Moderate Dems, moderate Republicans? Dying breed?

[Ted King]

mattkime wrote:
The reaction to morally offensive actions shouldn't be "lets sit down and try to find middle ground"

If we very heavily populate the realm of "morally offensive actions where we shouldn't try to find middle ground", then we are going to run into problems with maintaining our pluralistic (representative) democracy. For a pluralistic democracy to function there has to be a willingness to find a middle ground on a whole lot of things and if vast swathes of things are put off limits for the finding of a middle ground, then the pluralistic democracy can't function effectively.

When you put together the growing list of things both many liberals and many conservatives (e.g., anti-abortionists) are categorizing as "no middle ground", they add up to a lot of things. I think that is putting a severe strain on our democracy. Of course, there inevitably has to be some things that people hold so dear in terms of moral offense that compromise is extremely hard, but if we value our pluralistic democracy I think we should try to save a "no compromise" attitude for only the things we hold most dear.