Moderates: The Vital Center of American Politics, from the Founding to Today

by David S. Brown

The fierce polarization of contemporary politics has encouraged Americans to read back into their nation's past a perpetual ideological struggle between liberals and conservatives. However, in this timely book, David S. Brown advances an original interpretation that stresses the critical role of moderate statesmen, ideas, and alliances in making our political system work. Beginning with John Adams and including such key figures as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and Bill Clinton, Brown charts the vital if uneven progress of centrism through the centuries. Moderate opposition to both New England and southern secessionists during the early republic and later resistance to industrial oligarchy and the modern Sunbelt right are part of this persuasion's far-reaching legacy. Time and again moderates, operating under a broad canopy of coalitions, have come together to reshape the nation's electoral landscape.

Today's bitter partisanship encourages us to deny that such a moderate tradition is part of our historical development--one dating back to the Constitutional Convention. Brown offers a less polemical and far more compelling assessment of our politics.

352 pages, Hardcover

Published January 16, 2017

About the author

David Scott Brown is Horace E. Raffensperger professor of history at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, United States. He graduated from Wright State University in 1990 and earned a master's degree from the University of Akron in 1992. He completed his Ph.D. in 1995 at the University of Toledo. Brown joined Elizabethtown College in 1997, after previously teaching at the University of Toledo, Washtenaw Community College, and Saginaw Valley State University. He was named Raffensperger Professor in 2012.

Reviews

[Barron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not, as one might read into the title, a book about folks like Evan Bayh. It is a fairly rich history examining a number of (often doomed) inflectionary figures in American political history that merit more consideration, especially now at a time of seemingly radical realignment and -- ahem -- lack of comity. Frankly, it was surprisingly relaxing to read about politicians trying to hold it together instead of blow the country up.

Better than Brown's previous book (which was still good), though obviously anything that was written about political history in the lead-up to the 2016 election evokes the feeling of watching an unsuspecting pedestrian step into the path of a bus.

I have a few analytical objections: Brown argues that Barack Obama was more centrist than Bill Clinton because Clinton was "tempted ... by favorable election results into pushing for an unusually progressive agenda." In 1993, he argues, Clinton tacked left by trying to pass health care reform and entering into a debate about gay military service. This is presented as a great contrast to Obama who ... passed health care reform and overturned Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Literally the same actions. Try again.

Elsewhere, Brown might do well to skim Sean Trende's 'The Lost Majority' as a corrective to conventional thinking about enduring coalitions. And it is odd to read a (very good) section about Teddy Roosevelt's role in pulling progressives from the GOP to the Democratic Party with virtually no mention of Wilson, as if his presidency disappears down the memory hole and we jump from 1912 to 1920. But this is a good book and Brown is carving out a space for himself in rich areas that are not over-covered.

[Mills College Library]

306.20973 B87765 2016