09/18/25

A CALL FOR RADICAL MODERATION

Another political leader killed, and another frustrating challenge on what to say, what to do. Charlie Kirk’s death resurfaces similar tragedies from our American past, both venerable and recent, some wounding, some fatal. 

It’s not a time for what-ifs, for justification slanders, certainly not for secret rejoicing. There’s no telling when the next bullet will fly, nor who will be the target. It could be in preparation already. We’re a violent nation.

Maybe it’s a time to think about what NOT to do, especially among leaders. All kinds of leaders—elected, appointed, hired, and self-appointed influencers.

True leaders, the ones we desperately need right now, don’t take this opportunity to blame the other side for political violence. One or two misguided persons don’t constitute an entire enemy class in a political war. Nearly everyone, on both sides, wants to conduct politics in terms of democracy, a battle for minds. That’s what Charlie Kirk advocated. 

True leaders don’t whip up their followers in a time of rage, vowing retribution. Senator Lindsey Graham on Sunday called that a “Middle East” way of dealing with opponents. 

Abraham Lincoln, himself a victim of political violence, called Americans to heed “the better angels of our nature” in his First Inaugural Address in 1860. He was trying to persuade slaveholding states against secession. It didn’t work, and 11 of the 15 slave states joined the Confederacy.

But four didn’t. Whether Lincoln’s speech influenced their decision or not, his appeal to politics rather than to violence resonates today. 

True leaders don’t ignore the violent acts of proponents of their own political philosophy. The right and the left both have their bad actors, and leadership requires calling out such actions by your own supporters as well as those on the other side.

Many young people today don’t know what a “Sister Souljah moment” is, and many oldsters have forgotten. In 1992 during the Los Angeles riots, black hip-hop recording artist and political activist Sister Souljah remarked, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Democratic Presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly called out the statement, repudiating it for its violent extremism. Clinton’s remarks have come to represent reasoned opposition to advocates of violence from one’s own political side.

Times like ours plead for political moderation—not a wishy-washy, fence-sitting kind of thing, but rather a commitment to fair play and respect. 

Elliott Richardson, Attorney General under President Nixon for five months in 1973, resigned his position rather than fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, whom he had appointed to investigate reported connections between the White House and the Watergate affair. Two decades later he declared his political philosophy in his book Reflections of a Radical Moderate:

“I am a moderate—a radical moderate. I believe profoundly in the ultimate value of human dignity and equality. I therefore believe in such essential contributions to these ends as fairness, tolerance, and mutual respect. In seeking to be fair, tolerant, and respectful I need to call upon all the empathy, understanding, rationality, skepticism, balance, and objectivity I can muster.”

Some doses of radical moderation would serve us well in times of overheated politics. And our leaders should call for it. ♦