. When Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of harassment, she was all but accused of being a whore. And, rape victims are routinely accused of "asking for it" by the authorities to whom they report, especially when the alleged rapist is rich, famous, or both. It is no surprise that many victims of one kind of abuse or another choose never to report it. But victims who do report can at least draw from their personal experience to help steel them in the arduous pursuit of justice.

For whistle blowers who aren't victims, like Paterno, the choice is much different. They generally do not have to live with the pain of having been victimized. As a result, their choice is whether to keep quiet or to subject oneself to the kind of pressures that accusers seem inevitably to face. Take for example, Thomas Tamm. He was a Department of Justice lawyer who reported NSA wiretapping during the Bush Administration. For his troubles, Tamm was subjected to a six-year FBI investigation, which continued even after it was widely acknowledged that the program was illegal. During that period, he spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, lost his job at the Department of Justice, and faced imprisonment at the hands of the government.

For people like Paterno and Tamm, the moral decision is clear. You report the crimes because it is the right thing to do. But faced with the available options, it's not hard to imagine that saving the football program is only a small part of the calculation involved in making such a decision. Paterno's silence, while shameful and immoral, is not entirely incomprehensible. His decision to keep his report in-house seems like an attempt to balance the two options available to him. He followed protocol and contented himself that he'd done the right thing and saved himself in the process. It turns out he was wrong on all counts.

All this points to an incredibly complicated situation that raises many more questions than it answers: How should we hold people accountable for turning in possible criminals? How do we begin to reconcile our moral duties with the fears of complete undoing? What does it mean to fulfill ones responsibilities when the people to whom you report are at liberty to forgo their own? In a culture that values everything (and I mean everything) as a potential asset, how do we protect children, and other people, from being coveted as things to “have”? How do we begin to unravel the unacceptable relationship between economic success and silence in the face of sickening crimes? There aren't easy answers to these questions, but they need to be asked, along with many other complicated ones. The real danger is in not asking these questions to begin with and being content with the punishments that have been, and will be, meted out.

Which brings me back to Paterno's ouster. I suppose what I find most disturbing about Paterno’s dismissal is the level of contentedness it seems to grant people. Paterno's dismissal (coupled with Sandusky's arrest) allows people to go back to believing that, now that the cancer has been excised from Happy Valley, things can return to normal. The evil has been purified from the system, the monster has been chased out of town. Except it hasn't. Sandusky's actions aren't the result of football; the cover-up isn't a failing that can be localized to central Pennsylvania; and JoePa's forced retirement doesn't solve a thing other than to soothe the seething mobs (with the exception of the rioters who turned out to support Paterno by destroying their beloved campus--they were apparently not soothed). Paterno is gone, Sandusky will most certainly end up in jail, but the system will roll on until the next shocking abuse of the system and the revelation of its cover-up demands that more heads roll (Even as I type this, I am reading an article about the Catholic Church’s lead investigator into child sex scandals being arrested for possessing troves of child pornography images). The Penn State tragedy isn't just that kids were harmed and the violator was protected; it's also that what happened in Penn State is part of our culture in a way that the tarring-and-feathering of all involved can't touch, much less solve.