My Life as a Moderate

I am an American moderate.

Such is the state of our shared discourse taxonomy, however, that I could’ve just as easily called myself an American centrist.

To me the two are different. Some agree with me on that; others use the terms interchangeably. Who cares. “Moderate,” “centrist,” “squish,” “placebo-pilled dipshit”—none of these terms matter. What matters is that I not engage in Both-Sides-ism.

And that’s just it: discourse labels aren’t nearly as informative as discourse tendencies. Most of the time labels just don’t tell us very much.