I don't like moderates. Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of them personally, but their beliefs rests on the same sort of complacent naivete that so may leftists I keep excoriating here do. Against all evidence, they willfully persist in believing that you can have partners in peace with the Republican party who won't exploit every inch of ground you concede. If you can live through the last forty years and not see by now that the Republican Party is a fanatical cult, literally willing to let the world burn and risk the lives of billions rather than concede a few business interests, you're not a serious person. At this point, it's just as naive to believe that people like Mitch McConnell would honor any agreement as it would be to believe that Assad or Kim Jong-Un would.
The difference now between Republicans and leftists is that Republicans control every single piece of the American governmental apparatus, and while many socialists/anarchists/communists/intersectionalists/ even progressives are willing to support terrorists who want to inflict nuclear weapons on cities to kill hundreds of thousands and dictators who mow down a million at any given time in the name of socialism and anti-Americanism, conservatives/libertarians/alt righters/even moderates, are willing to support the intermingling of government and big business that can literally burn the planet, kill billions rather than millions, and have already lead somewhere between 1 in 9 to 1 in 6 species on earth to the verge of extinction. One side is a huge threat, but there is no question for the moment which threat is ultimately so much bigger.
I fucking hate the Overton Window, the idea that the framing of dominant ideologies makes people's ideological perceptions drift over time, and makes some ideologies seem extreme that didn't used to b,e or never should have been, and every extremist uses it to support the idea that they are the misunderstood, aggrieved side - the Overton Window must literally be made of silly putty if you believe anything like every time it's used.
But there's no question that American ideological perception is warped. Conservatives consider themselves conservatives who are authoritarian reactionaries, and moderates consider them moderates who are in fact conservatives. Liberalism, the only ideology that truly evolves from generation to generation when new evidence presents itself, is the ideological center of any functional society, and we are anything but functional these days.
Liberalism is not a mushy peacenik center, it is a dynamic, relentlessly critical ideology, always pragmatically adjusting and accommodating to the new realities. It is, in some ways, the absence of ideology. Liberalism meant something completely different, almost the opposite, of what it meant in the 19th century to what it meant in the 20th, and it very well may mean something utterly different by the middle of the 21st. When socialism evolved, it first became communism, then anarchism, syndicalism, decolonizationism, and now it seems to be identitarianism, but from generation to generation, the goal that people should be treated equally never changed, but the ends of it - the belief of what causes inequality that has to be rooted out, always changes like a fashion, and once a new root cause of the problem is identified, half the old ideology has to be shed like snake sheds its skin. On the other hand, when conservatism evolved, it became at times monarchism, imperialism, racial supremacy, nationalism, nativism, libertarianism, and certain other isms we won't mention....
Liberalism was never completely immune to any of these sentiments either left or right, but in all this time, those toxins never dominated and with time, they were all overcome.
The word 'liberalism' comes from Latin 'libera' which means something between freedom and deliverance. The goal was always to both keep people free to live their lives, and simultaneously to deliver them from life's agonies, whatever those may be. The means always changed, the goals never did.
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