Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona (his bumper sticker identified him as AuH2O) said the following when he accepted the nomination for president in 1964 at the 28th Republican National Convention.
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
In 1964 we were among the very few Democrats living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. (We always joked that in 1960 the 44118 provided exactly four votes for John F. Kennedy: my parents and Joe and Lillian S., the parents of my best friend.) Yet even then, with the Cold War at its height, with McCarthyism still distorting political and cultural discourse, and the Civil Rights and feminist movements gaining traction and momentum, these words seemed ominous.
And they sound even worse now, has rhetoric from both Right and Left gets louder and uglier and more violent.
On the Right, Second-Amendment partisans (amplified by the National Rifle Association) scream that the government—specifically President Obama—intends to take away every last gun and then lead some heinous action intended to suppress and even imprison every “good” American. The same people who claim to be “good guys with guns” leave loaded guns where their children can get them; provide guns to their mentally-ill children and spend “quality time” on ranges ensuring that their children become skilled shooters; and respond to arguments and irritations by firing bullets in a blind rage and to the sounds of family members at night or police and firefighters responding arriving to conduct wellness checks by firing bullets at demons emerging from their own paranoia.
On the Right, individuals elected and appointed to local and state government, judgeships, Congress, and the Supreme Court are determined to remake our nation as a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. They would replace education with catechism and return women to a condition of chattel. Children would have no recourse against rapists in their families and social circles or parents who willfully withhold vaccinations that protect them from disease and medical treatment that heals illness and injury. “Rights” and “liberties” would be a matter of a person’s position within the social and political hierarchy.
“Extremism in the defense of liberty,” Goldwater said to the GOP, “is no vice.” But whose liberty is being defended and to what end? “Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The wealthy and the powerful have always been immoderate in their pursuit of “justice”—or as Charlie Sheen and Donald Trump might put it, “winning.”
On the Left—and I grant you the voices are primarily young, male, white and privileged—Hillary, Obama, and the entire notion of Democratic politics are cast as evil incarnate. Most of the partisans feel the Bern and see him as a savior. Bernie Sanders’ politics are untainted by any force of evil), his character is without flaw, and the world that he would bring about would be an ecology of honesty, prosperity, education and freedom underwritten by enormous sums that would be collected from the One Percent, Wall Street and Big Business. Should Bernie, the registered Independent and self-identified socialist, be the candidate of the Democrats in the fall, they cannot imagine either a loss in the election or a failure to enact his vision once in the White House. Should Hillary be the candidate, many say they will either not vote at all or vote for Donald Trump, and that a Republican victory would “serve the Democratic machine right.”
Extreme behavior? Yes, but they argue that desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s an old thought. The Greek physician Hippocrates (470-360 BCE) said, “For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable.” Erasmus (1466-1536) concurred in 1500: “Malo nodo, malus quaerendus cuneus (“for a hard knot a hard tool must be sought”) But so thought the southern states when they committed to the preservation of slavery and fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. And so did brave Americans who risked their lives—and sometimes lost their lives—to win the vote, to end Jim Crow, to practice their full measure of American citizenship.
Revolution. It is an extreme measure. And Revolution hurts many innocent bystanders it purports to help.
But it is the vilification of the party and everyone associated with it that horrifies me. It is the extreme language, the advancement of any accusation however poor the evidence that supports it, the claims that are not only immoderate but wild, paranoid and Trumpian in their absolutism and utter lack of rational and substantiated evidence that so disturbs me.
I don’t disagree entirely with these folk who would change the world. We children of the sixties took on the project half a century ago. But their tone scares me. Their violence of expression scares me. And their abandonment of rational and measured discourse scares me most of all.
Some extremism is no vice and the companion moderation no virtue?
I cannot agree,










