Moderates and markets

For David Brooks, to be a moderate is to embrace the free market. In his latest column Brooks contrasts the moderate favorably with the economic nationalists who support President Trump and the "progressives" who threaten to dominate the Democratic party. He spends most of his space attacking progressives, who allegedly want to "create a government caste that is powerful and a population that is safe but dependent." They're too willing to "coddle" people, while moderates "want to help but not infantilize." Progressives, as ever, seek to centralize things, while moderates "are always aiming to make responsibility, agency and choice as local as possible." These comparisons may leave you wondering what makes Brooks' heroes moderates rather than conservatives. His own answer would be that moderates support "a bigger role than before" for government in preparing citizens for a competitive global economy. Yet these moderates can't help looking conservative from the progressive standpoint, since they accept a number of premises about the world that progressives challenge. Progressives certainly would protest Brooks's use of (to them) pejorative terms like "coddle" and "infantilize" when they most certainly see themselves as liberating people so they can become their true selves, and not what the market demands them to be. Whether  Brooks is moderate or conservative, he presumably uses these words because he suspects progressives of poorly preparing people for conditions that are subject to neither debate nor a vote. Opponents of 21st century progressivism argue that the world simply can't be the way progressives want. Historically, that's been a conservative argument, but when self-styled conservatives in the Trump movement also seem to want a world that can't be, the moderate may well be the person who rains on both parades. If the 21st century moderate is primarily a realist, and not someone simply seeking the middle ground between extremes, he may have a useful contribution to make, but he will have to explain and defend his overall view of the world more forcefully than Brooks does here.