The Revenge of the Irate Moderates

I normally don't pay much attention to politics, but I think everybody was watching the Connecticut primaries to see how the voters would deal with Joe Lieberman. The big question is whether there will be an opposition party in America.

I liked the New York Times phrasing of the situation this morning:

Mr. Lieberman’s supporters have tried to depict Mr. Lamont and his backers as wild-eyed radicals who want to punish the senator for working with Republicans and to force the Democratic Party into a disastrous turn toward extremism. It’s hard to imagine Connecticut, which likes to be called the Land of Steady Habits, as an encampment of left-wing isolationists, and it’s hard to imagine Mr. Lamont, who worked happily with the Republicans in Greenwich politics, leading that kind of revolution.

The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president’s choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration’s contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.

Yet while all this has been happening, the political discussion in Washington has become a captive of the Bush agenda. Traditional beliefs like every person’s right to a day in court, or the conviction that America should not start wars it does not know how to win, wind up being portrayed as extreme. The middle becomes a place where senators struggle to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him. Attempting to regain the real center becomes a radical alternative.

When Mr. Lieberman told The Washington Post, “I haven’t changed. Events around me have changed,” he actually put his finger on his political problem. His constituents felt that when the White House led the country into a disastrous international crisis and started subverting the nation’s basic traditions, Joe Lieberman should have changed enough to take a lead in fighting back. Revenge of the Irate Moderates

I remember the first time I saw the sex-education curriculum that had been proposed and unanimously adopted for 8th and 10th grade Montgomery County public school students. I'd heard about the controversy, so I downloaded the document and looked it over. Read through it once, wondered, what's the problem? Read through it again. Tried to read between the lines. Looked for a "gay agenda." Looked for the part that encouraged children to experiment with sex. Looked for the part that promoted promiscuity.

What I saw was a moderate, well-reasoned, objective curriculum.

After the 2004 elections, the Recall Group organized to recall the entire school board for adopting the curriculum. It wasn't a matter of changing the content of the classes, it was about extremists taking over the school system. Failing that, they backed off and tried to badmouth the curriculum with ridiculous distortions, and ended up delaying it by confusing a judge about some background materials. This had the intended effect of destroying the district's work. It didn't fix anything, it just set everybody back a year. And cost the taxpayers a bunch of money.

Teach the Facts formed to support the school board's decision when they were under attack. We weren't asking for anything extreme, just a commonsense curriculum that presented the facts as they are understood by medicine and science. We don't have any special need to change the world, we just want to see some stability, some fairness, some truth.

Ordinary, normal, decent people are shocked by the corruption, immorality, and outright un-Americanism that has taken over our public discussions. Joe Lieberman made the mistake of going along with it, and the voters have shown that they are not willing to accept the status quo. The group that is in power now is radical, but because they are the ones in office they get to pick the topic, they establish the frame for the discussion. The effect has been mob rule, like a riot where one person smashes a window and so everybody starts smashing windows. The press has gone along with the rhetoric, and now it is common to attack moderate common sense as extreme.

No, The Times has it right. We are seeing The Revenge of the Irate Moderates. Hopefully, ordinary people will start taking their country back this year.