Are Moderates the Last Idealist?

Moderation has come to sound like cowardice in an age that rewards extremes. To stand in the center is to invite charges of timidity or betrayal; the loudest treat restraint, compromise as weakness.

Yet this caricature misunderstands moderation. It is not indecision, but discipline—a moral and political craft grounded in realism about human nature and humility before complexity.

Yet this caricature misunderstands moderation. It is not indecision, but discipline—a moral and political craft grounded in realism about human nature and humility before complexity.

Its idealism lies not in imagining a perfect world but in maintaining a livable one. The moderate wagers on persuasion over coercion, endurance over purity, and the slow repair of institutions over the ecstasies of revolution, old or new.

From Aristotle’s ethics of balance to Madison’s architecture of restraint and the tragic wisdom of Berlin, Weber, and Aron, moderation has always been the virtue that allows freedom to survive itself.

The suspicion of moderation begins with a misunderstanding of its classical source.

The suspicion of moderation begins with a misunderstanding of its classical source. In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defined virtue not as a mere habit of obedience but as hexis—a state of active equilibrium in the soul. Translating hexis as “habit” has long misled readers: it suggests routine or passivity, when Aristotle meant something closer to “poised readiness.” Virtue, for him, is not the suppression of impulse but its intelligent calibration. Each virtue occupies the space between two distortions: courage stands between cowardice and recklessness, generosity between stinginess and prodigality.

Yet this “mean” is not a numerical midpoint—as if one could divide virtue by arithmetic—but what Aristotle calls “relative to us.” Its measure depends on circumstance, character, and context, and can only be discerned through phronesis, practical wisdom.

To live “in the mean,” then, is not to settle for compromise, but to exercise mastery—the art of holding steady in the swirl of competing passions. The virtuous person, Aristotle wrote, “sees truly and judges rightly,” because emotion no longer bends perception. The coward’s fear magnifies danger; the rash man’s overconfidence blinds him to it. The moderate, by contrast, perceives proportion. This balance is not a retreat from passion but a disciplined ordering of it, so that reason can guide rather than suppress desire. Moral clarity and intellectual clarity, for Aristotle, are one and the same: to think well, one must feel rightly. A disordered soul cannot judge a situation justly because it sees the world through the haze of appetite or anger.

In this sense, moderation is not a secondary virtue but the foundation of freedom itself. Before it can govern the city, the self must first govern its own storm. The equilibrium of the soul is the first republic—the inner constitution without which all others decay.

The equilibrium of the soul is the first republic—the inner constitution without which all others decay.

What Aristotle built into the soul, James Madison built into the American republic. Writing in the aftermath of the Revolution, Madison faced a confederation on the verge of collapse—states inflamed by populist passions, legislatures printing worthless money, mobs threatening courts. The experiment in self-government risked devouring itself. In Federalist No. 10, he diagnosed the root cause: faction, that “dangerous vice” inherent in the human condition, “sown in the nature of man.” Like Aristotle, he accepted that passions and inequalities could not be eradicated; they had to be governed.

“Liberty is to faction what air is to fire,” he warned; to extinguish it would destroy both. The cure, then, was not moral purification but structural restraint. Rather than wish citizens more virtuous than they are, Madison sought to design institutions that would make even self-interest serve the public good. The Constitution’s intricate machinery—its separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and extended sphere—was an act of moral realism translated into law. “Ambition,” he wrote in Federalist No. 51, “must be made to counteract ambition.”

This was not cynicism but chastened idealism: a republic sturdy enough for sinners to inhabit. Madison’s genius was to convert vice into ballast, transforming discord itself into the guardian of liberty. His system assumed conflict, channeling passions. In this way, Aristotle’s equilibrium of the soul became political architecture—the moral geometry of balance rendered as a constitution.

The twentieth century tested moderation in fire. After the twin totalitarianisms of Nazism and Communism, a generation of thinkers—Berlin, Weber, Aron, Popper, Oakeshott—undertook one of the century’s quietest acts of reconstruction: they rebuilt the moral case for restraint. Each, in his own idiom, defended the possibility of living decently amid pluralism, of seeking truth without demanding unanimity. Their project was not nostalgia for lost certainties but a new humanism shaped by tragedy—an ethic for citizens who must share a world without illusions.

Isaiah Berlin began where the ideologues had ended. Against the utopian “monism” that claimed all good things could be reconciled in one perfect order, he posited value pluralism: liberty, equality, justice, mercy—each real, each often at odds. “The belief that all good things are compatible,” he wrote, “is demonstrably false—and the attempt to make them so has filled the pages of history with blood.” Politics, for Berlin, is not redemptive but tragic: the art of managing irreconcilable goods without sanctifying any of them. “The first public obligation,” he concluded, “is to avoid extreme suffering.” The goal is not perfection but what he called “a precarious equilibrium.”

Max Weber gave this pluralism a moral spine. In his lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” delivered to a defeated and divided Germany, he distinguished between two ethics: conviction, which acts by pure principle and “leaves the outcome to God,” and responsibility, which “must answer for the foreseeable consequences” of action. The vocation of politics, Weber insisted, requires both passion and proportion—the fire of belief yoked to the discipline of realism.

Raymond Aron, watching French intellectuals excuse Stalin’s terror while scorning their own democracy, called ideology “the opium of the intellectuals.” His remedy was lucidité tragique—tragic lucidity: fidelity to flawed institutions that nonetheless permit reform. His liberalism was not complacency but vigilance against every promise of redemption through power.

Then, Karl Popper supplied the method. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, he proposed “piecemeal social engineering”—reform by trial and error, never revolution. “I don't think we can make heaven on earth,” he warned, “but we can make hell on earth a little less hellish.” His open society is humble in aim but immense in dignity: it replaces prophecy with corrigibility.

Michael Oakeshott closed the circle with style and skepticism. Politics, he wrote, is “the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together.” The Rationalist dreams of blueprints; the moderate repairs the ship while at sea. Civilization, for Oakeshott, survives through the patient art of maintenance.

Together these five forged a tragic humanism—a vision of moderation as courage, not caution: the courage to act within limits, to accept imperfection without surrendering hope. For readers of Concordia Discors Magazine, their legacy is a moral invitation. They remind us that to live freely among others is to live without final answers; that the work of liberty is not conquest but coexistence.

To defend moderation is to defend a particular anthropology and a particular politics at once. Anthropology: that human beings are glorious and limited, capable of truth yet prone to zeal. Politics: that a republic endures when it gives form to that doubleness—when the equilibrium of the soul (Aristotle) is echoed by an equilibrium of powers (Madison), and the tragic plurality of goods (Berlin) is met with responsibility for consequences (Weber), methodical corrigibility (Popper), and the patient art of maintenance (Oakeshott). Call it concordia discors: harmony by way of structured tension, a music of liberty rather than its march.

The radicalism of moderation lies precisely here: it refuses despair without indulging salvationist dreams. It wagers that arguments can still refine truth; that rivals can remain neighbors; that legitimacy grows not from victory alone but from institutions sturdy enough to absorb loss. Moderation is not a middle without content. It is a creed of civic friendship—philia politike—that binds opponents to a shared future by limiting what any one of us may do to the rest.

Moderation is not a middle without content. It is a creed of civic friendship—philia politike—that binds opponents to a shared future by limiting what any one of us may do to the rest.

If fanaticism promises direction, moderation practices memory: of human limits, of unintended effects, of the goods we must trade and the evils we must avoid. Moderation prizes institutions not because they are perfect, but because they are the only human devices that let us be wrong without being ruined. In a culture that confers honor through outrage, the quiet virtues—patience, irony, gratitude, forgiveness—become political virtues again.

Moderation prizes institutions not because they are perfect, but because they are the only human devices that let us be wrong without being ruined.

As Leonard Bernstein said of music, harmony is “a resolution that creates tension anew.” So too with liberty: it is an unending act of tuning, not a final chord.

Moderates are the patient musicians of freedom.

Moderates are the patient musicians of freedom. They keep the instruments in repair; they write with rests as well as notes; they refuse the brutal simplicity of a single theme. Their art is not to silence discord but to compose it—to turn conflict into counterpoint, so that a free people may stay in tune and the music of liberty endure. ◳