898: Moderation on the Merits
Noah Smith connecting effective politics with policy
Economist
has a rundown on the current debate over Democratic candidates moderating that includes a hearty case for moderate policy.Here is an excerpt from “Moderation is good for its own sake: Winning elections is important. But so is serving the people.”
We pick up where his analysis of the WAR debate leaves off:
This is an interesting technical debate, with some pretty high stakes. Winning elections is very important, as the consequences of Democrats’ defeats in 2016 and 2024 have made plain. But at the same time, we live in a representative democracy, and politicians aren’t perfect avatars of the popular will; they have a lot of leeway to make policy choices that are better or worse for their constituents. And they have a moral responsibility to help their constituents instead of hurting them.
Politics matters, but policy matters too.
And when it comes to policy, moderation tends to produce better results. This is because the effects of policy are highly uncertain; when you make big changes to the status quo, it’s a lot riskier than making small changes. Sometimes you need to take big risks — for example, in a war or other acute emergency, where the status quo will clearly lead to disaster in a short space of time. But most of the time, and along most dimensions, the world isn’t in an emergency, and so you should take risk into account.
That doesn’t mean big policy changes are always bad; often, they’re the right thing to do. It just means that unless you’re in an emergency, you should be careful about making big abrupt policy changes, and you should demand clear and compelling reasons before making them. In other words, moderation isn’t always the answer, but it has some value.
An example was fervor for police defunding in 2020. A lot of progressives, including Kamala Harris, AOC, and Zohran Mamdani, called for deep cuts to police funding. But the balance of evidence strongly indicates that a robust police presence is very important for deterring crime. And logic and evidence make the mechanisms of this deterrence clear — more cops means crime carries a greater risk of arrest, cops deter crime in public spaces just by standing there, and cops physically remove hardcore criminals from society.
Harris, Mamdani, and the other Democrats who hopped on the activist bandwagon in 2020 should have been more circumspect. Not only did this turn out to be bad politics, but it was bad policy as well — and a rapid return to more robust police presences probably helped tamp down the crime wave of 2020-21. Even if Democrats could have won some elections in 2020 by yelling “Defund the police”, the few cases of actual police defunding probably resulted in more Democratic constituents getting killed.
Another example is fiscal policy during the pandemic era. The CARES Act during the pandemic was radical, and was good policy overall — but that was an emergency, where doing nothing clearly would have resulted in personal financial devastation for millions of Americans. In 2021 the danger of devastation had receded, yet Biden still passed a very large pandemic relief bill. Moderates like Olivier Blanchard warned that a bill of this size would lead to inflation, but these warnings were ignored. And Biden’s American Rescue Plan probably did lead to increased inflation, bringing down real incomes for millions of Americans. That had negative electoral consequences in 2024, but it was also just bad for regular people.
Recent Democratic presidential primaries have been won by the candidate promising a form of moderation. Only 898 days until the first results are in for 2028.
Read Smith’s full piece here:
