The Extreme Moderate: A New Genre in American Politics

Trumpism has created a brand new political breed

Demi Moore’s character in The Substance.

by Jeremy Novak

From the Trumpism slime emerges a new breed of political genre. It’s a curious creature, with features from all points on the political spectrum haphazardly growing from its mass.

If I was to describe it as a physical entity, I would choose the final version of Demi Moore’s character in The Substance. Its personality might be summed up by the concept behind the movie Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

The problem with these comparisons, however, is that it gives the impression that this new genre is interesting.

It’s not.

It’s tired. It’s ugly. But it’s also chaotic and frenzied.

What is this new genre? It is moderation on acid. And steroids.

It’s the Extreme Moderate.

The Extreme Moderate

In the face of an extreme ideology such as MAGA taking root in our politics, an extreme moderate energetically promotes the extreme side in a desperate attempt to make everything seem normal. They are in denial; they can’t accept the idea that our country may be under threat by the extreme ideology. They happily move along the political spectrum to the “moderate” position, comfortably avoiding having to call out these obvious threats.

To call out those threats would be “choosing a side” after all. And the one thing these people cannot be seen as is biased. This would ruin their veneer of independence and being above petty politics. It would hurt their self-image of wisdom and esteem.

Chris Cillizza is a great example of what an extreme moderate is and how it behaves in the wild. Consider the following Substack post:

The rise of Trumpism and the MAGA movement apparently hasn’t been a cause of concern for him. It’s just another political ideology that we welcome into the arena. It achieves “wins” that we should admire and tuck away in our mental files as bullet points to understand current events.

Now, Cillizza also criticizes Trump. And he praises and criticizes Democrats. But that’s the point. It’s just business as usual. Nothing to see here but normal political adversaries battling it out—in a figurative and sportsmanlike way, of course—for the hearts and minds of Americans.

But in order to make the extremism of MAGA fit into this traditional template, they need to fawn over it that much more. A bit more energy is required. Extreme moderates overplay Trump’s achievements because of a desperate need to make things seem normal.

This is often justified by the idea that Trump is Trump. He’s always been this way, so all of his insane ramblings are not news. Therefore, he’s just operating in the regular political world, not actively trying to shift America into a fascist hellscape.

For this to work, extreme moderates have to ignore a couple key factors.

First, even if Trump is acting as he always has, the news is that the American presidency has never acted this way in 230+ years. In fact, the most apt comparison for Trump as President to an historical leader would be King George III, who was notably going insane at the time of his rule and was coincidentally the ruler that America had a revolution to gain independence from.

Second, there is a decline in Trump’s cognitive and mental faculties. Anyone that’s paying attention can see it. All you have to do compare his public appearances now to those from 2015-2020. He definitely appears sharper and stronger in those earlier clips. You can almost understand his appeal, as he exudes rage and revenge effectively.

Today, he’s often hunched over while appearing tired and weak. His stream of consciousness is almost impossible to follow these days, whereas 5-10 years earlier it was something that a native English speaker could roughly translate. He’s a fraction of the man and public force that he once was, and yet the extreme moderate wants to pretend he’s the same now as then, a monolithic political powerhouse whose personality will always spark awe in those that experience his rantings.

The Extreme Middle

There is another type of Extreme Moderate, but it is imaginary. It’s part of a grift. It adheres to the phantom ideology of the Extreme Middle.

Elon Musk recently announced that he was starting a third party, the America Party. It’s not clear what his motivations are. Perhaps he wants to stick it to Donald Trump and disrupt his power. Perhaps he has a genuine desire to create a political home for those who feel politically homeless.

Whatever his reasons, his selling point for this new party is that it’s where the American political middle can go to find their proper representation.

This is absolutely preposterous, of course. This new political party stemmed from the passing of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which slashed government spending in programs that help lower-income folks, while slashing taxes for the wealthiest individuals.

But their problem wasn’t that the less fortunate among us were going to be even less fortunate. These people wanted them to be even more less fortunate that the bill proposed. This is because the tax cuts would cause the federal budget deficit to explode, so they wanted more and more spending cuts to compensate. In fact, complete elimination of Social Security or Medicaid wouldn’t have been out of the question.

This is “Starve the Beast”, Libertarian Party stuff. The idea that the middle 80% wants this is so far from planet Earth that Musk is currently designing a colony on Mars for it.

Plus, Musk is the man who promoted conspiracy theories about Democrats importing immigrants to illegally vote and steal elections from Republicans. This new party is basically even more extreme than MAGA. It’s the .00000001% of the American electorate, even further to the right of MAGA on the political spectrum.

And yet the idea persists that if you don’t particularly like either party, by default you must be in the middle 80%. So by this logic the America Party is where these people can go; it is, therefore, “moderate”.

This logic is analogous to quantum physics vs Newtonian physics. When quantum physics first emerged, it’s findings were inexplicable, and yet they were reliable, so they had to be accepted. Even Albert Einstein refused to accept them…until he was forced to because they consistently produced the same results, over and over again.

It’s completely inexplicable how a party to the right of MAGA would be in the “middle”. But it’s going to be promoted that way over and over, until perhaps one day, people accept it.

It’s like the Big Lie of the 2020 election, which has created an alternate reality regarding election results. Perhaps reality will be altered again, this time by someone other than Trump. It could be Musk’s greatest achievement.

Keep one eye open

If you spot an Extreme Moderate, turn around and go the other way. If you can’t, turn off your senses until you are safely out of their reach. Their power can be overcome by ignoring them.

Go about your busy life, but keep one eye open for the Extreme Moderates. They are insidious in their methods. They hide in the shadows of perceived moderation, but their extremism can be easily detected if you know what to look for.

You can be a moderate in this day and age. But that doesn’t mean accepting everything and everyone regardless of their politics. A true moderate would be disgusted by Trump’s words and actions. Don’t let the MAGA movement be normalized into society. Not for a second.

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