Politics

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” -usually attributed to Albert Einstein.

The American Civil War itself was largely triggered by mushy moderates. It was the mushy moderates’ efforts at compromise that made war inevitable.

For example, the first open combat between proslavery and abolitionist forces was the result of the Kansas Nebraska Act. The Kansas Nebraska Act was mushy moderate U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas’s (D-Illinois) attempt to avert conflict by appeasing the Southern slave power. The act led to dozens of deaths in Bleeding Kansas and turned abolitionist terrorist John Brown into a national hero.

Interestingly, the Kansas Nebraska Act was Douglas’s effort to address the failure of two earlier mushy moderate solutions; the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act. Each of those solutions increased national divisions. History teaches us that mushy moderates will go right on offering destructive compromises and making sleazy deals until the bullets start flying.

Nor was the Civil War the only conflict caused by mushy moderates. World War II broke out in Europe; largely because a mushy moderate British Prime Minister; Neville Chamberlain, kept trying to appease Adolph Hitler.

Moreover, history also teaches us that mushy moderates will ignore the danger until the fighting starts. For example Chamberlain sold out an entire nation; Czechoslovakia, in an effort to preserve the peace in the Munich Agreement of 1938. Yet less than two years later German bombs were falling on London.