Moderation Takes Another Hit

Moderation in American politics is being squeezed. Longtime moderate Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine has decided against running for another term. She cited the polarized atmosphere in the U.S. Senate as the main reason for her decision to retire, and she said the Senate has become "dysfunctional."

Moderates are always under some fire, simply because they don't always satisfy those more committed to a particular ideology, and they almost never satisfy those VERY committed to a particular philosophy. Unfortunately, I don't see any end to this situation, which has been developing in fits and spurts for decades, but which has intensified in more recent times, as a fairly large number of very conservative Republicans have been elected to both houses of Congress, threatening to take the country back to varying degrees of the Middle Ages, the Iron Age, and the Stone Age. Opponents of this agenda seem to have no other choice than to hold the line just as fanatically against a headlong retreat into the distant past.* Many more moderate and traditional Republican officeholders or candidates have moved rightward in an effort to retain their offices (or gain office) in the face of the highly activist conservative rightwing. We certainly see this with Mitt Romney, a moderate Republican, who now has almost gotten to the point of beating his chest to prove how conservative he is.

So Olympia Snowe will be gone. She tried to do as her former Republican Senate leader, Bob Dole, did; that is, " to reach across the aisle" to the other party and come to agreements that may not have satisfied the hard left or the hard right, but which tried to do what was good for the nation, not what was good for an ideology. I will miss you Senator Snowe, and so will the nation.

* In a certain "odd" way, "progressives" have become sort of "conservatives," as they have had to react to the aggressive push by the right wing to turn back the clock.

WORD HISTORY:
Snow-This word goes back to Indo European "sneigwh/snoigwh," which meant "snow." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "snaiwaz," which produced Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "snaw," with a long "a" sound, which then became "snow," the version that has endured for many hundreds of years. The verb was derived from the noun. Common in the other Germanic languages: (these are the noun forms) German has "Schnee," Low German Saxon has "Snee," West Frisian has "snie," Dutch has "sneeuw," Danish has "sne," Norwegian has "snø," Swedish has "snö," and Icelandic has "snjór."