Holding the
Center

It is the worst of times.

The worst part isn’t that President Trump is repeatedly, egregiously, and brazenly violating the Constitution. Nor that he is ignoring statutory mandates and defying court orders, or that the Department of Justice is prosecuting his “enemies.” Nor that he sends federal agents to disappear legal US residents and deposit them in overseas gulags. Nor even that he allows those agents to murder US citizens with impunity, or that he staged a dictator-style military parade in the capital and deployed troops on patrol inside our borders.

The worst part is that half the country, knowing full well who Donald Trump is, voted in 2024 to put him back in the White House. Only a deeply broken democracy would do that.

The signs of decay are everywhere and have been for years. Our politics are bitter, divided, and hostile. Republicans and Democrats differ not only on political philosophies and policy proposals but on basic facts. Americans have less faith in government than at any time in the history of public opinion surveys. Political leaders in several states have used the word secession not as metaphor or hyperbole, but as an actual, conceivable option. We’ve seen the first effort at armed insurrection since the Civil War. Nearly half of Americans believe “another civil war” is likely or very likely in their lifetime.

The unthinkable seems almost probable.

But while Trump is most decidedly a wannabe autocrat, the United States is not an autocracy. It doesn’t have to end that way, or in civil war or disunion.

To put it more positively: A healthier, more successful politics is within our reach. Our basic structure of representative government is deeply flawed, but workable nonetheless. Our history of democratic practice is even more deeply flawed, but the mechanics of citizen engagement and electoral accountability remain strong in our collective muscle memory. And crucially, while our divisions are real and serious, they are far from unbridgeable. The center can hold.

The fault for the sad state of our democracy lies not in our stars, nor in our inherent selves, but rather in the choices we make and the political habits we have developed.

Or as the great lawyer Elle Woods said: We have all the equipment; we just have to read the manual.

This book is a manual for rebuilding our democracy. It is full of detailed proposals, recommendations, and examples, but they all start from one key premise: To fix politics, we need to fix government.

Underlying the bitterness and division is a decades-long record of botched government. Our political institutions have barely been able to address, much less surmount, the big and urgent challenges of our time: climate change, global economic competition, automation, persistent inequality, and structural racism. Dysfunctional government fuels vituperation and blame that make government less functional and so on, in a vicious cycle of failure.

The tricky part is that effective government requires compromise. We live in a diverse society. Americans have a wide range of views on taxes, civil rights, abortion, war and peace, homelessness, health care, and a whole slew of other topics. We have different, and often conflicting, material interests. As a New York City resident, funding for subways improves my life a lot more than funding for highways. For my friends in Utah, or even upstate New York, it’s the reverse. Compromise is the only way to get a majority to agree on a tangible result. For government to work, we need politicians who are willing to shake hands on an ok deal rather than hold out for a great one. There is a word for politicians like that: moderates.

We tend to think of American politics in terms of a clash between Democrats and Republicans, but that’s only half the story. Even while the parties struggle with each other for power, there is always another conflict percolating within each party between moderates and extremes.

Most people pay little attention to that second part of the story. It’s inside baseball. But right now, that’s where our most critical problem lies. The battle between Democrats and Republicans is not what is poisoning our democracy. What is toxic is how that battle is being waged.

The fact is, American democracy can survive—and thrive—with both pro-choicers and pro-lifers, tax raisers and tax cutters, hawks and doves, urbanites, suburbanites, and rural folk. It can even survive with both Democrats and Republicans.

But it cannot survive without compromise. It cannot function when political extremes drive the agenda and set the rules of engagement. It cannot thrive when politicians—or citizens—equate compromise with the apocalypse. It is time for moderates to take charge.

Don’t misunderstand. I am an avid partisan. There is no equivalence between the two parties as far as I’m concerned. Democrats are right and Republicans are wrong on all the important issues. Perhaps more important, the Republican extremes are a lot more extreme and a lot more dominant within their party. On one side, extreme means government-run health care and a wealth tax. On the other, it means storming the Capitol to overturn an election. So no, there is no equivalence. If we are talking about blame for our current political nadir, it is clear where that belongs.

The focus of this book, however, is on how to move forward, and specifically on what Democrats can and must change in our own practice. Blame for blame’s sake is energizing but not helpful. The Democratic Party is the party I know, the party I have worked for, and the party I have standing to address. So while the Republican Party may be more in need of reform, and while I believe many in that party will find the observations and prescriptions that follow useful, the book’s argument is directed toward my fellow Democrats. My aim is to persuade them to follow the golden path of moderation.

You may think I am swimming against the tide. Online and at campaign rallies, all the passionate intensity seems to be with the activist left. Democrats seeking to claim the mantle of progressivism for themselves paint moderates as difference-splitters with no real principles, forever “triangulating” between political poles and lacking the spine to fight for whatever beliefs they do hold. In this portrait, centrist Democrats are at best no better than Republicans. At worst, they are conservatives in disguise.

Nonsense. The conservative credo is: Government is best which governs least. Moderates reject that view entirely. We know government can and must be a force for progress on all fronts. Let’s get this straight at the outset: Moderate Democrats’ ideology is progressive.

Now, there are indeed real differences between the center-left and the further-left on policy and on strategy. Moderates respect the power of market forces more than nonmoderates do and we are more inclined toward incremental change. But on both our core principles and our broad policy agendas, moderates and Democrats further to the left are largely in sync. The two camps share common, fundamental goals: an economically fair society, better lives for working people, a sustainable environment, and an end to racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies. Both believe in progressive taxation, robust social services, income supports, universal health coverage, workers’ rights, a strong safety net, aggressive action to help Black families prosper, holding police officers accountable for abusive conduct, protection for reproductive choice, and lots more.

Moderates are just as passionate about these beliefs, and just as willing to work for them, as are nonmoderates. One difference between this book and similar work by pundits and scholars is that I have spent three decades working as a Democratic activist, staffer, and politician. I’ve spent a great deal of energy and emotional investment trying to beat Republicans in elections and in legislatures, and I’ve done that because I believed (and believe) the stakes in those battles were real and important. The moderates with me in the trenches felt exactly the same.

The essential distinction between moderates and further-left Democrats is not over tax policy or transgender girls’ access to soccer teams, or even over core progressive ideals like economic justice and gender equality. The distinction is that moderate ideology draws strength not only from those ideals but also from other deeply American values: humility, patience, community, and democracy. Far from difference-splitting, moderation is an affirmative ideological commitment to all of these values. And the thread running through the entire Moderate Creed is that each of its tenets inclines moderates toward compromise.

• Moderates are progressive. For moderates, commitment to progress demands that we prioritize concrete results over virtue-signaling or ideological statement.
• Moderates are patient. Moderates take the long view and grab an eighth of a loaf when available. Because we are patient, we know that today’s compromise is not the end of the story. We know good ideas prove themselves and make it easier to come back for the rest of the loaf tomorrow.
• Moderates are humble. The late New York City Mayor Ed Koch, a classic moderate, called himself “a liberal with sanity.” I think humility is a better word than sanity for what he was getting at. Moderates are progressives with humility. We believe in government’s power to achieve progress. But we also understand its limitations, and our own. Because we are humble, we know there is a chance that other views have more merit than we think they do, so the policy cost of compromise may not be as great as we fear.
• Moderates are communitarian. Activists on the left often treat politics as a zero-sum game—if I win, you lose. Moderates look for common ground and understand that many issues have right answers, not just winners and losers. We believe one function of politics is to shape communal identity and we recognize political opponents as part of our community.
• Moderates are democratic. Monarchs who govern by divine right have no need for compromise. Americans do, because we acknowledge each other as political equals. We may not respect the views of our fellow Americans but we respect their votes and we believe our democratic system expects dialogue and negotiation.

When left-leaning Democrats scorn moderates for our willingness to compromise—and it is true that moderates compromise far more quickly than further-left progressives would—they miss the roots of this willingness in our broader ideology. For moderates, willingness to compromise is a virtue, not a vice. It is precisely what makes the moderate approach superior. We compromise not because we lack convictions, nor because we lack the courage of those convictions, but because our convictions tell us it is the right thing to do, just as a high minimum wage and marriage equality are the right things to do.

If the Moderate Creed sounds basic—“Everything I need to know about politics I learned in kindergarten”—that’s because it is basic. The precepts I have described are not, in truth, terribly controversial. The vast bulk of Americans accept them without a second thought.

Why, then, are we so divided? Because that’s how politics works.

Politics is governed by a set of natural laws that work in direct opposition to the Moderate Creed. These laws pull politicians toward the extremes, just as the law of gravity pulls objects toward the Sun.

The first law is no surprise: the law of self-preservation. Politicians’ primary goal will be to win reelection or election to a different office. The common metaphor of “political capital” describes something very real. It is the currency required to stay in office. Some elected officials, like a new member of Congress in a swing district, have very little. Some have a lot, perhaps because of longevity, or because they generate it through superb constituent service, or because they are extraordinarily skilled politicians who can accumulate capital as fast as they spend it. Politicians continually make judgments about how much capital they have, how much they are earning, and how much they are spending.

The natural laws of politics also set rates of exchange for this capital. Here is where the laws become pernicious. One sure way to earn capital is by creating or exacerbating divisions among groups in society, and by vociferously asserting commitment to the values of one group and hostility to the values of others. In practice, this encourages politicians to favor ideology over practicality, stick to orthodoxy, eschew innovation, ignore complexity, and promise to reach unattainable goals.

On the other side of the ledger, there are plenty of ways to spend capital, but compromise is among the priciest. Making policy concessions exacts a political cost.

The combined impact of these incentives is to reward politicians and others throughout the system who choose conflict over conciliation. Voters want a fighter—a representative who “stands on principle”—not a compromiser. The result is a political debate full of lofty goals and a political practice mired in stasis.

Just as the perfect is the enemy of the good, the natural laws of politics are the enemies of good government.

I doubt that I would be a moderate if I had taken a different career path. I grew up in New York, with liberal Democratic parents in a liberal Democratic neighborhood. I didn’t know much about politics but I knew the basics: FDR and JFK were heroes, Nixon was a crook, and Ronald Reagan was awful.

I went to college thinking I would major in physics, but a first-semester poli sci class got me hooked. (Also, it turned out that the physics-for-physics-majors track was really hard. I switched majors after three semesters.) As I paid more attention to politics, I started to question some of the conventional wisdoms I had absorbed, on both neighborhood concerns and larger issues. My family lived on the West Side of Manhattan, not too far from Riverside Park. This is a long strip of grass and playgrounds that, as the name suggests, sits beside the Hudson River—kind of. In some places, the six-lane West Side Highway runs between the park and the river. In other places, the highway bisects the park. Anywhere else in the country, Riverside Park would be an odd public space. In Manhattan, it’s a precious bit of greenery. In the 1960s, New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller proposed to dig a tunnel and put the West Side Highway underground. The plan, dubbed Westway, called for covering the tunnel with grass and trees. The result would have been a much wider and unbroken Riverside Park. The park would have extended all the way down the southern half of Manhattan—an area which, at the time, had no waterfront access at all and certainly no waterfront park.

Activists on Manhattan’s West Side opposed Westway. They saw it as a Trojan horse that would allow real estate developers to put up more big buildings. Accordingly, politicians representing the West Side, all liberal Democrats, were against it.

One of the activists’ strategies was to challenge Westway in court. They argued that the project violated the Endangered Species Act because it would disrupt the habitat of fish living along the Manhattan shoreline. The litigation postponed construction for years. Finally, in 1985, New York’s Governor Mario Cuomo and Mayor Ed Koch decided to use the funding allocated to Westway for the subways instead.

NYC subways needed the money, but still I was disappointed. Even if it meant more tall buildings, I thought Westway would have been a big improvement for people who lived on the West Side. Plus, the endangered species claim seemed like a pretext. I thought opponents had killed the project without winning the argument on the merits.

Meanwhile, I was working on a senior thesis about US immigration policy. The liberal view favored expansive immigration. I shared that view and still do, for all the usual reasons: the moral duty to take in refugees fleeing oppression, the economic vitality provided by people with the energy and drive to uproot themselves and their families and make their way here, the innovation and creativity generated by a continual infusion of new cultural perspectives.

But I also realized that immigration makes it harder for impoverished Americans to move into the middle class. While many immigrants are successful entrepreneurs, vastly more work at the bottom end of the income scale and their presence in the labor market keeps that end low. Whether they say so or not, agriculture companies in the Southwest want a porous border with Mexico. Otherwise, they would have to pay workers more to harvest their crops.

I favor a “path to citizenship” for undocumented residents (or as they called it when I was writing my thesis, “amnesty”) even despite those concerns. But it struck me that pro-immigration Democrats never acknowledged the fact that immigration reduces the earnings of low-income workers. It felt to me like a willful refusal to consider inherent trade-offs.

Still, those thoughts about Westway and immigration were just musings. My education did not begin in earnest until I went to work for Chuck Schumer, several years later. Schumer was then in the House of Representatives and he was looking to hire a lawyer for the subcommittee he chaired. When he interviewed me for the job, he asked whether I knew who represented the Manhattan neighborhood I grew up in. I did—Ted Weiss. Then he asked: On a liberal to conservative spectrum, where are you in relation to Ted Weiss. Slightly more liberal, I said.

Schumer looked at me skeptically, as well he should have. It was a preposterous thing to say. The late Ted Weiss was on the far left of any intelligent observer’s ideological spectrum. Same with his successor, Jerry Nadler. My answer showed that I had no idea what I was talking about (and worse, I thought I did). Thank goodness Schumer hired me anyway.

I learned a ton in that job. First, I learned that not everyone who cares about politics is a liberal Democrat from a liberal neighborhood. I mean, I knew that most of the country had voted for Reagan—twice, no less!—and then for George H. W. Bush. But to be honest, the idea of passionate Republicans was pretty abstract to me until I started working on Capitol Hill. It turned out the offices down the hall were full of people from Wisconsin and South Dakota and Florida who thought Ronald Reagan was a Mount Rushmore–caliber president. Even New York and California had plenty of folks like that. What’s more, these people were smart and apparently decent.

A lot flows from this inconvenient truth. A few pages ago I listed the core precepts of moderate ideology, culminating with democracy. Working for Congress and later in New York politics and government, I have come to understand that our democratic system is designed specifically to enable self-government in a large, ideologically diverse country. I have gained a far better understanding of the system’s flaws; yet my commitment to it has deepened. So too has my conviction that only moderates can make our democracy work and only moderates can sustain it.

Of course, much of what I learned working for Schumer I had to learn all over again when I ran for office and got elected myself. As a newbie New York City Council Member, I thought I had to be uber-aggressive. That’s what real politicians are like, I told myself. Getting slapped down by the Speaker—justifiably—showed me that smart politicians are patient. Seeing ideas I thought were great backfire taught me humility.

Along with those moderate virtues, I also learned the pernicious laws of politics. I knew the phrase All Politics Is Local—the golden rule of politics!—but representing constituents with a wide range of income levels, ethnic backgrounds, and values taught me how that maxim operates in practice. I felt the pull of the other golden rule—Whoever Has the Gold (Or the Votes) Rules—when donors and highly organized groups favored policies that my constituents overall wouldn’t. I learned that Silence Is Golden because taking a position on a significant issue is always costly and waffling never is. I was able to put to use a rule I had already learned—All That Glitters Is Not Gold—by packaging nuanced policies in simplistic labels.

Most important, I experienced for myself the politicians’ dilemma. The natural laws of politics create a trade-off between policy accomplishment and electoral success. While compromise is necessary to change government policy, it drains political capital. Politicians still strike bargains, of course, but far less often than they should. If we want more compromise and hence more effective government, we need to change politicians’ risk/reward calculus.

Which is where you come in.

The Moderate Creed is a prescription, not a description or a prediction. Our politics won’t shift toward the center automatically. The indispensable role of moderate citizens and activists is to push back against the laws of politics—to forge and sustain the conditions for compromise.

Changing politicians’ incentive structure takes real, on the ground work. Simple exhortations to play nice won’t cut it. If you’re already a moderate, you need to get involved and stay involved. If you’re not—well, I hope you will be when you finish the book. If you’re all over the place—like most people—you need to let your moderate flag fly.

The good news is that most elected officials genuinely aspire to make their neighborhood, city, state, or country a better and fairer place. While some politicians do hoard their political capital like misers, the overwhelming bulk are willing to spend at least a modest amount for a policy change they believe in.

This means that small changes in politicians’ incentives can have a surprisingly large impact on their behavior. We don’t need to repeal the natural laws of politics altogether. We just need to make their penalties less harsh. Making compromise a little less costly will give good-faith politicians a lot more ability to help solve the problems government is supposed to solve.

My ultimate point in this book is not that our political process is broken, but that we can fix it. And my ultimate purpose is to enlist you in the effort to fix it.

This work is not optional. Look ahead to January 21, 2029. I am confident Donald Trump will no longer be president. Some of my friends don’t share that confidence and maybe you don’t either. But assume for the sake of argument that a new president has moved into the White House.

That, on its own, won’t come remotely close to solving our problems. Our fundamental challenge is to repair the civic and political culture that allowed a person like Donald Trump to gain the presidency in the first place—and to regain it despite having perpetrated high crimes against democracy. Joe Biden’s election in 2020 gave Democrats a chance to begin that repair work. We needed to show that our basic structure of democratic government can be made to work. We misspent this opportunity and Americans of all political parties (or none) are suffering the consequences.

We must not repeat that mistake. The political forces Trump personifies and unleashed will not recede, even as Trump himself fades in the Florida sunshine. The weekend revolutionaries who ransacked the Capitol were hardly a rebel army, but can anyone doubt they are the tip of a massive iceberg? We ignore that iceberg at our peril.

We the People—or at least enough of us—have to make a conscious decision to reward politicians for results, not promises or fiery rhetoric. We must learn to demand, or at least tolerate, politicians who compromise. Moderates must become the driving force in our politics.

Nor is this a one-and-done proposition. As the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, the price of democracy is eternal compromise. And the promise of moderation is a more progressive and healthier democracy.

The book is structured in three parts. Part 1 elaborates the Moderate Creed and illuminates the complexity contained within its seemingly simple list of virtues.

Part 2 delves deeper into those pernicious “laws of politics.” We will see precisely how they discourage compromise, and look at the vices they encourage in politicians: earmarks, logrolling, bedazzling, waffling, and pandering.

Warning: Not everyone enjoys horror stories—I’m more of a westerns guy myself—and this material is not for the faint of heart. But if you want to understand politics, you’ve got to look inside the sausage factory.

This understanding is all the more necessary because some of the work we have to do is internal. The laws of politics operate not only on politicians, but on activists and citizens, too. When I said those laws push politics toward the extremes, that’s you and me doing the pushing. We are doing democracy wrong.

The Moderate Creed helps us recognize how the laws of politics influence even our own thinking. Like a golfer who knows the green slopes to the right, we must correct for this influence. Moderate politics is mindful politics.

Part 3 charts a course for the future. It begins by briefly surveying the evolution of modern Democratic Party ideology. From FDR’s election through the 1960s, the New Deal coalition and the New Deal vision dominated both the Democratic Party and the country at large. After LBJ’s presidency, the vision was exhausted and the coalition was no more. Democrats then spent twenty years in the wilderness, searching for a new and viable progressive vision. Bill Clinton found it and his presidency began a third phase. Barack Obama and Joe Biden each differed from Clinton in important ways, but all three shared a broadly neoprogressive ideology. (Yes, I know neoliberal is the fashionable term but I’m calling it neoprogressive because that’s what it is!)

In 2020, candidate Joe Biden said that if he won, his presidency would be “transitional.” That turned out to be true. Neoprogressive ideology has run out of steam as the Democratic leadership is shifting generationally to people born a quarter-century or more after Clinton and Biden. The contours of partisan conflict between Democrats and Republicans are also shifting, as each party makes inroads into the other’s core constituencies. The Democrat who next wins the White House will likely do so with a coalition and on a platform materially different from those of Clinton, Obama, and Biden.

The book’s final chapters take a stab at filling out that platform. I’ll focus on economic inequality, first drawing lessons from a struggle over gentrification in New York City and next outlining a broader agenda that moderate politicians and voters should embrace. Again, be forewarned: Enacting these policy ideas will require political compromises and I’ll spell those out as well.

I will then propose reforms to our electoral system and initiatives to give Americans a stronger and fuller sense of citizenship. These prescriptions differ from the standard “good government” fare because they are designed specifically to counteract the natural laws of politics. Together, they would make it considerably easier for good politicians to also be good at governing, and for all of us to start doing democracy right.