Introduction to Part 1

Eighteen years ago, I published Meditations of a Militant Moderate. My purpose then was to collect in one place more than three dozen of my short essays on various questions bearing on the public interest, essays that had appeared during the previous 25 years in many leading national and academic publications The earliest, a New York Times op-ed, “Rethinking Liberalism,” was written in the wake of Ronald Reagan's first election and suggested that liberals’ insights about how the natural world works were deeply inconsistent with their views on social policy dynamics. The latest were a group of 2005 essays on diverse topics. I hoped that these essays would enlighten my readers about what I considered some of the crucial issues facing American society during a quarter-century of great change.

Today, the world that prompted those essays seems distant. American society has been convulsed by wars, pandemics, presidential impeachments, economic recessions, the internet, fundamental changes in media and inter-personal communications, global environmental challenges, a narrowly-averted attempt at a coup in Washington, and polarizing changes in our political parties with an utterly transformed Republican Party absorbing and normalizing far-right elements while Democrats have been challenged by “progressive” insurgencies from the left. In mid-July 2022, the New York Times reported a nationwide poll finding that a majority of American voters across nearly all demographics and ideologies believe their system of government does not work, with 58% of those interviewed saying that our democracy needs major reforms or a complete overhaul.

These convulsions have been manifested in countless ways. Many of them were crystallized in the presidency and continuing influence of Donald Trump on many aspects of Americans life, but some changes were quite independent and remain so. The writings collected here touch on only some of these factors, of course, but they are among the most salient ones for understanding what American society has become. The remainder of this Preface, also Part 1 of the book, presents two essays written in 2022. The first explains why I continue to consider myself a “militant moderate” even—or especially—in these turbulent times. The second piece is unpublished. I present it as a moderate reaction to the literally precedent-shattering Supreme Court decision in late June 2022 overruling Roe v. Wade.