Why Not Moderation?
A conversation with Aurelian Craiutu about how to save liberal democracy
I am just back from a political trip to Germany and about to go off to California with another German parliamentary group, but while I’m back in DC I wanted to post the transcript of an interview I did a few weeks ago with my good friend Aurelian Craiutu. As those who listened to our Vital Center podcast discussion from early 2022 may remember, he’s a professor of political science at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he’s affiliated with the Russian and East European Institute, the Institute for West European Studies, and the Ostrom Workshop. He is also a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.
Aurelian’s scholarly interests are extremely wide-ranging, but he has had a particular concentration on French political and social thought, European and American political ideologies, comparative political theory, and democratic consolidation. He is the author and editor of several books on modern political thought, among which are two of the most essential works on moderation to have appeared, in my humble estimation, in several centuries: A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830 and Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes.
I wanted to talk to Aurelian about his new book, Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals. It’s a deeply informed defense of moderation but one that’s aimed at a general rather than a scholarly audience. It takes the form of a series of imaginary letters between the narrator — a passionate moderate, much like Aurelian himself — and two young radicals, one from the right and one from the left. Aurelian not only draws on his intellectual and philosophical engagement with moderate traditions from previous centuries, he also asks key questions about the fate of moderation in the present moment: Why is moderation seemingly a losing political strategy now? Why are young people increasingly drawn away from moderation toward progressive illiberalism or populist authoritarianism? Does moderation still matter? I hope readers will enjoy Aurelian’s book as well as this transcript of our conversation, which has been condensed and lightly edited.
Geoff Kabaservice
Welcome, Aurelian!
Aurelian Craiutu
Thanks for having me on your Substack.
Geoff Kabaservice
I am excited to talk to you as always, but I’m especially pleased that we get a chance to talk about your newly released book from Cambridge University Press, Why Not Moderation?: Letters to Young Radicals. The limited time that we have today can’t begin to cover the richness of your treatment of moderation in this book, even though it’s a quick read at only a little more than 200 pages. But I hope that we can get a sense, even in a relatively brief discussion, of what the principal themes of the book are, and then readers can (and should!) go out and buy the book for themselves. I feel a bit disingenuous in asking you about the origins of this book since I was present at the creation, so to speak. But nonetheless, what can you tell us about how this terrific new book came to be?
Aurelian Craiutu
Well, it's supposed to be a trade book, addressed to a general, educated public interested in political issues, so it's not a book only for academics properly speaking. It addresses an important topic, which is how to save our liberal democracy today. I start from an assumption that is widely shared today. Our democracy is in trouble today, our institutions are fragile, and we need to rethink why we should care about liberal democracy and how to best defend it from its critics and enemies.
Geoff Kabaservice
Its origin was as a more straightforwardly epistolary work, but you changed the format from being simply a series of letters into a work with more elements of dialogue between you and your two young radicals, Lauren from the left and Rob from the right — which is a helpful mnemonic, by the way.
Aurelian Craiutu
The idea of writing a trade book on moderation actually came from… you, as you may recall, so I'm grateful to you for that. Inspiration also came from my father-in-law, who is not an academic and who asked me to explain in lay terms what I had been writing about in my academic books on this topic that you mentioned at the outset. But the idea of writing letters to a young audience is not new, as you know. There are some classic examples. The best ones are nonpolitical or literary, starting with Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. There are others that address political topics such as Letters to a Young Activist by Todd Gitlin and Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens.
Geoff Kabaservice
Sadly both Gitlin and Hitchens are no longer with us.
Aurelian Craiutu
Those two political books were written by prominent public intellectuals, and I’m only an academic, not a public intellectual. So I thought that I should try to find a different and livelier format for my own book. I couldn’t figure out what that would be until a friend gave me a small book written by Leo Rosten in 1971, A Trumpet for Reason, conceived as a series of questions and answers about the political events in 1968 (the book didn’t come out until a few years later). I enjoyed it very much and was fascinated by its lively and spirited tone. It was unpredictable and vivacious.
Rosten’s book suggested the path forward to avoid a monologue which would have been a dead end. I slowly figured out that a series of letters ought to be interspersed with a real dialogue with two radicals, one from the left and one from the right. This is how I came up with this idea of an eclectic and dialogical book that contains a series of letters addressed to two imaginary radicals, Lauren on the left and Rob on the right, punctuated by breaks and intermezzos in which the voices of my interlocutors can be heard. This kind of dialogical structure, I think, suits the topic of moderation quite well because nobody has the monopoly of truth. As a result, the book has an inner rhythm and, I hope, remains lively from the beginning (with its trigger warning to the reader) to the very end (with the rules for radical moderates). A recent reviewer called it Socratic, which is a great compliment in my view.
Geoff Kabaservice
Lauren, in your telling, is a Bernie Sanders fan and a Democratic Socialists of America member from a secular family in Brooklyn who has been greatly impressed by the agenda of the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements. Rob, on the other hand, is from a Catholic family in the Upper Midwest who is a faithful conservative voter and espouses traditional family values. I'm curious to know whether the back-and-forth between you and these imagined young critics of moderation from the left and right in any way reflected the patterns of classroom discussions that you’ve had with your students in recent years?
Aurelian Craiutu
The answer is yes and no at the same time. I have the privilege of teaching students who are less radical than others. After all, they mostly come from the Midwest, and radicalism here is less pronounced than on the two coasts. So I looked for real articles published in left-wing and right-wing magazines: Jacobin, N+1, First Things, American Greatness. I tried to put in Lauren’s and Rob's mouths words uttered by practicing journalists and opinion writers on both the left and right. I do think some of my students share with the fictional Lauren and Rob a declining faith in the virtues of liberal democracy, a sense that our democracy is corrupt and needs a radical shift of gears. And that feeling must be addressed.
Geoff Kabaservice
In the introduction to the first letter in Why Not Moderation?, you wrote: “I was surprised to notice that for a surprisingly high number of young people today, liberal democracy is mostly a thing of the past. In their view, the old types of liberalism and conservatism have failed us, and we should not try to bring them back. What we need instead, they argue, is an entirely new political horizon beyond the old liberal democracy.”
Aurelian Craiutu
Yes, that's precisely the thesis against which my book argues, and you can find that thesis advanced by different people on both the radical left and the radical right. There are prominent voices whom I respect who put forward such ideas — such as, for example, Patrick Deneen’s very successful book Why Liberalism Failed and his more recent Regime Change. But also on the left you find prominent critics such as Sam Moyn or Pankaj Mishra who also believe that our liberal democratic horizon is obsolete, exhausted, and we need we need something new. I think that some of the young students and activists today share this belief. They believe that we need something radical, that all present institutions have lived their day, and the time has come for trying something new. It is against this idea that the book makes its argument that moderation is one way to defend liberal democracy and the open society as we know it.
As you know, I was born in Romania, and I was 23 when communism fell. As I write in one of the book’s letters at the outset, I remember very clearly what we were deprived of in the late 1980s: the basic principles of the open society, that is, free elections without violence, the absence of censorship, the ability to travel, and the rule of law. All of those things are very precious and all of them are now taken for granted by too many people in western societies. Because I grew up deprived of those principles, I think that that my personal biography explains my interest in moderation as well as my somewhat immoderate passion for this virtue about which I’ve now been writing for two decades.
Geoff Kabaservice
Your radical interlocutors Lauren and Rob advance a lacerating critique of moderation throughout the book. Although we can’t recapitulate every aspect of it here, can you tell me broadly about the critique of moderation you derived from your students as well as from the readings that you did in preparation for this book?
Aurelian Craiutu
I think the most important criticism leveled against moderation from the left is that it's not democratic enough; there are forms of moderation that condone injustice, inequalities, and unfair hierarchies. I think that is pretty clear in the 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now, I do not say that moderation is always right. In fact, I acknowledge in the book that there are different forms of moderation, some of which are problematic ones. In this regard, I agree with critics from the left that moderation sometimes can defend what is indefensible. But this doesn't mean that moderation cannot promote change and reform. As a matter of fact, there is a recent book by Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox, Gradual that makes a very good case for moderation and incrementalism. I think that what critics from the left tend to ignore is that sometimes radical reforms can be promoted over the long term through piecemeal reforms.
Geoff Kabaservice
As it happens, Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox, the authors of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age, will be speaking on my podcast soon.
Aurelian Craiutu
What a nice surprise and coincidence! Their excellent book carries an important message. The other criticism that is usually leveled against moderates is that they lack political vision, that they are wishy-washy and don't have a firm position that they can adopt and defend. That's something that I also reject in the book. Its third part is called “Do Moderates Have a Political Vision?,” and it’s a response to this question. I think that the answer is yes, and I try to show what that vision consists of.
Geoff Kabaservice
Obviously, the right would share some of the critique that you just outlined from the left. What other elements of the right critique of moderation appear in the book?
Aurelian Craiutu
I think that the most salient criticism leveled from the right is that moderates are weak, timid, indecisive, and unable to achieve political victories. I'm reminded here of a line from Rush Limbaugh that you quoted in your book on the death of moderate Republicanism more than a decade ago: “By definition, moderates can't be brave — they don't have opinions! … I mean, brave moderates? ‘Great Moderates in American History’? Show me that book.”
Geoff Kabaservice
My need to refute that quote was one of the reasons why I wrote Rule and Ruin.
Aurelian Craiutu
I think that quote gives voice to a widespread belief on the right that moderates are weak, that they cannot achieve any form of greatness. I think that’s still very much the view on the right.
Geoff Kabaservice
Barry Goldwater famously declared at the 1964 Republican National Convention that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. But you quote from some Trumpier interpreters of conservatism, such as the writers for the Claremont Review of Books, who believe that moderation is not just an ineffective but an unmanly approach to politics.
Aurelian Craiutu
This is true. And there is another criticism leveled from the right: that moderates lack moral clarity. I do talk about this in a letter in the book because I want to show that claims to moral clarity can be dangerous and self-serving. One should almost always be skeptical of anyone who claims to have total moral clarity on political issues, because political issues almost always require nuances and distinctions, and are quite complex. An obsession with absolute moral clarity may in fact become a major challenge to democratic politics. The Left is not immune to that temptation either.
Geoff Kabaservice
You've been writing about political moderation for the better part of two decades now. I wonder whether your defense of a moderation as a political vision in Part III of your book is different from what you would have said in your two previous books?
Aurelian Craiutu
I think that what I try to do in this new book is to clarify for a general audience what I had earlier written for a more limited, academic audience. But something that looms larger in Why Not Moderation? than in previous books is my defense of eclecticism.
I start each letter with an epigraph, and the letter on “Eclecticism and Pluralism” starts with a quote from Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son: “Few men are of one plain, decided colour; most are mixed, shaded, and blended; and vary as much, from different situations, as changeable silks do from different lights.” I also take my cue from Montaigne, who said that “We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.” This is, let's say, a personal defense of eclecticism in the sense that we are eclectic individuals, different personas as we move forward in life. We may change our ideas, we may come to espouse views that we had not previously embraced. It is in this sense that we are all eclectic at the individual level. The same goes for politics.
Let me explain. I think it’s important to acknowledge that in our modern society there is no central command post, there is no longer a single cockpit from where we can fly the plane. This may have been the case in the past, but not today. In modern society there are several spheres. The economic sphere follows the logic of rationality and efficiency. The political sphere tries to follow the economic sphere sometimes, but it has its own autonomous logic based on legitimacy. And then there's the cultural-religious sphere that follows its own principles, such as authenticity or truth. These are three different spheres of life, and it's important to avoid applying one principle to all of them. You need to combine principles that are partly fitting to these different spheres.
I think that this is the central idea of the book and the core of my understanding of moderation. You need political judgment to understand what principles are appropriate to which spheres and when. And I think that it's fair to say that these principles may change across time. Political judgment is needed to apply these principles in a thoughtful way.
To give an example, you may be a defender of the welfare state at some point or a defender of the small state at another. But then things change, and when the facts change, you may come to defend the opposite position for some time. And then you may switch again. There's nothing wrong with changing your views as long as the change is made necessary by reality and you don’t trade camps to join an extremist sect; fanatics often jump from one extreme position to another. It’s normal to admit that sometimes you make mistakes.
That's why my book also defends Albert Hirschman’s recommendation that you actively cultivate a “propensity to self-subversion” as a means of self-correction and testing the validity of your ideas. It's good to review your views from time to time, and to say, “Okay, I was wrong on that front. I have changed my mind because the facts didn't support my views.” I feel more strongly now than I did earlier that the defense of pluralism requires us to be self-subversive with regard to our received ideas and to be open to admitting our errors or biases.
Geoff Kabaservice
There's that famous quote attributed to John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” I think that's clearly an element of what you're describing. But when we spoke on our podcast discussion, you had talked about the need to think not just of “liberalism” but a variety of “liberalisms” in the plural. And in this book you speak of “a variety of liberal languages.” That to me also informs your conception of “the archipelago of moderation.”
Aurelian Craiutu
Absolutely. I do think that one of the limits of many books on liberalism is to assume that one can speak of liberalism in the singular, as if there were one singular language that is equally true at any point in history. I think that's false. The tradition of liberalism is a diverse one, and the same applies to moderation. That's why I like the term “archipelago of moderation,” because it shows that there are different languages, vocabularies, and themes embraced by moderates over time. Some may emphasize the institutional aspects of moderation: mixed government, checks and balances, things like that. Others may emphasize the ethics or the ethos of moderation, things like civility, prudence, and dialogue.
So, it's very important to embrace complexity when one looks at traditions as diverse as liberalism and moderation. I think that the tendency to simplify can be found in very influential books recently published on liberalism: Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and Sam Moyn’s Liberalism Against Itself. In very different ways, they both put forward a simplified thesis that doesn't pay enough attention to the nuances and internal variety of liberalism. As a historian of political thought, I believe that our task is precisely to reintroduce nuance and complexity where others try to simplify and gloss over this internal diversity of liberal languages.
Geoff Kabaservice
I'm also reminded of Shadi Hamid's recent book on The Problem of Democracy, in which he argues that the democratic element of collective self-determination is different from the liberal element of individual rights and freedoms, and democracy and liberalism are often in tension.
Aurelian Craiutu
I’m not familiar with the book, but what the author says is common knowledge. What interests me is to address the belief that that you can have a panacea, a one-size-fits-all solution to problems like that of the tensions between democracy and liberalism. I think that history, politics, and experience demonstrate beyond doubt that one-size-fits-all solutions do not exist or if they do, they are dangerous.
It is to the credit of liberalism that liberals have spoken different languages and have come up with different solutions to these questions: How much equality should we have? How much liberty? How many rights? What kind of rights? There's no single answer to those questions. And rather than bemoaning this, I see it as a strength of liberalism. Communism had a one-size-fits-all solution and we know well how poorly it has worked in history.
Geoff Kabaservice
One of your distinctive attributes as a scholar is that your ambit has included both American and European politics and thought over recent centuries. You begin the Prologue of Why Not Moderation? with a quote from George Orwell that he wrote in 1939 as “Europe was about to embark on a dangerous and suicidal path,” as you said. I feel there’s an implication in your book that the extremes of left and right, as voiced through your two young radicals, are not just looking to the end of liberal democracy but doing their utmost to bring about this end. In your opinion, is moderation a necessary condition for the continuation of liberal democracy?
Aurelian Craiutu
I have no doubt that it’s a necessary condition for the continuation of liberal democracy, but I’m also well aware that it's not sufficient. Moderation is not a miracle cure for our problems but it is one of the things without which, as John Adams said, “every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey.” We need a modicum of the virtues associated with moderation, such as compromise, prudence, and civility. These virtues are essential for the smooth functioning of institutions in a diverse and plural society where disagreement is to be expected.
I am prepared to say that moderation is essential to starting a new movement to restore the health of liberal democracy in America. I could envision a new MAGA movement: Make America Governable Again (this is what Jonathan Rauch says on the back cover of my book). Moderation could be a major part of this strategy of improving our governance.
Geoff Kabaservice
It would have been self-evident to most of the scholars and practitioners of government in America in the mid-twentieth century that compromise was the essence of governing. One thinks of Clinton Rossiter’s formulation: “No America without democracy, no democracy without politics, no parties without compromise and moderation.”
Aurelian Craiutu
Absolutely. And one of the things that worries me most is the rise of this new style of politics as warfare. It's a politics that you can see in, for example, a very influential essay written by Michael Anton in 2016: “The Flight 93 Election.” It's a politics that sees every battle as an existential battle, now or never. “Charge the cockpit or die. You may die anyway, but if you don’t try, death is certain.” This mentality contributes to the rising political temperature and leads to a situation when one sees one's opponents as existential enemies who need to be vanquished and destroyed forever. This atmosphere is dangerous and can destroy liberal democracy. I think that compromise and moderation can lower this temperature by helping us realize what we hold in common and what are the causes of our divisions.
In Part V, “Who Needs Moderation Today?,” I try to answer my young radicals’ questions about whether America is doomed or if there is still some reason for hope. I start with a beautiful quote from Jacques Turgot in 1785: “[The Americans] are the hope of the world. They may become a model to it… The Asylum they open to the oppressed of all nations should console the earth.” OK, that was a long time ago and we are no longer that exceptional in America today. But I want to add that while the image of democracy is currently tarnished, I think it's important at the same time to point out the seeds of change.
That’s why in my book I discuss valuable initiatives carried out by organizations such as Braver Angels, the American Exchange Project, More in Common, or the Heterodox Academy. These are only a few that I mention in this part of the book. But it seems to me that what they do is very important to restore the civic fabric of our country. That is one way of lowering the political temperature. Of course, organizations like Braver Angels can do only so much. They work locally, they cannot provide solutions to the whole country. But we should start from that level.
Geoff Kabaservice
I recently picked up a book by the economics commentator Martin Wolf called The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. I was interested to see that the epigraph quotes the famous inscription at the shrine of Apollo in Delphi: Μηδὲν ἄγαν, “Nothing in excess” — which in its Latin formulation is often translated as “All things in moderation,” a phrase that will be familiar to readers of this Substack. And of course this quote appears in your book as well.
Aurelian Craiutu
Yes, it's also the epigraph for the third letter in Part II, “The Archipelago of Moderation (I): The Old World.” There is nothing new under the sun. Things have been tried, some have worked, others have not. The inscription from Delphi shows one side of moderation: its ethical dimension. It doesn't tell us anything about the institutional component.
Now, I do think that in order for us to save liberal democracy, we need to combine the ethical and the institutional aspects of moderation. In other words, we need an institutional structure that could embed the ethos and the spirit behind the inscription on the temple of Apollo at Delphi — “Nothing in excess” — in an institutional framework that allows different groups, different constituencies to participate in the sharing of responsibilities and duties and the exercise of the political rights. Political and social pluralism and diversity are essential in this regard, as is balance.
Geoff Kabaservice
You conclude the book with ten “Rules for Radical Moderates,” somewhat in homage to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. The second of those rules is “Do not forget that moderation is much more than a simple trait of character, state of mind, or disposition, as is often argued. It also has important institutional dimensions that make representative government work.”
Aurelian Craiutu
And those are, again, checks and balances, bicameralism, separation of powers, federalism, judicial review, subsidiarity, and polycentricity — which is a way of saying that there are different centers of power and decision-making that may be appropriate to different decisions. Scale matters. All of these are essential components of the institutional framework of moderation, and they are sometimes forgotten. But I think that they are very important.
That's why I would encourage anyone interested in in studying this concept to avoid speaking of “moderation” in the singular and instead refer to it in the plural, as an archipelago containing different islands. There are different dimensions of moderation, but the plural is better suited to describe the nature of moderation than the singular.
Geoff Kabaservice
I agree with you that moderation shouldn't be reduced to a mode of personal conduct. But particularly when we're thinking about young people, it seems to me that moderation as a mode of personal conduct is precisely what they don't like about it, even beyond some of its political implications. In the Acknowledgements section of your book, you are kind enough to refer to your participation in a Niskanen-sponsored conference on moderation that took place here in Washington, D.C. in February of 2019. I still remember that the program listed the first three speakers in alphabetical order: Tony Blair, David Brooks, and Aurelian Craiutu.
Aurelian Craiutu
That was a great and pleasant surprise to see my name immediately after Blair and Brooks. Five years ago!
Geoff Kabaservice
In your panel discussion, as I recall, you were seated next to Andrew Sullivan, and he mentioned that although his politics are often classified as moderate, he does not consider himself personally to be a moderate. And, you know, as a young person myself I would not have identified as a moderate. I would have identified with that poem by Thomas Mordaunt: “Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!/ Throughout the sensual world proclaim/ One crowded hour of glorious life/ Is worth an age without a name.”
Aurelian Craiutu
That's okay. Again, we are eclectic persons, and frequently you will see a combination of radical and moderate elements in one person’s life and activities. This only confirms, Geoff, what I was saying earlier about eclecticism. Moderation is the institutional expression of this eclecticism, which is personal but also existential.
Another example that comes to mind is Michael Oakeshott, a favorite of mine. As you know, Oakeshott was a defender of political moderation and had a beautiful definition of politics which Andrew Sullivan, too, quoted on our panel in 2019: “In political activity, men sail a boundless and a bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy, and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.” But Oakeshott was not a moderate in his personal life. Actually, he had a radical side sui generis and also had a religious side that many neglected until the publications of his Notebooks in 2014. He was a very complex person.
So I think there's room for radicalism, there is room for innovation, there is room for tradition, there is room for skepticism — but for that one needs sound judgment. That only confirms what you are saying.
At the end of the day, I think everything I've been writing in the last two decades or so has been trying to answer the question: What is political judgment? How do I define good, sound political judgment? The moderates that I studied in my previous books such as Raymond Aron or Isaiah Berlin offer examples of sound political judgment — not all of the time, but most of the time. And I think that moderation is a form of thinking politically, which means that you have to start from the world as it is, not as you would like it to be. Then you try to improve it little by little, through step-by-step reforms, piecemeal reforms.
People use ideologies as shortcuts to define their positions and explain what their ideal society might look like. Moderation is different because it not a fixed ideology, but that doesn’t mean that moderates don’t have a compass. They reject any monist doctrine that offers a vision of reality focused on a single principle, whether that’s freedom, justice, equality, or any other ideal that justifies the simplification of a much more complex reality. Moderates are pluralists who refuse to interpret events in the light of one single value or principle. That's why they are ready to take into account changing facts and amend their views when necessary. That's what I mean by thinking politically, and this is part and parcel of what we can call sound political judgment.
Geoff Kabaservice
You've said in the past that there can be conservative moderates as well as liberal moderates and centrist moderates. I wonder if you've gotten any pushback against that view from the various audiences that you've spoken to.
Aurelian Craiutu
Not as much as I expected. I would like to emphasize that you can find moderates on all sides of the political spectrum. People on the left usually identify moderation as a conservative virtue. But I think that it's fair to say that there have been lots of moderates on the left. The one that I prefer and have in mind here is an Italian thinker, Norberto Bobbio, a liberal socialist of sorts who always followed the rules of moderation. He was a committed man of the left who defended constitutionalism and liberty. I’d also like to add that often moderates can be found in the center — but not always. The association of moderation with centrism is something else that I think is open for discussion.
Geoff Kabaservice
The pushback that I get from the right is that I am trying to force a conservative figure like William F. Buckley, Jr. into the Procrustean bed of moderation. And yet I was very struck by your observation that increasingly the tendency on the right is to oppose Buckley-style fusionism, his attempt to find a balance between traditionalism and libertarianism and anti-communism — because fusionism as a doctrine was too eclectic for the tastes of today’s purist-minded conservatives.
Aurelian Craiutu
Absolutely. I was just looking for Frank Meyer’s book, In Defense of Freedom, which I was browsing before we started our conversation. I too am puzzled by the rejection of fusionism from the right today. The Meyer-Buckley-National Review fusionist moment was the high moment of the conservative movement, broadly speaking, in the United States — and it was a good moment. I believe that our age calls for a new type of fusionism — not the old type, of course, but a new one as a way of combining different but not incompatible principles that could help us strengthen liberal democracy and the open society. I feel like I'm a lonely voice in this regard, though. I'm glad to see that you picked up on that topic as well.
Geoff Kabaservice
I think that Buckley was exercising a kind of balance and measured judgment in leading an eclectic conservative movement whose parts were not entirely internally consistent, if that makes sense.
Aurelian Craiutu
Absolutely. And he did it with panache and with considerable success. He helped make fusionist conservatism into a very respectable tradition.
Geoff Kabaservice
As you know, I have thought about moderation as, among other things, a kind of leadership ethos. I recently was reading Henry Kissinger's last book, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, in which he equated “a deeper conception of meritocratic leadership” with the political scientist James Q. Wilson’s definition of virtue: “habits of moderate action; more specifically, acting with due restraint on one's impulses, due regard for the rights of others, and reasonable concern for distant consequences.”
Aurelian Craiutu
It's a good summary of how I see moderation as well. I think Wilson’s words are precisely what I would repeat today.
Geoff Kabaservice
And you know, Kissinger had a somewhat broader conception of moderation as an ethos that he associated with the middle classes and meritocracy. Does that seem to be consistent with your understanding of moderation?
Aurelian Craiutu
Yes, it does. That's another face of moderation, and one that has a historical lineage. It so happens that at the moment I'm returning to my first love, Guizot and the French Doctrinaires, who were the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton twenty-five years ago. These were the thinkers who sought to carve out a middle ground between revolution and reaction in post-revolutionary France. They came up with a phrase to describe their political agenda: le juste milieu, the middle ground. Their most important contribution was to defend the rising middle class, the bourgeoisie in Marxist language. There is indeed a sense in which a healthy middle class is needed to anchor the virtue of moderation.
If you want to go even further back, Aristotle said much the same thing in Book 4 of his Politics. That remains true today. There’s a sense in which the middle class is the anchor of a healthy state so long as that middle class is not a closed class, not a caste, but is open to those who acquire property and education. That was the sense in which nineteenth-century liberalism thought it could expand the right of suffrage and could include more political rights. It was a peaceful and a piecemeal revolution that was upended by the rise of socialism and collectivism later in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.
The conception of the middle class that, for example, François Guizot had in the 1830s also very much emphasized the need for a meritocratic and educated middle class. He authored the famous 1833 law that created the primary education system in France. His limitation was that that by the end of the 1840s, he could not see a day when universal suffrage would be accepted in society, and that was the cause of his demise. We can no longer accept those views, of course, but we can think in terms of the indispensability of a healthy and educated middle class for a healthy society
Geoff Kabaservice
Speaking of your work on French political philosophers, can you tell me something about the address you will be giving in Paris in December?
Aurelian Craiutu
I’ve been invited to speak at the Académie Française as part of their commemoration of the 150thanniversary of the death of François Guizot (1787-1874). That’s a great honor for me; being invited to speak at the French Academy is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Guizot was a distinguished conservative-liberal intellectual, a supporter of constitutional monarchy in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830, minister of public education and foreign affairs in the 1830s and ‘40s, and France’s prime minister from 1847 to 1848. He died on September 4, 1874, but the celebration will be on December 10 at the Institut de France.
I will be speaking about precisely this topic of Guizot’s view of the juste milieu, and the focus of my presentation will be on his views on political representation. At the end of the day, Guizot and Tocqueville and other French liberals were thinking, “Okay, the Ancien Régime is gone. We need to preserve something of the virtues of the old regime while avoiding its vices and create a new class to replace the old aristocracy” — and that was precisely the middle class. Theirs was a search for a new type of aristocracy, so to speak, that would not be aristocratic in the old sense of the term but would be based on merit, education, spreading slowly throughout the whole body of society.
I think that this search for a new juste milieu as a way of educating democracy is something that can still teach us important lessons today. And I think that we need more education, we need to instill skills and knowledge that allow us to understand our role and duties as citizens. We talk a lot about rights, but we talk very little about duties today. That's another language that that has been neglected, and I think that there's much more to do in this regard.
Geoff Kabaservice
Speaking of portraits of moderation, I was interested to see that you included an illustration in your book of the Titian painting “An Allegory of Prudence” that hangs in the National Gallery in London. What was it that interested you about that painting and made it seem illustrative of some of the tendencies you’re writing about?
Aurelian Craiutu
It's a phenomenal painting, truly stunning. I would have preferred to have had it reproduced in color, but the Press preferred to print it in black and white. For those who aren’t familiar with the painting, it shows a man in the three stages of life — youth, adulthood, and old age — above the three animals that correspond to each phase of his existence. The bearded man in the middle, facing forward, is in the prime of his adulthood, at full strength and force, and the animal that corresponds to this stage is the lion. The beardless youth on the right is symbolized by a dog, and the old man on the left by a wolf. It’s a striking trinity.
The Latin inscription above this tripartite representation of human life reads, in its English translation: “From the past, the present acts prudently, lest it spoil future action.” As I understand the painting’s message about prudence, it is that in order to have political judgment one needs the strength of adulthood, the impetuosity of youth, and the wisdom and self-restraint of old age. Combining the three in an harmonious manner is the key to political judgment.
Geoff Kabaservice
Is prudence, in your conception, a subsidiary virtue of moderation? Or is it a separate quality?
Aurelian Craiutu
It's a difficult question to answer and I don't have a definitive answer. What I would say is that moderation has those three components that we discussed earlier: ethical, institutional, and stylistic. Prudence is perhaps more limited. It's difficult to make a case for prudence as a form of institutional-constitutional structure, but you can make that case for moderation. Prudence, as I see it, is one of the many faces of moderation. Most moderates are prudent, but prudence does not always amount to moderation.
Geoff Kabaservice
You and I have talked a lot about the difficulties faced by universities and other institutions of higher education at the present moment, and of course we have seen recently the firings of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. In your book, you pose the question to yourself as to whether moderation can help solve the problems of higher education, and you answer that you don't know.
Aurelian Craiutu
Because the crisis of higher education is a complex phenomenon that involves factors such as administrative bloat, the promotion of mediocrities, and technological change that would upend the familiar ways of higher education. But there’s one thing that starts with each of us. I'm a college professor. It’s within my power to determine how I behave towards my students and colleagues. Perhaps at least some of the problems with higher education can be addressed at the lower level rather from a bird's-eye perspective. I don't think any one of us knows precisely how to reform higher education, but I can tell you that a path toward reform starts with my own daily interactions with my colleagues and students. I think that that's the safest answer I can give to your question.
Geoff Kabaservice
As you know, my first book was about Kingman Brewster Jr., one of the more enlightened university presidents in the 1960s. While I believe that biographers usually should resist the urge to hold séances with the subjects of their biographies when it comes to contemporary issues, I do think that an enlightened university president of any era would be likely to approve of most of your “Rules for Radical Moderates.” Certainly I think that today’s students should live by your Rule Six, which counsels the avoidance of “echo chambers and bubbles” and advises reading “widely and ecumenically.”
However, I do find it hard to imagine that a college or university president in the current environment would repeat the words of your Rule Seven: “Don’t be a snowflake, have a tough skin, and don't get offended too easily. Reject trigger warnings and the idea of micro-aggressions.” But do you think that such advice will be heeded at some point?
Aurelian Craiutu
I'm afraid yours is a rhetorical question, so my answer might be rhetorical as well. I see my book as a short survival textbook for our age of ideological intransigence and vitriol. What I wanted to do was to celebrate those who defend the right to embrace nuance and the liberty to criticize. Moderation properly understood calls for courage. Academics fight with different arms than soldiers; we fight with words and they often require nuance. It's important to say that embracing nuance is not a form of weakness — on the contrary, it's a form of boldness. Rule Seven invites people to be courageous by opposing trigger warnings and accusations of microaggressions. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be triggered. I think that we stand to benefit if we don’t avoid controversies, if in the process of responding to our critics we try to better figure out where we stand and why we believe what we say we do.
I agree that Rule Seven is difficult to follow, but I do think that embracing nuance and accepting dialogue are a must for any honest intellectual. Nuances are important and so is dialogue. There’s a beautiful book published by Jean Birnbaum, a French journalist who works for Le Monde, called Le Courage de la Nuance, the courage of nuance. I highly recommend it. He admires intellectuals who have the courage to sometimes say, “I don't know. I reserve the right to weigh the pro and cons of each issue.” Albert Camus was one example of an intellectual who embraced nuance, and who had the capacity to courageously acknowledge his mistakes and amend his opinions when it was the case to do so. He is discussed in Birnbaum’s book.
Geoff Kabaservice
As a final question, Aurelian… I do agree with you that moderation is a virtue for courageous minds. However, I found myself as a center-right registered Republican agreeing with your interlocutor Lauren that it's unlikely that my kind will have significant influence within the Republican Party in the foreseeable future. What might you say to give heart to a somewhat despairing moderate like myself?
Aurelian Craiutu
Focus on the long term rather than the next day. The parties do the latter, moderates do the former. I've said to my colleagues from the left that we need to fight to save the Republican Party from its own excesses and implosion — but that will not be easy to do, even with people like you inside. I think that that there are different types of conservatism, for example one that emphasizes natural law, another that focused on prudence, another one emphasizing religion, patriotism, and so on.
The conservatism that I like most is the one illustrated by Michael Oakeshott and, to some extent, David Hume (primarily in his literary and historical writings). It’s based on skepticism and the awareness of the limits of one’s knowledge and reason and is opposed to a technocratic mentality that believes in indefinite progress. This type of skeptical conservatism is open to the lessons of history and experience. It is a type of intellectual hygiene from which we all can benefit every now and then.
But when it comes to the political reality of the primary elections, for example, where intemperance is an advantage and nuances are unlikely to carry the day — well, I am less hopeful. Moderation is not an ideology and cannot translate into a clear-cut political agenda for winning elections. Moderation is something without which our liberal democracy cannot survive in the long term. Yet it's not an infallible ideological textbook for winning elections, I'm all too aware of that. That is both a shortcoming and a strength of moderation. Again, let’s not forget that the latter is neither an ideology nor a panacea.
Geoff Kabaservice
And you do portray the dissident movement in Eastern and Central Europe under communism as having been fundamentally a moderate movement, and one that succeeded in the end. That ought to hearten us.
Aurelian Craiutu
It succeeded even if it took some hard work and a long time, several decades of grass-roots work in the Czech Republic (Charter 77) and in Poland (Solidarity movement, KOR). The moderation of those movements had a radical side that must be acknowledged. Sometimes you need to be a radical moderate; you need to bold and audacious. Vaclav Havel was such a figure. He said, in one of his famous essays, that the courage to live in truth is essential. The courage to give moderation a chance is essential to us today as well. That's why I think that people on the right who call themselves conservatives should have the courage to speak the truth and avoid being enlisted into a cause (Trumpism) that does not reflect their core beliefs.
Geoff Kabaservice
In your book, you discussed the Polish dissident Adam Michnik, who's still alive at age 77. You said that he and his good friend Havel, in what was then Czechoslovakia, defended the value of the open society in dark times. But you added that Michnik was a bold moderate in the sense that he was unwilling to make any compromises with a vicious system. I think that’s something that we ought to keep in mind in the present day as well.
Aurelian Craiutu
Absolutely. In the early ‘80s, Michnik was in prison several times. On one of those occasions, he was offered a way out: he was promised a passport and deportation to the French Riviera if he signed a letter denouncing some of his previous actions. He said no, and he was right to do so. But what great courage! He was actually a revolutionary moderate. That’s a paradox, but I think it describes him accurately. And it's interesting that after the fall of communism he engaged in a series of dialogues with the former leader of the Polish Communist Party. He was very much criticized by his former friends for doing that, but I think that decision was in line with his general philosophy.
Geoff Kabaservice
Well, Aurelian, congratulations again on the publication of Why Not Moderation?: Letters to Young Radicals. It’s an accessible yet profound book on one of the most important subjects of our time. Thank you very much for joining me today.
Aurelian Craiutu
Thanks for having me, and thanks again for encouraging me to write the book.
Great interview! The book sounds very interesting.