What Do We Mean by “Extremists” and “Moderates”?

As we’ve often said, everyone, regardless of their politics, can embrace the goal of reducing toxic polarization. In other words, it’s a cause not just for political centrists or moderates (as those words are often defined). It’s a cause for everyone, including people with political views some would call extreme. So it’s important to clarify what we mean when we use words like “moderate” and “extremist.”

Toxic polarization is a problem largely caused by excessive contempt for our political opponents and excessive hostility when we engage with them. The problem isn’t that we have very different opinions — that’s a given for a society. The key problem is our highly negative views of each other and the toxic ways we interact across our differences.

We can see our divides in two dimensions:

1. Differences in stances on issues: These are differences in our issue-related beliefs and opinions.
2. Constructiveness of engagement: This is about how we perceive and interact with people who disagree with us. We can have more positive, healthy ways of interacting — or more toxic, high-animosity approaches. 

When we use terms like “moderate” and “extreme,” we usually refer to how people engage rather than what people believe. A “moderate” in this context is someone who engages respectfully and constructively — while an “extremist” engages with high levels of contempt and aggression (or even violence), is intellectually rigid, and is not willing to work with those with different perspectives. 

Those two dimensions (belief versus how we engage) can be complex and intertwined. Our negative emotions can influence our beliefs — like when strong animosity toward the “other side” leads people to distrust elections more than they otherwise would. Believing an election to be illegitimate is a belief that can be influenced by faulty, overly pessimistic views of one’s adversaries. 

Similarly, if a stance is held by people we strongly dislike, we might oppose that stance more — even if we might have seen it more favorably in less polarized circumstances.

Being in a conflict can degrade our thinking and lead to rigid, intolerant ways of thinking and behaving. For example, the book The Coddling of the American Mind argues that various faulty and simplistic ways of thinking have become common in left-leaning circles. One such idea is that life is “a battle between good and evil people.” On the right, we can also find simplistic ways of thinking: for example, some Trump supporters see any criticism of Trump, no matter how measured, as representing unfair political bias and malice. 

This is to say that, all around us, we can find evidence of how our divides have contributed to making our thinking more emotional and team-based, and less nuanced. We often see what we want or expect to see. 

This is one reason why you’ll sometimes hear people in the depolarization and bridge-building spaces using “extremism” to refer to beliefs they see as contributing to our divisions. Trying to correct simplistic, divisive ideas is one path to making our discourse more nuanced and less contemptuous. 

To reduce political and cultural toxicity, we think it’s generally more effective to focus on how we disagree and not what we disagree on. A focus on how we engage helps us build a diverse coalition of people who hold very different political and cultural views but who, nonetheless, agree on the importance of disagreeing in better ways. 

For people concerned about ideologies they see as harmful, this approach will help in that regard, too. Our views of each other influence our beliefs — and this means that improving how we engage with each other will, over time, reduce toxic and unhelpful beliefs. Correcting distorted views and fostering a culture of disagreeing better will make people less likely to see their political opponents in highly pessimistic and catastrophizing ways. Over time, this will diminish simplistic, divisive, and team-based beliefs and bring about more constructive, collaborative, and solutions-oriented environments. 

By improving how we disagree we’ll find that we indirectly improve the things we disagree about. 

Want to read more about the challenges in defining “extremism”? Philosopher Quassim Cassam argues that it should be defined based on the intimidating and violent actions people take in the furthering of their ideas — as opposed to their ideas themselves. 

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