Abstract
This article ethnographically maps the activism of moderates engaged with grassroots Republican Party politics in Kansas, a state that for the last two decades has been a primary battleground in America's so-called ‘culture wars’ in which the value of ‘moderation’ has been the subject of strident contestation. Drawing inspiration from the writings of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, it probes the testimony of activists in an effort to identify those political and social practices and principles that might be considered constitutive in the making of a moderate politics. The goal is to ‘salvage’ a rudimentary activist theory of moderation for those seeking to champion and defend contemporary American democracy at a time when publics and their institutions have been compromised by, or succumbed to, electoral polarization and political extremism. The article argues for the displacement of the usual representation of moderation as a default position defined by the absence of strong ideological or other convictions in favour of an understanding of moderation as a disciplined engagement with divided publics. Most importantly, moderates embrace democracy as a yet-to-be-fulfilled moral project, which serves to infuse the values that underpin moderate politics with normative power and purpose. How to render these values operational in a divided politics remains a central question for both activists and scholars committed to moderation and the practices and values it names.
[Let] me describe what moderation is not. It is not just finding the midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting yourself there. Only people who know nothing about moderation think it means that.
David Brooks writing in The New York Times (25 October 2012) in the run-up to the US Presidential election
On a hot July day in 2006, I sat in the comfortable, air-conditioned boardroom of the national headquarters of the centrist Republican Main Street Partnership (RMSP), off K Street in Washington DC. I had come to the US capital to conduct pilot research on an ethnographic study I was planning on the Republican Party's marginalized ‘moderate’ wing. My meeting with Main Street's Policy Director was nearing its conclusion. ‘If I was to go to a state where I could observe a struggle between conservative and moderate Republicans taking place on the ground’, I asked, ‘where would you suggest I go?’ In a heartbeat, he replied: ‘Kansas.’ Imagining myself standing before an endless prairie dotted with lonely farmhouses and rusting windmills, I hardly greeted the prospect of Kansas – which I had never visited before – with enthusiasm. Sensing my disappointment, though, the Main Street Republican was insistent. ‘No, really, you MUST go,’ he said. ‘But first, read Thomas Frank's book, What's the matter with Kansas?'
I finally visited Kansas City in February 2008 as I was scouting potential field sites for my study in the American Midwest. When I did, I understood immediately the wisdom of the advice I had been given. As I have argued elsewhere (Smith, 2010a), Kansas is – for reasons that will likely strike some as counterintuitive – the field site par excellence in which to conduct an ethnographic study of moderation and moderate politics, largely because it has emerged as a primary battleground in America's so-called ‘culture wars’ (cf. Sharp, 1999, 2005). But there is an analogy here that can be pushed further. In the same way that I was initially reluctant and then slow to embrace Kansas as the most appropriate field site in which to locate my study, moderation often struggles to capture or excite the contemporary political or sociological imagination. In ideological terms, moderation sometimes seems the political equivalent of ‘Flyover Country’. For often-understandable (if obvious) reasons, social scientists are drawn to, and fascinated by, militant politics. Too often, as a result, scholars appear content to define what lies between the polar extremes by what it is not. This rendering of moderation, as a default position characterized by the absence of strong ideological or other convictions, or an elusive midpoint, seems to me to be a mistake. At the very least, it is the kind of assumption that sociology should seek to challenge. After all, perhaps in part because it appears today to be in such short supply – certainly in national and, increasingly, state Republican politics as well – moderation continues to exercise a powerful presence in the American political imagination.
The Presidential nomination of the conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater over the ‘moderate’ Governorof New York Nelson Rockefeller at the 1964 Republican National Convention is often characterized as the moment when the conservative movement and their evangelical Christian allies began their relentless march to ‘capture’ (Brennan, 1995) the Republican Party in the late twentieth century. While the geopolitical, sociological and other explanations for the rise of conservative Republicanism are not my focus in this article, it is sufficient to note that a huge scholarly literature now exists on this topic. 1 Rather, I am interested in the consequent story of the destruction of the once dominant, but still largely under-studied, moderate wing of the ‘Grand Old Party’ (GOP), at the hands of conservatives, Christian fundamentalists and, most recently, the Tea Party (cf. Kabaservice, 2012; Rae, 1989; see also Mann and Ornstein, 2012). As the historian George Kabaservice has pointed out, the two main political parties throughout American history ‘had been coalitions of interest rather than ideological vehicles’ so that the Republican Party ‘as recently as the 1960s … contained large numbers of moderate and even liberal representatives’ (Kabaservice, 2012: xvi; see also Aldrich, 1995; Crotty, 1984). Arguing that it would be a mistake to assume (as many scholars do) that ‘for historic reasons some members of both parties found themselves ideologically misplaced’, which then led to ‘a more natural political ordering’ being reasserted in the 1960s (Kabaservice, 2012: xvi–xvii), he makes a persuasive case for apprehending moderate Republicanism as an important political tradition in its own right:
[Moderate] Republicanism was a separate political and ideological viewpoint that found adherents in all parts of the country, among members of all racial and ethnic groups, and along all points of the socio-economic spectrum. It overlapped on some issues with liberals, on others with conservatives, and on still others with neither. Historians who overlook the often-significant role of moderate Republicans in the twentieth century are left with a misleading view of modern American political development. (Kabaservice, 2012: xvii)
Asserting that there remain ‘millions of voters who define themselves as moderate Republicans, and millions more who would vote for moderate Republican candidates if they could find them’, Kabaservice goes on to argue that:
[The] complete domination of the conservative infrastructure in party politics, and the absence of moderate efforts to counter grassroots movements like the Tea Party, means that the GOP has for all intents and purposes become a uniformly ideological party unlike any that ever existed in American history. It has also become a party that has cut itself off from its own history, and indeed has become antagonistic to most of its own heritage. This unprecedented transformation … is likely to change our entire political system in ways that ought to concern all Americans. (Kabaservice, 2012: xix)
The many activists for the moderate wing of the Kansas Republican Party I met during ethnographic fieldwork in 2009–2010 shared Kabaservice's anxieties about the impact of ideologically driven politics on the future of American democracy, locally and nationally. Now seemingly defined by their defeat as they have ‘passed from the political scene’ and ‘faded from public memory’ (Kabaservice, 2012: 392), moderate Republicans are of interest in part as a contemporary exercise in ‘salvage ethnography’. 2 No matter how depleted their ranks, an exploration of the anxieties, practices and values of moderates engaged in contemporary Republican politics presents us with an important opportunity to capture something before it is lost, to both politics and science. The British social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern has long argued that it is in such moments of (imminent) loss and re-discovery that the social sciences – as well as political activism – can be apprehended anew. Something salvaged is something that can be remade, reused and reworked into new possibilities, full of creative promise. These are regenerative moments. My goal, therefore, is to recover an idea of moderation as both an ‘object’ (of analysis, interpretation) and an ‘operation’ (practice) capable of producing dynamic ‘social effects’ (cf. Strathern, 1996: 522), which can sometimes lead to still-surprising transformations in political allegiances and identities, even in the early twenty-first century.
I will begin by briefly describing the background and national context to the struggle between conservative and moderate Republicans in Kansas during the early to mid-2000s, a struggle that, for now, appears to have been resolved firmly in favour of conservative Christian evangelicals and their Tea Party allies. I will then draw on the testimony of moderate activists I interviewed in Kansas to explore, in their own words, what moderation means. 3 This will allow me to describe a rudimentary activist theory of moderation, which places value on ideas of civility, community, consideration and dialogue in the making and remaking (correcting) of local democratic decisions. Turning to the writings of the leading American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who drew inspiration from Thomas Jefferson's ideas, I will locate the testimony and values of the moderate activists I interviewed in an older, distinctly American intellectual and political tradition that argues for democracy as a moral commitment. For Dewey and for Jefferson, this is grounded in an affirmation of the primacy of associational (social) relations and an idea of the local community as the building block of democracy.
Moderate Republicans and Kansas
Under the first presidency of George W. Bush, it could be argued that the Republican Party's moderate wing underwent a renaissance in response to the ideological excesses of the Christian Right's moral agenda and the neo-conservatives' war on terror (Smith, 2010b). For example, in addition to the activism of the Republican Main Street Partnership, ‘Log Cabin’ Republicans achieved national newspaper headlines in their efforts to fight those opposed to gay marriage. Republicans for Choice and the WISH List continued to campaign for candidates supporting abortion and reproductive rights for women in contentious GOP primaries. A couple of years after her resignation as Environmental Protection Agency administrator over Republican opposition to the Kyoto Protocol in the summer of 2001 – just weeks before September 11 –ex-New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman published a book calling on ‘radical moderates’ to take back the Republican Party and reclaim it for ‘Lincoln's legacy’ (cf. Whitman, 2005). Similarly, another Republican – former Governor for Missouri and retired US Senator John Danforth – published a thoughtful tract on politics, religion and the destructive influence of debates over ‘moral values’ on both the Republican Party and the wider electorate (cf. Danforth, 2006).
During this period, Whitman and Danforth joined forces to relaunch the centrist Republican Leadership Council (RLC), which would eventually fail in its aim of rebuilding the nationwide campaign infrastructure needed for supporting a moderate candidate in the 2008 GOP presidential primary election. 4 But there were also numerous other standard-bearers for moderate Republicans. Defeated by Bush in the 2000 GOP presidential primary, Senator John McCain stood apart from the Republican majority on embryonic stem cell research, illegal immigration and the justification of the use of torture in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. There was also Delaware Congressman Mike Castle, later defeated by the Tea Party in the bitter 2010 Midterm primary battles that consumed the Republican Party, and Senator Lincoln Chafee (Rhode Island), the only GOP Senator to vote against the military invasion of Iraq. In the Midwest, there were Congressional representatives like Jim Leach (Iowa), who vetoed the distribution of anti-gay leaflets in his unsuccessful 2006 re-election bid, alienating social conservatives who then refused to back him. And there was the late Kansas-born Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, a leading Main Street Republican who defected to the Democrats in 2009.
These national struggles were mirrored in state legislatures across America. During my preliminary fieldwork, I interviewed representatives of moderate political action committees (PACs) like the 200-strong First Republicans Forum in Indianapolis and the state chapter of the RLC in St Louis. In Kansas itself, moderate activist groups like the GOP Club – later to become the Kansas Traditional Republican Majority (KTRM) – and the Mainstream Coalition 5 squared up to the conservative Kansas Republican Assembly, Kansans for Life and other similar organizations, including national groups like the Club for Growth and the National Rifle Association. Indeed, ever since the 1991 ‘Summer of Mercy’ in which the pro-life movement mobilized against the late Dr George Tiller and his abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas had become a key battleground in America's so-called ‘culture wars’. For the next twenty years, a bitter struggle for control of the Kansas Republican Party was waged between conservatives and moderates. At the turn of the millennium, moderate Kansans succeeded in clawing back control of the state Republican Party and electing the moderate Mark Parkinson as state chairman. 6 For a time, opposition to conservative efforts to curtail access to abortion rights and restrict funding for embryonic stem cell research was reinforced in the state legislature. Firm foundations were also laid on the back of this progress for overturning the Kansas State Board of Education in 2006 after religious conservatives attempted to introduce the teaching of Intelligent Design to the high school science curriculum (cf. Smith, 2010a).
The Christian Right and their conservative allies have had to contend with robust opposition from organized moderate-secular activist groups in Kansas. These groups have drawn, in part, on the state's moderate and progressive Republican traditions that date back to the historical origins of the state. Following an episode of guerrilla warfare between abolitionist militia and pro-slavery ‘Border Ruffians’ known as ‘Bleeding Kansas’, the state entered the Union as a Free State on the eve of the American Civil War in 1861, identifying strongly with Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party he founded. In the face of Populism and Temperance, which swept the state and the rest of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kansas Republicans continued to support leading Progressive politicians, including Governor Alf Landon, who stood (and lost) against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1936 Presidential election. And after the Second World War, Kansas continued to break new ground for progressive politics. For example, a class action filed in 1951 against the School Board District in the state capital Topeka became the landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education that saw the US Supreme Court outlaw racial segregation in public schools (cf. Allen, 2004).
Contrary to contemporary caricatures of Kansas as a breeding ground for rabid conservatism and religious fundamentalism, the state might equally have been conceived, until very recently, as a site of innovation for moderate activist groups seeking to counter-mobilize against the Christian Right. For example, Kansas is home to the Mainstream Coalition, an organization forged in the 1990s to defend the constitutional separation of church and state (see Smith, 2010a). In 1999, Kansas Citizens for Science was set up to oppose the teaching of Creationism in the high school science curriculum. It was the first state organization of its kind and has now been duplicated in a dozen other states under the ‘Citizens for Science’ banner. Even the GOP Club and KTRM, according to one of my ethnographic subjects, inspired moderate Republicans in Pennsylvania to create a similar organization. These groups were all headquartered in affluent Johnson County, a traditional stronghold for Republican moderates in Kansas prior to the pro-life ‘Summer of Mercy’ mobilization in 1991. With a population of 535,000, the county is home to roughly 20 per cent of the state's population and constitutes part of the greater Kansas City metropolitan area straddling the Kansas–Missouri border in the state's north-east corner. Also home to the well-respected Kansas University Medical Center and prestigious Stowers Institute, Kansas City's prospects for future economic growth are vested significantly in the biomedical and life sciences industries, which in turn depend on public funding for embryonic stem cell research. In Johnson County, deep pockets exist for GOP moderates who want to run for office.
From the perspective of hindsight in 2013, however, it would seem that the fortunes of GOP moderates remained tentative. The national moderate counter-offensive of the early to mid-2000s proved short-lived and the defeat and departure of leading moderates from national Republican politics compounded difficulties for grassroots activists in states like Kansas. From the mid-2000s onwards, the Christian Right and other conservatives regrouped and mounted what would eventually become a successful campaign to defeat moderate GOP incumbents and dominate state politics. In 2010, the deeply conservative former US Senator for Kansas Sam Brownback was elected to the Governor's mansion after sixteen years during which it had been occupied by moderates: the Republican Bill Graves and then the Democrats Kathleen Sebelius and Mark Parkinson (the former GOP state chairman). Following his election, the last obstacle to Governor Brownback and his supporters remained the moderate Republican leadership in the state senate. All moderate GOP senators were then targeted in their 2012 primary elections by conservative PACs and the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, which was bankrolled by the libertarian, Wichita-based billionaire Koch brothers. The primary season proceeded with all the sound and fury of a military mopping up operation. Very few moderate incumbents survived the onslaught.
From 2008, several PACs that had previously supported moderates in Republican primary contests either closed down completely or scaled back activity in Kansas. KTRM largely disbanded after 2008, when it ceased receiving financial support from the national RMSP. 7 Pro-Kan-Do, an important pro-choice activist group based in Wichita, closed in 2009 shortly after the murder of the controversial abortion doctor George Tiller, who had been its primary financial donor. The Kansas Coalition for Lifesaving Cures, an organization to which many moderate Republicans had gravitated, also wound down in early 2010. In contrast, Kansas Citizens for Science and Mainstream Coalition, the latter drawing members largely from the Kansas City suburbs of Johnson County but operating on a shoestring budget, seemed determined to maintain a presence.
The progressive political history of Kansas sketched here, then, might be seen as a relic, a leftover of another America that has been eclipsed by the cultural and ideological struggles of the last few decades. In the fossil record of American political traditions, Kansas seems an anachronism, a place where a moderate/ progressive Republican politics that expired in other parts of the United States long ago somehow survived into the twenty-first century, albeit by its fingertips. The consequences of this insight were not lost on many of the activists I interviewed. Early in my fieldwork during 2009, I had lunch with a former KTRM office-bearer. Between mouthfuls of his grilled chicken salad, he likened his and the fate of his fellow moderates in the Kansas Republican Party to the besieged survivors of the apocalyptic George A. Romero horror movie Day of the Dead. ‘It's like all these years we've been trapped in the bunker fighting off the zombie horde, waiting for the marines to fly in and rescue us,’ he intoned:
But then, eventually, it dawns on you that the marines are never going to come and that we might be the last group of survivors holding out. What do you do? Do you continue the fight? Or do you accept the inevitable and give up, allow yourself to get bitten by one of the zombies and join them?
Another KTRM supporter had attended the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia as part of the Kansas delegation, shortly after moderates recaptured the state party in the late 1990s. She and her husband poignantly described to me the moment when they realized that the problems moderates faced in state politics were not confined to Kansas:
RNC delegate: … [That] was the first time I really felt on a national level that this had spilled over. You know, you sort of thought it was a local problem … you didn't realise it was a national thing. I can remember the first night that we were back in Philadelphia, two of [George W.] Bush's operatives came and talked to the delegation and several of us said afterwards, ‘well, if he lets those two guys do much more talking we're not going to be able to support him.’ Well, that was only the –
Delegate's husband: Tip of the iceberg.
RNC delegate: – Tip of the iceberg, yeah.
Alex Smith: So what sort of things were they talking about?
RNC delegate: Well they were talking about all the social issues … abortion
–
Delegate's husband: Gay rights.
RNC delegate: ‘We don't want that, we want charter schools.’ … What were some of the rest of them? I don't think illegal immigrants had gotten –
Delegate's husband: I don't think that was much of an issue.
RNC delegate: – into play yet, but that would soon come. … [It] was just – it was obviously that his people were far more social activists than we had really thought …
Meanwhile, other moderates located the problem of political extremism in the Republican Party the other way round – nationally rather than locally. ‘I always thought the Religious Right was a phenomenon of the coasts and that in Kansas we were insulated from it’, a former President of the Mainstream Coalition – a retired scientist – explained to me over coffee. ‘But then, they came here.’
What moderation means
I have suggested elsewhere (Smith, 2010a) that many Kansas Republicans acquired their identities as political moderates partly because that was the label with which the Christian Right branded them and their politics during the 1990s. While some wore this label more comfortably than others, 8 the political struggle in which pro-choice, secular Republicans and their allies found themselves forced them to reflect on their own political ideas and traditions. Put simply, this was, in part, a ‘crisis’ of self-knowledge (cf. Miyazaki, 2004; Smith, 2011a: 101–103) for moderates, which led many activists to re-evaluate and then embrace those values that were most important to them, as moderates, in opposition to religious conservatives. Differentiating themselves from their conservative opponents demanded an emergent, reflexive dialogue about what moderation means and what it means to be a moderate so that they could attempt to unlock the ‘instrumental possibilities’ of their own ideas, metaphors and values (cf. Jackson, 1989: 149).
In 2009–2010, I interviewed several members of Plymouth Congregational Church in the college town of Lawrence, in Douglas County, Kansas (which neighbours Johnson County). Founded in 1854 by abolitionists from New England, it was the first church established in Kansas Territory (cf. www.plymouthlawrence.com/who/history/) and played a pivotal role in securing it as a Free State and stronghold for Abraham Lincoln's newly formed Republican Party. In 1863, its congregation was targeted during Quantrill's infamous raid on Lawrence, during which Southern militia killed almost 200 male residents in what is generally regarded as the worst war crime against civilians of the American Civil War (Miner, 2002: 49–52). Because of this turbulent history, many of its members take Plymouth's progressive political identity seriously and are active in either the Democratic Party or the moderate wing of the Republican Party. Indeed, the congregation at the time of my fieldwork included several elected officials, such as the then Attorney General for Kansas (a Democrat), the state's Insurance Commissioner (a Republican) and several current and former local and state representatives.
One leader of the Church was a retired university administrator from Indiana who had registered as a Republican voter soon after arriving in Kansas several decades ago:
I suspect some people would label me a moderate because I can speak to people of different political persuasions and have supported people of that same division. … [But] I think … what makes up a moderate – certainly I mentioned to you the commitment to civility and … the ability to … see good in people of opposite persuasion. But … I think … it's again going back to early childhood and a belief that people have – that life is sacred, people have rights and the biggest job of government is protecting those rights. … [And] whether that's because of racial discrimination, economic hardship or what have you, … those rights need to be protected and … so I have a strong, strong commitment to civil rights. (Interview, 29 September 2009)
This individual believed that ‘even though [somebody] may be a hundred and eighty degrees from me on an issue’, that person has a right to be heard and ‘it would be nice to get back to the point where we could really have in depth debate in a civil mode in our society’. In addition to a respect for civility, tolerance of opposed and dissenting voices and a commitment to civil rights, he therefore rejected forms of political partisanship he viewed as divisive. Instead, he endorsed a commitment to the value of community:
[Even] though all politics is supposedly local, in city commission here, it isn't really so much whether you're Republican or Democrat, it's how you look at development in a community … a lot of it has to do with just how you feel about your local community. (Interview, 29 September 2009)
A retired pastor and former Republican voter from western Kansas who had worked in a number of midwestern states joked, ‘notice where we sit in the church – extreme middle – [although] a little bit more to the right because I'm fiscally conservative’. He shared the retired university administrator's concerns about the dangers of partisanship and the decline of civility in public discourse:
One word that has become more and more important to me – and my wife hears me complaining about it too much – is people lack consideration of other viewpoints and other people's opinions. And if we listen, we will learn and we will find a way we can go forward together and that word consideration – well, because we no longer have a bipartisan Congress, this can only be achieved by living as a moderate in the middle … I mean, I know there is always going to be extremists, but the biggest majority of people ought to live so that they can talk to each other and understand each other and compromise and do the very best they can at that time – at that point in time –knowing that you correct it as you go along. (Interview, 17 November 2009)
Endorsing moderation as a ‘lived’ social practice, the retired pastor embraced fallibility as a sound principle on which to make decisions on behalf of a community – provided members of that community are fully engaged in conversation as those decisions are being made. Indeed, dialogue is constitutive of community life, in his view. He later suggested that this tradition of moderation – of consideration, of collective decision-making and dialogue – was integral to his upbringing in the ‘congregational way of life’ in which:
The moderator of a church … would have a presence. He would be sure that every side got heard without interruption and he would keep the peace of the church at all cost, so that people would not get up out of a meeting and take their marbles and go home. And that's a virtue of moderation – right there – to keep people together and moving forward towards a hopeful goal or goals … I voted for Obama because he brought the word ‘hope’ back alive among our people. I was sick to death – and I spoke about it in my Christmas letter that we send out every Christmas – we have got to stop living by fear. It will destroy us if we do not get hope again. We've got to be hopeful, got to work together, in the middle, you know, and so it's a passionate belief of mine. (Interview, 17 November 2009)
Characterizing the Plymouth congregation as ‘moderate-to-liberal’, a senior pastor at the Church similarly suggested that his role demanded he embrace moderation, even if he and his wife defined their politics more radically. According to him, this remained core to the identity of the church:
Moderate – you know, I think it's really tough for me … because I'm married to somebody who's not a moderate, doesn't see herself as a moderate … and so we have this argument all the time and I think I have a hard time sometimes figuring out … who am I as a pastor of a moderate congregation? … I realise that the credibility I have to be a leader of this congregation comes from the people of this congregation and that if I did not embrace moderation – if I embraced a more radical perspective – I would not … have the support for my leadership. (Interview, 19 October 2009)
Of this senior pastor, moderation demanded a disciplined engagement with a congregation constituted by social and other relations that, to him, seemed fragile. Attending to these relations was hard work:
Senior Pastor: [The] toughest part … of leading a moderate-to-liberal congregation is that you don't have this nice neat language that can kind of ‘rally the troops’ and you can say: ‘This is what we believe, what we're about is … bringing people to Christ, what we're about is accepting Jesus in our hearts.’ You know, if you can have kind of a clear view of that type of language, that's incredibly seductive in terms of … creating and rallying the community around. I think a place like Plymouth is a huge challenge. … [What's] hard is that in a moderate-to-liberal congregation, the personality of a leader and the relationships you have with the people in the community [tend] to be that which kind of holds the centre together and I think that in places like Plymouth, it's – I think they're fragile institutions. I think they're very fragile and it would not take much for this congregation to kind of fracture.
Alex Smith: And fragile because the language is delicate?
Senior Pastor: Fragile because the language is delicate, because there's a lack of agreement on what it is that holds us together. You know, we can talk about ‘the Plymouth Covenant holds us together’. We can talk about a message of grace, of love, of radical hospitality … that inclusion holds us together. … But those are tough ideas in terms of the clarity of those ideas, in terms of being compelling enough to keep the community together.
The husband of the RNC delegate quoted earlier had served as chairman of the Douglas County Republican Party during the early 2000s. In 1964, he and his wife had been enthusiastic Young Republican activists for Nelson Rockefeller in his failed bid to secure the GOP presidential nomination. Agreeing with the above sentiments, he explained to me that moderates have a different attitude to conservatives regarding the role of government:
I think moderates have long felt that governance is in the middle – you don't call it ‘moderatism’ or anything else – it's the function of government to achieve something by compromise and a decent discourse. Now, that means moderate to me today, I guess. But that's not really what the label – why the label was never acquired by moderates and used by moderates. It became … through default that ‘I'm a Moderate because I'm not a Conservative’. But what it is – … ‘I believe in government, in moderation in the middle, with compromise involved’ – will achieve good governance and this extremism stuff doesn't on either side. (Interview, 15 July 2010)
Another interviewee was a radio broadcaster and an employee of the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce. In the 1960s, he was a Barry Goldwater activist and had identified with conservative Republican politics, though he counted Rockefeller Republicans amongst his personal friends. But he also cited his father – another conservative Republican who had served in the state legislature post-World War II – who taught him the importance of moderation in the legislative process. ‘To moderate, to be a conciliator, to say: “I know you don't agree with a thing this guy says, but we've got to have his vote”,’ was to be valued positively, in his view. However, the radio broadcaster felt that his strong belief in the constitutional separation of church and state now put him at odds with the views of many contemporary conservative Republicans. With some initial reluctance, he had come to think of himself as a moderate:
I would have to say that … a series of things that had been going on in our nation … led me to realise – well, certainly I am not what you would call part of the Religious Right! I just – I'm – my religious views are mine. I feel very strongly about them. I believe in God very deeply. I believe very strongly in ‘Jesus Christ is my saviour’. … My religious affiliation, to me, belongs to me or to members of my family that join in with me on it. … I find myself to be a moderate in terms of how I view other people and other religions. I don't think that God has decided that Jews are not going to be in Heaven or that Muslims who aren't good people are not going to be in Heaven. I just don't think there's a God that would eliminate religions. But I don't share – a lot of people don't share that point of view of the overall Kingdom of God with me, but that's just the way I feel about it. … I don't try to wear my own religious convictions out in public.’ (Interview, 17 December 2009)
For this individual, religion belonged firmly in the realm of the private. In contrast, government had a positive role to play, safeguarding rights and services and attending to the needs of vulnerable groups:
I feel very strongly in our public school system. I'm an advocate for public schools. That crosses me off a lot of the conservative Republicans of today's list – they don't think that that's the way to go. I feel very strongly about public school. I feel very strongly about healthcare being available, especially for those who are old and especially for those who are young … So that takes me off the right wing – I have a strong feeling that we need to take care of people that can't take care of themselves. If we have to raise our taxes, we have to raise our taxes. So maybe I'm kind of getting to –and see, now I'm sounding like a Democrat! (Interview, 17 December 2009)
‘Does being a moderate mean you change your political point of view?’ he went on to ask:
Absolutely not! It means you're willing to listen to the other person and accept some changes in legislation that will help you accomplish what you think [is] most important from your political point of view. Does that make you a ‘waffler’ and less strong? I don't think so. I think it makes you a realist. (Interview, 17 December 2009)
This former Goldwater Republican strongly affirmed both a role for government and a method of governing that places a positive emphasis on engagement, dialogue and compromise. This approach, which he viewed as ‘realistic’, is one of strength rather than weakness. Other moderates I interviewed who did not belong to Plymouth Congregational Church expressed similar sentiments.
For example, a Johnson County lawyer and self-described ‘moderate’ who had served for much of the 2000s as a board member of the Mainstream Coalition was a registered Democrat voter who had been a Nelson Rockefeller supporter as a Young Republican in the 1960s. For him, moderation meant being willing to ‘listen to reasonable ideas’ and embracing the role of pragmatism in government services:
I suppose what I – perhaps one of the words I would use is ‘pragmatism’: if it works, do it and if government can provide a service efficiently and well, the government should do it. Don't have ‘Ronald Regan’-type feelings that the government is the enemy. I mean, government can be very helpful in improving the lives of the citizens and where that makes sense and where you can do it efficiently, you should do it … So moderation … it seems to me the Democrats – where I parted company with the Democrats is where they'll take, where they'll want the government to perform services that I'm not sure the government can perform well. And on the other hand, where I part Republican company to the conservative Republicans is that they want to take away services that I do think the government can and should provide. So … moderation, I suppose, for me comes down to: if it works, do it and if government can do it and that's the only way it can get done, do it and then … pragmatism keeps you from going too far in any direction. (Interview, 17 November 2009)
Importantly, this former Mainstream board member believed that being moderate or pragmatic meant engaging in dialogue with diverse and opposed viewpoints and accepting the fallibility of one's decisions. In particular, it meant making oneself available and responsive to reason, rather than simply being reasonable:
And another thing I think about moderation is that you're not just totally convinced that you've got the right answers. I mean, you concede that sometimes you may be wrong and others, even where you disagree – there are grains of truth in the other guy's – the opponent's position. And so it seems to me that ‘ends of the [political] spectrum’ tend to have a feeling of the rightness of their position that doesn't allow for growth or education or change and moderation says, ‘well, I think I'm right, but I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise if you can show me.’ So I guess that's where I think I am on moderation. (Interview, 17 November 2009)
A senior KTRM office-holder and former chairman of the Johnson County Republicans echoed many of these sentiments when he explained to me how moderate Republicans differed from the Party's right wing:
Moderates recognise – moderates don't like this battle [between GOP conservatives and moderates] for the most part. You know, we don't like this battle. It's counterproductive. It's a waste of time. This battle's not about policy; it's about power and, for the most part, what I see – I mean this is a very biased perspective and may not be true – but for the most part, from what I see, moderates are interested in passing public policy, implementing public policy that is good for the state, you know, whatever the good for the state – whatever we think ‘good for the state’ means. I think that what, you know, what separates centrists, or what separates moderates or whatever you want to call [them] from the Right Wing, is the number of ‘shades of grey’ you see in the world, you know, the number of ‘shades of grey’ you see in the issues. And the Right Wing tends to see things as ‘black and white’, there's only –there's no grey in the world, you're ‘black or white’ and ‘you are either 100% with me or you are against me’. … Moderates tend to see things in ‘shades of grey’, you know. There's moderates – centrists, whatever, understand that politics is the art of compromise, politics is the art of getting as much as you can for your agenda without crossing any bright red lines in the sand … and looking for ‘win win’ solutions – not ‘win lose’ solutions – but ‘win win’ solutions where everybody gets something that they want and nobody gets everything that they want. (Interview, 30 November 2009)
According to this individual, moderate Republicans define themselves not just in terms of an interest in public policy that promotes a public good (what is ‘good for the state’). They also recognize that issues are complex and demand dialogue and reflection. Furthermore, moderates value compromise and are prepared to embrace what might be called a ‘politics of sacrifice’ (cf. Allen, 2004; see also Holmwood, this volume) in which citizens agree to ‘get something that they want’ while accepting that ‘nobody gets everything that they want’.
Returning to the words of the retired university administrator quoted earlier, it is difficult to participate in such a politics if one is unable to ‘see good in people of opposite persuasion’. Put simply, moderation demands that judgement is deferred and held long enough so that one can listen to the views of someone who might be considered a ‘stranger’ to one's views. This point was emphasized by an employee of the Mainstream Coalition, who explained to me how her identity as a political moderate emerged as a way of engaging family, friends and peers when she decided to ‘come out’ publicly about her sexuality:
I think some of why I might identify as a ‘moderate’ more than I would a ‘liberal’ or a ‘lefty’ today is because I think there's something to listening to somebody you disagree with and still respecting them and hearing them that was very important in my ‘coming out’ life and turned out to be something that works well. I mean, people like it when they get respected and so I have a relationship with people all across these lines. … You can look at my Facebook life and tell that I have a very interesting group of people who themselves would maybe not hang out with each other. (Interview, 4 November 2009)
This involves a commitment to being ‘pragmatic’ that extends beyond an instrumental approach to doing politics, to affirm and enable the forging of (new) social relations:
[That's] what it seemed to me: it was just pragmatic, made sense and it didn't bother me. Now, I need to say that I have to be honest that I don't know that I'm pragmatic enough that if that involved me having to make peace with someone who wanted to teach Creation in [the] science classroom, for example – I mean there are some places I can't go. But … I don't think that would make me a non-moderate. … I do have a line, but maybe I just discovered that my line was movable and maybe in a different place than most people would have thought it was. … I didn't have any trouble going out to western Kansas and supporting Sally Cauble [for the Kansas State Board of Education], who's a Republican and been one all her life … You know, it made sense to me and I trusted Sally Cauble as a human being. I mean, I got … to know a lot of the candidates. So I do have a sense of them as human beings and that's a good thing … I don't care what party Sally Cauble belongs to – I just don't! So yeah, maybe that makes me a moderate too, yeah. (Interview, 4 November 2009)
From the testimony of the individuals quoted in this section, it is possible to begin to discern a set of practices and values that, taken together, could be said to resemble a rudimentary activist theory of moderation. Placing value on the maintenance of diverse social, political and professional networks, political moderates consistently highlight the need for civility, compromise, pragmatism and reason in public discourse. Moreover, they are motivated, in part, by an underlying, occasionally openly expressed, optimism about the power of dialogue to forge new relations amongst those who may be politically opposed (cf. Curtis, this volume) and generate a sense of common purpose and even community. However, such optimism is tempered by an acknowledgement of the fragility of social relations and their limits. The anxieties underlying the above testimony points to those qualities of contemporary publics that are more properly understood as contingent, negotiated and temporal. How to render moderate values operational in a divided politics remains the central question that drives both my ethnographic research and the activism of the moderates I encountered in Kansas. I will return to this question shortly.
Democracy begins at home
I suggest, then, that moderation should not be caricatured as political capitulation or as a doctrine devoid of moral commitment, intellectual coherence or courage. Rather, I argue that moderation is better grasped as a disciplined engagement with divided publics. Conceived primarily as a dialogue open to learning from others, this conception of moderation draws on an older intellectual tradition of American pragmatism and, specifically, the philosopher John Dewey. Writing between the two world wars, Dewey worried about the breakdown of community during a tumultuous period of rapid economic, political and social change that invites comparison with contemporary transformations in American democracy and society (see Antonio, this volume). Noting that ‘individuals at present find themselves in the grip of immense forces whose workings and consequences they have no power of affecting’, Dewey argues for a democratic politics grounded in associational, community life, which can mitigate the worst effects of dramatic social change by taking proper account of its consequences:
The situation calls emphatic attention to the need for face-to-face associations, whose interactions with one another may offset if not control the dread impersonality of the sweep of present forces. There is a difference between a society, in the sense of an association, and a community. Electrons, atoms and molecules are in association with one another. Nothing exists in isolation anywhere throughout nature. Natural associations are conditions for the existence of a community, but a community adds the function of communication in which emotions and ideas are shared as well as joint undertakings engaged in. Economic forces have immensely widened the scope of associational activities. But it has done so largely at the expense of the intimacy and directness of communal group interests and activities. (Dewey, 1989: 122)
Many of the moderate activists I interviewed would share Dewey's commitment to community as a building block – the prerequisite – to democracy. In addition, they would likely also share his anxiety about its ‘dislocation and unsettlement’ as a result of the unfettered growth of ‘economic forces’ and industrialism':
Vital and thorough attachments are bred only in the intimacy of an intercourse which is of necessity restricted in range. … Is it possible to restore the reality of the less communal organizations and to penetrate and saturate their members with a sense of local community life? … There is no substitute for the vitality and depth of close and direct intercourse and attachment. … Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community. (Dewey, 1954 [1927]: 212–213)
Importantly, Dewey locates his formulation of democracy in an intellectual and political tradition inspired by one of America's Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson. Often claimed by those arguing for ‘states rights versus federal power’, Jefferson remains misunderstood, according to Dewey, who argues that while ‘he stood for state action as a barrier against excessive power at Washington, … in his theoretical writings chief importance is attached to local self-governing units on something like the New England town-meeting plan’ (Dewey, 1989: 121).
This formulation of democracy certainly resonates with the views of the moderate activists I interviewed, such as the former university administrator for whom ‘how you feel about your local community’ remained an important test for prospective candidates soliciting his support. But Dewey is keen to emphasize that, for Jefferson, American democracy is ‘moral through and through: in its foundations, its methods, its ends’ (Dewey, 1989: 119). Democracy is not ‘technical, abstract, narrowly political nor materially utilitarian’ (Dewey, 1989: 124) but, rather, a moral project, the ends of which – ‘the rights of man [sic] – not of men in the plural’ – are unchangeable, ‘not the forms and mechanisms through which inherent moral claims are realized that are to persist without change’ (Dewey, 1989: 120). This opens space for constitutional innovation:
As believers in democracy we have not only the right but the duty to question existing mechanisms of, say, suffrage and to inquire whether some functional organization would not serve to formulate and manifest public opinion better than the existing methods. It is not irrelevant to the point that a score of passages could be cited in which Jefferson refers to the American Government as an experiment. (Dewey, 1989: 121)
Many of the moderate activists I interviewed would likely concur with Dewey's affirmation of Jefferson's view that American democracy is a moral project concerned primarily with the promotion of civil rights. 9 These rights, as the testimony of the moderates quoted above would suggest, can best be promoted and protected through forms of associational life found in the face-to-face community, which is ‘small enough so that all its members could have direct communication with one another and take care of all community affairs’ (Dewey, 1989: 122). Of course, with a population of less than three million spread across a large rural area, endorsing the primacy of local community in democratic decision-making has political currency in a state like Kansas. ‘I studied all the works of Thomas Jefferson back … in Watertown in a humanities class’, the retired pastor from western Kansas quoted earlier told me. ‘He's probably the most brilliant political philosopher our country ever generated. … [If] you want to preach something that will tell you how far we've come from our Republican – our true, our Republican – heritage, read the first inaugural address of Thomas Jefferson and he outlines the ten principles of our Republic: we've come a long way from those principles’ (Interview, 17 November 2009).
Moderation and salvage ethnography
‘With all of its flaws and failures’, the historian George Kabaservice asks, ‘why should anyone lament the passing of moderate Republicanism?’ The answer, he says, is that ‘moderates upheld values and positions that are no longer adequately represented in American politics’ (Kabaservice, 2012: 398). Several of the values Kabaservice (2012: 399–400) associates with moderate Republicanism – advocacy of effective, good government; a commitment to balancing diverse interests and a pragmatism coupled with suspicion of ideological extremism; the role of civility in politics; the importance of civil liberties and the value of meritocracy – are validated in the testimony of the moderate activists I have quoted in this article. More importantly, however, for Republican moderates in Kansas, these values are grounded in a Jeffersonian commitment to American democracy as a moral project. This project places central value on the primacy of civil rights realized through an affirmation of community, deliberating together in the management, and self-correcting, of its affairs and attending to face-to-face social relations in an effort to overcome difference. These values, I would argue, are worth salvaging as individuals and communities confront the anxieties, challenges and upheavals that are already characterizing twenty-first century life in America (cf. Antonio, this volume). And for moderation, this instinctive understanding of democracy as a quintessentially moral project is what generates its enduring, evocative power, especially in politically and socially divisive times.
If moderate Republicanism has ‘crumbled as a political force in Congress’, it is worth noting that moderate Republicans ‘have not vanished from the earth’; as recently as 2008, a Washington Post/ABC election exit poll ‘found that fully 10 percent of the electorate described themselves as moderate Republicans’ (Kabaservice, 2012: 392). This is potentially a significant number in electoral terms, especially when combined with those voters who identify themselves as moderate Democrats (18 per cent of the electorate) and moderate independents (16 per cent). Even in Kansas, which according to the Economist (2010) has now turned ‘blood red’ as conservative Republicans swept moderates and Democrats aside in recent successive primary and general elections, moderation continues to exert a powerful presence in the conservative Republican imagination. I learned this during the 2010 GOP primary, when one socially conservative Republican campaigning for Sam Brownback's Senate vacancy, Todd Tiahrt, accused fellow conservative and primary rival Jerry Moran of being a ‘sporadic moderate’ in a widely distributed mailer. One of the unintended consequences of Tiahrt's ill-conceived leaflet was that many of the moderate Republicans I had interviewed, who were otherwise disinterested in a primary contest in which there was no self-identified moderate candidate, discreetly rallied to Moran's candidacy. He went on to win the GOP primary by 5,000 votes. Even when moderate voices appear absent in public debate, moderates still matter.
Furthermore, moderation offers possibilities and resources unavailable to the political militant, enabling activists to extend their reach deep into constituencies where extremists cannot go. This evocative potential of moderation is revealed in those very instances when Fox News, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh indulge in unflinching, inflammatory condemnation of moderates and moderation. Vital to right-wing conservatives seeking to ‘pull rank’ and reinforce pre-existing (but unstable) political and sectarian divisions, such talk points starkly to the discursive limits of political extremism, which must always maintain vigilance against those individuals within one's ideological ranks who fail in their commitment to the collective cause and may harbour the desire to reach out and forge relations with one's opponents. Militancy is, after all, exhausting (cf. Smith, 2011b).
During my fieldwork, I encountered evidence to suggest that even amongst religious conservatives who might be assumed to support the Christian Right, moderation can enlist activists and support. An office-holder in the Johnson County Republican Party described himself to me as ‘a moderate that has “social conservative” values’ (Interview, 27 July 2010). Before engaging with GOP politics in the 2000s, he had enjoyed a long career as an evangelical preacher on radio and television in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area. An opponent of abortion, he was approached to stand against a moderate, pro-choice incumbent state legislator in the 2004 GOP primary. He told me the story of ‘the “tearful couch talk” at 11.30 at night in June of 2004':
[They] showed up on my doorstep two days before the filing deadline, asking me to run against … the State Representative … They sat here on my couch and one of them actually cried. That was quite a moment for me: one, that someone would think that I could run and serve in that way; but two, that someone was so impassioned, he would sit on my couch until 11.30pm and cry over how critically important it was that I file, run and beat this pro-choice representative. So … I said to them on the couch, I said, ‘I've got stakeholders.’ But it did put a thought in the back of my mind, you know, ‘you could do that’ … [At] the same time, when they challenged me to that, I started thinking, ‘now, why would I run against a guy like [the State Representative]?’ I'd never even met him! … So, I called [him] and I said, ‘We have met’ – but I didn't really know him – ‘can we do coffee?’ ‘Sure!’ So we started with a coffee, that began a relationship where we began having coffee about once a month and at a certain point I decided, ‘you know what? Why would I run against a guy that I like?’ I found him to be quite thoughtful … (Interview, 14 July 2010)
Although the two men held opposing views on abortion, they found that they shared common ground on the issue of public funding for education. A couple of years later, the former television preacher decided to stand for the seat, but this time with the endorsement of the state legislator, who was retiring from politics. When he arrived at the statehouse in Topeka for his first legislative session, this self-described moderate ‘with “social conservative” values’ continued on his journey of moderation:
[When] I was in the House, I didn't really feel like I had a party. Seriously. I have a theological perspective. If I wanted to find my moorings with people who are ‘like mind’ theologically, they were hateful and vindictive and mean spirited and I didn't want to hang out around them. I didn't want to have that stigma. Seriously. They're an embarrassment, to the name of Christ. And to claim Jesus as their Lord and Saviour and behave in such a mean spirited way, they're not typical of what I think a Christian should be and that's theologically. I came back to my church and I talked to one of the key businessmen there and I said, ‘I don't – the people who I should have the most in common with theologically, I don't want to be around them.’ He said, ‘… I would propose to you that you don't have a theology that's common with them.’ And I went, ‘OK.’ … I had another man that put his hands on my shoulder and said, ‘… when you go to Topeka,’ – he's Lebanese – ‘when you go to Topeka, don't hang out with the Christians, hang out with the other guys. That's what Jesus did – he hung out with the sinners!’ That's very crude, very blunt. (Lebanese, you know, speak your mind.) [He] said, ‘the Christians – they don't want you and they don't need you.’ And so I did. I mean … I tried to be friends with what we call [the] ‘Hard Right’ but I didn't go to their Monday morning club … and get the list of things that we were voting on that week and how the people in Wichita that have all the big money wanted us to vote. … I didn't go join that Club and that was the first sign that I wasn't going to comply with their little culture and some people just kind of wrote me off right then, ‘cause I didn't come into their little circle … [So] I wound up hanging out most of the time with 22 moderate Republicans because they were supportive of education. (Interview, 27 July 2010)
In telling his story, the evangelical preacher affirmed the values of moderation identified by other activists, in particular, taking account (consideration) of the perspective of an opponent's point of view and ‘seeing good in people of opposite persuasion’. He also placed positive emphasis on forging face-to-face relations, with those he had initially assumed would be political friends as well as strangers. Importantly, his decision to reach out to GOP legislators who no doubt initially viewed him with some suspicion, as a result of his socially conservative religious views, was made collaboratively, in dialogue with others from his church community. This is moderation as operation, producing social effects that were sometimes as surprising to this particular individual as it was for the 22 moderate Republican legislators he befriended as a result.
Earlier, I used the testimony of my ethnographic subjects in Kansas to describe a rudimentary activist theory of moderation. I then drew on the philosophical writings of John Dewey, inspired by Thomas Jefferson's ideas on American democracy and civil rights, to re-cast moderation as a moral project employing a set of practices and values that speak to the vitality of community-making and social ties. Part of the strength of these individual practices and values is that moderation, as an activist theory, does not have a monopoly over them. Conservatives, liberals and socialists (yes, even in Kansas!) can equally express anxieties about the decline of civility in public discourse or complain about the lack of bipartisan working in Congress. However, these values belong to moderation, nonetheless, as they promote practices – disciplines – of engagement, with opponents and others, across and between divisions of faith, politics and, potentially, race (cf. Allen, 2004). Moderation might therefore be more compellingly conceived as a critique of ideological excess, a conceptual and practical resource with which citizens and communities can challenge and disable bigotry and extremism. At such moments, the potential for publics to be reconfigured and created anew as activist publics, capable of moderating politics, religion and the market, can be realized.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article draws on field research, the various stages of which have been supported by the British Academy, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Leverhulme Trust. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Midwest Sociology Society annual meetings in St Louis (2011) and Chicago (2013) as well as a Departmental seminar at Kansas University. I am grateful for comments and feedback from Bob Antonio and John Holmwood.
While no review of this scholarship can be comprehensive, some interesting examples published in the last couple of decades include Andrew (1997), Berlet and Lyons (2000), Bjerre-Poulsen (2002), Diamond (1989, 1995), Frank (2005), Hacker and Pierson (2005), Hardisty (1999), Klatch (1999), Mann and Ornstein (2012), Micklethwait and Wooldridge (2004), 
.
This term is attributed to , who critiqued early American ethnographers and colonial anthropologists in the British Empire and elsewhere for their interest in collecting ‘ethnographic salvage’ in the form of ‘native’ cultures that were thought, at the time, to be heading for extinction as a result of the encroachment of ‘Western civilization’.
My fieldwork in Kansas is ongoing. To date, I have conducted approximately 50 face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with grassroots activists engaged in moderate politics. My approach follows , who interviewed activists that had been engaged with New Left and New Right politics in the 1960s to build a picture of their life histories in order to identify common themes and values in their testimony. On average, these interviews have lasted about 60–90 minutes and focused on the ideas, narratives, personal experiences and values of those whom I interviewed. On rare occasions, I have interviewed a couple of activists together (eg a husband and wife), though most have been recorded with individuals in their own homes or workplaces (and often over coffee). I remain grateful to all those who have agreed to an interview in the past, for sharing what was often very personal and, occasionally, painful testimony with me.
The Republican Leadership Council has since been disbanded as a national organization, although some of its state chapters (eg California) persevere.
Unlike the GOP Club and KTRM, Mainstream Coalition is committed to bipartisan working and therefore supports both moderates in Republican Party primary elections as well as Democrats challenging conservative Republicans in general elections.
Mark Parkinson later defected to the Democrats. He was appointed Democratic Governor of Kansas in 2009 following the resignation of Governor Kathleen Sebelius, who was in turn appointed US Secretary of Health and Human Services following the election of President Barack Obama. He did not seek re-election in 2010.
Several activists who had been involved with KTRM later worked for the Kansas Values Institute and the Senate Majority PAC, both of which unsuccessfully supported moderates in the 2012 Republican primary elections.
Some, though not all, KTRM supporters rejected the idea that they were ‘moderates’, fearing this label implied that they were ideologically ‘less Republican’ than their conservative opponents. They preferred to call themselves ‘traditional Republicans’. However, despite this, they would often slip into using the labels ‘moderate’ and ‘conservative’ to describe the dividing lines in Kansas Republican politics and would often identify their politics with what I describe as ‘moderate values’.
Dewey notes that, for Jefferson, personal rights even trump property rights: ‘The Jeffersonian principle of equality of rights without special favor to any one justifies giving supremacy to personal rights when they come into conflict with property rights’ (Dewey, 1989: 123–124).