Amid the awfulness of COVID-19, the movements for minority rights and recognition gained full momentum. The timing seems odd, but the trend is overdue and welcome.

Amid our variety of minorities, one may hold the key to our future. You likely didn’t guess it. It’s political moderates. And it may be our most endangered minority.

Time was, and not so long ago, that “political moderate” and “white middle class” were almost interchangeable. That may no longer be true as more and more whites push to the fringes of left and right.

But you can see the importance of the moderates in the most recent 70 or so years of our history. The civil rights movement that sprang from Rosa Parks’ defiance in 1955 of Jim Crow laws — that’s the moniker for the charade that white southerners call “separate but equal” — gained majority support across the country.

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Gallup Poll showed 58% of Americans in favor, 31% opposed. A year later, whites by 48% to 21% backed the marchers at Selma, Alabama. A month later, 76% of Americans supported voting-right legislation. You don’t get those numbers without support from the center.

But the support soon began to wane. I trace the falloff to the strong rhetoric — this is about when the word “militant” entered our lexicon — of such leaders as Huey P. Newton and Stokely Carmichael, who eschewed the non-violent methods of the larger movement.

I believe they scared the white middle class. The center.

Something similar happened with the movement for women’s rights, which had wide support until more radical views came to the fore. None probably more damaging than Andrea Dworkin’s assertion in a book in 1987 that “all heterosexual intercourse is rape.”

That drove away both men and women. Like the civil rights movement before it, the women’s rights movement started losing the support of the center.

Thomas Edsall in the New York Times this week called moderates “the exhausted majority.” Edsall is correct that by the numbers moderates are a majority, but I think of us as a minority for three reasons. The parties are forcing members to buy extreme ideologies or leave. Republicans are proving more willing to leave, but most still throw in with the Trump insurgency. Second, centrists may vote less often, especially in primaries dominated by the radicals in each party, so we become, in effect, a minority. And third, moderates are spread through both parties, though in decreasing numbers, as well as the ranks of the unenrolled, so the parties can ignore the small knot of us within their folds.

I see hope for moderates regaining control, though not full-blown hope. By nominating Joe Biden, Democrats put winning ahead of ideology, though you might say the ideology came to be “whatever it takes to end the scourge of Donald Trump.”

Biden presented as a centrist, and Democrats began backing him early in the campaign.

Many are now arguing that Biden is governing as a progressive, not a centrist, but he has been willing to compromise, a rare trait after four years of Trump. He dropped from the American Rescue Plan the move to push the minimum wage up to $15 an hour so the bill could get through Congress. He accepted a lower weekly unemployment benefit, and he withdrew a cabinet nominee whose Tweets many Republicans found objectionable.

Don’t get me started on the irony of Republicans finding someone else’s Tweets onerous.

A study called “Hidden Tribes,” conducted for More In Common, an organization backing centrist policies, interviewed everyday Americans. “We have found a large segment of the population whose voices are rarely heard above the shouts of the partisan tribes. These are people who believe that Americans have more in common than that which divides them. They believe that compromise is necessary in politics, as in other parts of life, and want to see the country come together and solve its problems.”

Moderates don’t compromise on ideals but are willing to meld other positions into their own. Moderates may favor private over government action, but accept government action when private won’t or can’t work. Moderates may prefer absolute equality of opportunity but accept that lasting change doesn’t come overnight. Moderates may want America to take a leading but cooperative role in world affairs. The center may still call itself “socially liberal but fiscally conservative.” Or “socially conservative but fiscally liberal.”

I’m no fan of U.S. Sen. Susan Collins — I think she has been far too shy about using her power to temper the extremism of the senatorial Republican Party — and last voted for her in 2006. But if the Aroostook County Republicans, as reported in the Bangor Daily News, want to censure her for voting to convict Trump, then I say welcome to the center.

Bob Neal counts himself a moderate. He accepts that change comes when moderates are pushed (or led) by the outliers in each party who make their case to the center. Neal can be reached at turkeyfarm@myfairpoint.net.

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