A moderate is someone who is to embarrassed to call themselves a liberal.
Can you say that anyone who isn't a Conservative is a Liberal regardless of what they want to call themselves?
There are also self-proclaimed "moderates" who actually agree with the conservatives on many things but have been brainwashed into believing that conservatives are meanspirited, closeminded, and bad, and therefore won't use the word and will admit to agreeing with conservatives only if cleverly pinned down in private conversation. I know quite a few of this type of "moderate."
Thanks for this.......and everyone else's comments also. I very much agree that a huge number of liberals call themselves "moderates" out of embarrassment, just as WinOne4TheGipper says. Excellent!
Note Thomas Sowell's super article in JWR for April 5th. Title: Liberal attitudes
His thesis is that modern liberalism has become a set of attitudes. I agree with Sowell.
Excerpts
"Liberals may think of themselves as people who believe in certain principles but, if you observe their actual behavior, you are likely to discover that most liberals have a certain set of attitudes, rather than principles.
Liberals may denounce "greed," for example, but in practice it all depends on whose greed. Nothing the government does is ever likely to be called "greed" by liberals.
"Diversity" has become one of the crusades of liberals, especially academic liberals. But, in a country that is pretty closely divided politically, it is not at all uncommon to find a whole academic department -- sociology, for example -- without a single Republican today or for the past three decades."
"Among liberals' most cherished views of themselves is that they are in favor of promoting the well-being of minorities in general and blacks in particular. But here again, it all depends on which segments of the minority community are involved.
Black welfare recipients or even black criminals have received great amounts of liberal political and journalistic support over the years. However, the great majority of blacks, who are neither criminals nor welfare recipients but are in fact their main victims, have their interests subordinated to the interests of their unsavory neighbors who are more in vogue in liberal circles."
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20050405.shtml