The Middle Way Through America’s Political Wilderness

Political extremes dominate the conversation despite representing a small minority. Reviving democratic discourse requires a bold recommitment to moderation.

A Note from the Editor: As America approaches its semiquincentennial in 2026, FAIR is launching “The American Experience,” a monthly Substack series exploring the fundamental question: “What does it mean to be American in 2025?” This series will coincide with the launch of FAIR’s American Experience Curriculum and examine how our founding principles apply to modern realities, showcase the civil discourse skills our students desperately need, and demonstrate why balanced education matters more than ever in our polarized moment. Please enjoy FAIR Advisor Greg Thomas’s contribution to the series:

In these fractured times, when American democracy faces unprecedented challenges from both within and without, I declare myself a radical moderate. This may sound like an oxymoron—how can one be both radical and moderate simultaneously? Yet in our current environment of extreme polarization, where the loudest voices often represent the narrowest perspectives, choosing moderation has become perhaps the most radical act of all. It is a stance that demands we embrace what is needed most: a full and radical commitment to democratic discourse itself.

When I describe myself as a radical moderate, I am not advocating for the wishy-washy centrism of those who cannot make up their minds. Rather, I invoke something closer to the Buddhist “Middle Way” or Aristotle’s “golden mean”—a principled position that recognizes extremes as both excessive and deficient. The “radical” component of my identity reflects the courage required to hold this ground in an age when nuance is mistaken for weakness and complexity is dismissed as indecisiveness.

This positioning has become radical precisely because a tiny but vocal minority has hijacked our political landscape, as research reveals. According to the 2018 More in Common “Hidden Tribes” study, those holding extreme views—combining both the far-right “devoted conservatives” (6% of the population) and far-left “progressive activists” (8%)—represent merely 14% of Americans. Yet these groups wield disproportionate influence, particularly on social media, where 70% of progressive activists and 56% of devoted conservatives regularly share political content.

The remaining 86% of Americans—the exhausted, silent majority—find themselves without adequate representation in our national conversation.

The data reveals something even more troubling: these extreme groups share disturbing similarities beyond their outsized voices. For instance, research from Queensland University of Technology found that both radical left and alt-right adherents score significantly higher on measures of the “Dark Triad”—psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism—as well as authoritarianism and entitlement. In contrast, centrists who hold pro-social values and respect others’ choices showed no correlation with these antisocial traits.

The urgency of reclaiming the center becomes clear when we consider recent events that have shaken American democracy to its core. When marauding looters dedicated to chaos rioted in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder, a populist mob rose from within the body politic on January 6, 2021, and algorithms are engineered to exploit and widen political divisions for profit, the stakes could not be higher. More recently, the Democrats, currently the minority party in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, have been wrestling with whether to tack towards the center, for example, Josh Shapiro, or the populist Democratic Socialism of NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. For their part, MAGA Republicans have been grappling with the antisemitism and white nationalism of Nick Fuentes and his Groypers.

Add Large Language Models (LLMs) to the mix, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) beginning to replace white collar knowledge workers, and the stage is set for social and economic unrest and deepening psychological anxiety across generations. In this context, radical moderation doesn’t represent compromise for its own sake, but a fierce commitment to preserving the pluralistic values fundamental to our multiethnic democratic experiment.

My radical moderation seeks to leverage core values from left, right, and center, while also recognizing that worldviews such as traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism contribute essential viewpoints while harboring dangerous shadow elements.

Traditionalism honors religion, family, and patriotism, but risks devolving into ethnocentrism and discrimination. Modernism champions scientific advancement and economic progress while potentially disregarding inequality and environmental destruction. Progressive postmodernism rightly emphasizes social justice and environmental protection, yet can slide into rigid identity politics that undermine individual liberty and other Enlightenment values.

The integrative approach I embrace respects the good in all these worldviews while remaining vigilant about their limitations. At the same time, I’m pragmatic in my embrace of key values and aspirations of the left and right. I lean center-left on some matters, sharing the progressive vision of expanding America’s social contract to include everyone. At the same time, I align center-right, valuing individual liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise systems that reward entrepreneurship. In fact, in local elections in my town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, I have cast votes on both sides of the aisle. This is not ideological inconsistency, but principled flexibility coupled with the ability to think independently rather than simply echo partisan talking points.

Perhaps most importantly, radical moderation recognizes that structural and systemic change requires not only political action, but inner personal work and skillful ways of relating across differences. As economist Glenn Loury reminds us, “All human development takes place inside social institutions... in between persons in the context of human interaction—the family, the school, the peer group.” The quality of our connections creates the context in which developmental resources reach individuals and communities.

This insight draws me to the Omni-American wisdom of Albert Murray and the blues idiom—what Murray called “affirmation in the face of difficulty, improvisation in the face of challenge.” Murray described this attitude as acknowledging that “life is a low-down dirty shame yet confronting that fact with perseverance, with humor, and above all, with elegance.” This stance of tragic optimism, also posited by cultural critic Stanley Crouch and psychologist Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, offers a template for democratic engagement that neither denies life’s difficulties nor surrenders to despair.

The journey toward such wisdom requires the cultural skill to facilitate deep democratic conversations across worldview codes, from indigenous and traditional to modern and postmodern. Having lived in alignment with each of these codes at different points in my 62 years—from Pentecostal fervor in my teens to an Afrocentric spiritual community in my twenties, and from critical theory graduate study in my thirties to the integration of jazz, business, and philosophical thought I exemplify today—I’ve learned that authentic dialogue requires both intellectual rigor and emotional intelligence.

The path forward also demands that independents—now representing 34% of Americans according to recent polling, with 60% identifying as moderates—find our collective voice and collaborative power. We must resist the pressure to always choose one side in manufactured culture wars and instead model the respectful disagreement democracy requires. This means exercising what philosopher and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls “dialogos”—conversations that seek understanding rather than victory.

Such dialogue becomes possible when we honestly admit that most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, experience the pain of loss and the blues of life. Indeed, this is the human condition. So, whatever our leanings, and even while rejecting the views of extremists, we should relate to other Americans with respect and deep empathy, grounded in shared cultural citizenship and civic leadership. This is not naïve optimism but hard-won wisdom about what democracy actually requires to function.

In our current environment of extreme polarization, fed by media bifurcation and algorithmic manipulation, speaking for the exhausted majority in the middle has become a radical act. It requires courage to stand against the thought-policing that characterizes both extremes, where expressing openness to opposing views brings backlash from one’s own cohort. But this is precisely what democratic citizenship demands: the willingness to think independently, speak truthfully, and listen generously.

The choice before us is stark: we can allow America to be torn apart by small factions representing loud, online minorities but wielding outsized influence, or we can reclaim the democratic center where most Americans actually reside. The latter path requires embracing radical moderation—not as mushy compromise but as fierce commitment to pluralistic democracy.

As Thomas Chatterton Williams writes in the Afterword of Summer of Our Discontent:

Genuine liberals, as well as their moderate and center-right partners, have no choice but to reclaim the abandoned moral high ground. We must identify and disown the means of extremism—even when they manifest themselves in pursuit of ends we may agree with. That is the most basic prerequisite for democracy.

If politics is the art of the possible, then the extremes have made real politics nearly impossible. They have reduced our national conversation to rhetorical warfare, which has morphed into political violence against politicians on both sides. Sadly, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated this past September. This horrific predicament of violent behavior and illiberal rhetoric serves no one except those who profit from division. But if we independents and moderates work together, increase our numbers, and raise our voices against this destructive polarization, we can move society toward our shared values of civil discourse, mutual respect, and democratic problem-solving.

The stakes are too high for anything less than this radical commitment to a democratic center. Our republic’s survival depends not on choosing sides in culture wars but on reclaiming the middle ground where “E Pluribus Unum”—out of many, one—remains more than a motto. It can become our lived reality, but only if we have the radical courage to be moderate in an age of extremes.

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