Moderation is not overrated

G. Elliott Morris is wrong on the internet

G. Elliott Morris published a piece last week, which I originally saw with the headline “Moderation Is Overrated,” but Substack’s A/B testing function led it to settle on “Moderation Is Not a Silver Bullet.”¹

One of my rules of internet discourse is that whenever I see people talking about how something is not a “silver bullet” or a “panacea,” I know I’ll need to take the rest with a grain of salt. This is related to the point I’ve often made about headlines telling people not to panic. Panicking is, by definition, an inappropriate emotional response to a situation. No matter how dire a situation is, it’s never correct to panic. The purpose of a “don’t panic” headline is to suggest that a situation is less dire than the writer believes the audience believes, but it cleverly skews the playing field by invoking the concept of panic. If armed gunmen kicked down the door to your house, it’s still the case that panicking would be a bad reaction. But nobody would write an article saying, “Don’t panic about the armed gunmen invading your home.” You should obviously be extremely worried in that situation!

Similarly with silver bullets and panaceas.

In the housing discourse, I often see writers and advocates on the left retreat to “upzoning is not a panacea,” and then pivot to talking about families whose incomes are so low that they simply cannot afford decent market-rate housing, no matter how unconstrained the supply side is.

Those families certainly do exist, but this response raises the question of whether anyone is denying it. There are certainly die-hard right-wingers who oppose the idea of giving poor people any kind of assistance. But that’s not what any YIMBY operating in Democratic Party politics thinks. Instead, we’ll tell you that things like Section 8 vouchers and other housing assistance programs go further if you upzone. We will tell you that broad upzoning makes it easier to build social housing. And we’ll tell you that zoning for more market rate housing improves your city’s fiscal condition and makes it easier to afford social services. But we’re not actually saying it’s a silver bullet.

Which is all just to say that I liked Morris’s first headline better, because I think it got at the core point.

Ideology and issue-positioning are not the only things that matter in politics. But it seems to me that these other things — “rizz,” “vibes,” fundraising, the ability to inspire people, organizing — are all frequently discussed and, if anything, somewhat overrated relative to ideology.

Republicans’ best performing Senate candidate in 2024 was Larry Hogan. Susan Collins is viewed as so difficult to beat that Democrats are struggling to recruit a quality 2026 candidate against her. Is that because Hogan and Collins are so good at vertical video? Or is it because they have credibly established brands as moderates and independent thinkers? I think the answer is obvious, and that a lot of very smart people have put a lot of brainpower and hard work into obscuring this obvious answer.

It matters a lot that moderates do better

I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds of Morris’s analysis, because I think that far and away the most important takeaway is that according to his own model, moderates are better at winning elections.