The evil of "moderation"

From the late Samuel Edward Konkin III:

Having seen Left and Right both purged by their “respectable” parties for adherence to principle in my long political odyssey, I can (having been raised Canadian, i.e., with an excess of tolerance) tolerate anything but betrayal. And it is why I have always argued for the Chesterton-like paradox that it is not extremism that destroys, but “moderation.”

Stalin was a moderate, eliminating the extremes of Left and Right (Trotsky and Bukharin); Hitler was a moderate, purging the party of the “extremists” Gregor Strasser and Ernst Röhm in the Night of the Long Knives. The great imperial mass-murderers of American history — Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson — were centrists. Truman alienated the Left and Right wings of the Democratic Party into electoral schism.

As Matthew Arnold pointed out, “The Center cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” The sooner, the better.

(The Agorist Quarterly, Vol. 1., No. 1, Fall 1995)

As Karl Hess, via Barry Goldwater, once said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."