One of Matt Yglesias’s defining political positions is that Democrats should be more moderate in order to attract more votes. This is generally invoked as a critique of the Left and so naturally attracts left-wing ire, which Yglesias seems to enjoy.

One issue I’ve long had with this moderation-or-not discourse is that it’s a moving target. If we define “moderate” as something like the median of the current distribution of political views (ignoring all the complications with that concept), then there must be people who organically and earnestly hold those specific views. Yet those people are only moderates for as long as their views happen to be at the median. If the underlying distribution of views changes, which it does, then people who were formerly moderates, so defined, no longer are.

But the people who advocate moderation, like Matt Yglesias, are almost never moderate in this organic sense. Yglesias’s views — e.g., those in One Billion Americans — are definitely not at the current median. These people are instead strategic moderates who advocate that politicians and other political actors determine what the current median is and then adopt those views, including in their own political advocacy.