Those darn extremist liberals.

Kevin at Calpundit sets his sights on his real enemy: extreme liberals. Other folks have already rebutted Kevin (Body & Soul, Atrios, and Mac Diva).

Personally, I’m very unconcerned. Moderates like Kevin have always been with us, sensibly telling us not to rock the boat, to wait, to be patient. We mustn’t make people uncomfortable!. That’s what they told Alice Paul when she was doing a hunger strike for women’s suffrage; that’s what they told Martin Luther King when he was locked up in jail; that’s what they told liberals who supported gay rights in the 1970s. Don’t go too fast, don’t ask too much, don’t do anything that would make the mainstream folks nervous.

But although they’ve always wanted to get rid of us, they never have. Which is a good thing, because every good idea liberalism has ever had has come from people who were extremists in their time. (If gay rights activists had listened to moderate, concerned heterosexuals like Kevin Drum, they’d still be waiting for the Stonewall Riot to happen someday.)

P.S. Although perhaps I’m not such an extremist after all. In this post, Kevin links to this internet quiz, which he says is “not too bad as a quick and dirty test of where you fall in the political spectrum.” The quiz dubs me a liberal of the non-extreme variety, which probably says more about the quiz’s defects than my politics, alas.

Update: Be sure to read Kevin’s response.

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