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Notes -
Well, as I've commented before, I understand myself to be Blue Tribe in the original sense of the term - recall that per the original 'Outgroup' post, there were explicitly Blue Tribe Republicans and Red Tribe Democrats. (Though I am not American.) I tend to think of the colour tribes as being about manner or about social milieu more than they are about explicit religious beliefs. I know I'm not Red Tribe because I grew up thinking of the kinds of people who owned guns and drove pick-up trucks and did blue-collar work and lacked university degrees and went to evangelical churches as gross low-status people that would be embarrassed to be confused with. I'm pretty sure I'm not Grey Tribe because I think the whole Silicon Valley technologist/rationalist mentality is gross. I may be a political defector from the Blue Tribe, but they're my native tongue, as it were.
Anyway, maybe it would help if I say that I think of moderation as something more procedural, rather than a substantive political position? Defined purely in terms of substance, the centre or moderate position is, as you say, a constantly shifting target which it would be absurd to invest in. Procedurally, however, I would say moderation is characterised by a willingness to listen and make deals with any of the major camps in the political landscape, while being reluctant to fully identify with any of those camps.
By the Caesarists, I'm thinking of people like the self-identified postliberals - they tend to be big fans of Orban, and supportive of some kind of strongman politics, where a visionary leader is necessary to reorder the state and effect a top-down transformation of society along more virtuous lines. Think of Patrick Deneen's aristopopulism ("Aristotelian ends by Machiavellian means"), or Vermeule's authoritarianism, or the "We need our own Putin" sentiment that was heard in 2016. Wolfean yearning for a 'Christian prince' is another version of the same idea, with the main difference being presenting itself as Protestant rather than Catholic. As a moderate, I am dispositionally skeptical of any political project that starts with the idea that we just need to get our guy into power and then crush our enemies. This is as true for the right-authoritarian-populists as it is for the left-authoritarian-populists.
Personally, my preferred politics is more the idea that virtue, community-building, pro-social behaviour, etc., are embedded in customs and the unspoken, unwritten rules of local community life more than they are in legal codes, and there's something inherently dangerous in the yearning for a powerful centralised authority that will authoritatively enforce our moral vision on all. I think we need is closer to the project Deneen sketches at the end of Why Liberalism Failed (i.e. small, local self-governing communities, rooted in the concrete realities of their lives), rather than the strongman fantasies of Regime Change. To that end what I favour is a limited, constrained central government that focuses, rather than on setting the conditions for the good life itself, making possible (but not mandatory) the kind of organic civic renewal that I hope for. Think more distributist-libertarian, on the political spectrum.
I think this probably sits well with a kind of old-fashioned liberal ethic, but it means that I take liberalism per se to be necessary but not sufficient for a healthy polity.
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