Also, “extremist” is inherently both relative and judgmental. Calling someone a terrorist is, by comparison, merely a technical description of methods and goals.

Besides, in the modern West, everything our fathers believed is extremist, anyway.

He tries to position the moderate as being on a scale of political opinion about halfway between an exaggerated right and left. In that sense, a moderate is really just someone who won’t start a ruckus at Thanksgiving. While this tells us something useful about a person’s character, it says nothing about the merit of their political views.

For ‘moderate’ to be meaningful, Graham should be using a different scale: true / false or correct / incorrect.

An intentional moderate (‘trimmer’) isn’t someone who deliberately chooses the middle path between right and left. He’s someone who tries to find a middle path between right and wrong, and therefore invariably comes to a position somewhere out on the left wing of politics.

An accidental moderate isn’t someone who makes up his mind on each issue. An accidental moderate is someone who is ignorant of the issues and doesn’t want to squabble over them.

Moderates are great to have around when political beliefs are friction-free enough that two parties can work together.

When political beliefs are so far apart that two parties can’t work together, moderates are a downright liability. They’ll sell out a logical and just policy so that they can avoid conflict, or will be end up being suckers for the left wing’s emotional arguments.

This is why the Democrat party in government is now stiff with ranty ideologues and yet so keen to work with Republican moderates. It’s the ultimate heads-I-win-tails-you-lose deal.

Some have observed that though there was, at one time, a political spectrum, it seems to have collapsed into a “centrist” singularity. And centrism, as everyone knows, means waging endless wars abroad and soaking the middle class at home.

It’s a truly bipartisan agenda.

At the political level, I think this concept is mostly wrong since I am seeing many so-called moderates being extremists.

I self identify as a doctrinaire empiricist and pragmatist. Life experience has earned me the right to be rigid about certain things, but not about others.