From an unexpected source I found the following:

Only in England do people write books with titles like The Middle Way, elevating the argumentum ad temperantiam into a guide for public policy. The Liberal Party used to make a career of the fallacy, regularly taking up a position midway between those of the two main parties, and ritually denouncing them for extremism. The main parties, in their turn, contained this threat by bidding for ‘the middle ground’ themselves.

(Madsen Pirie, How to Win Every Argument, P.129)

The author contends that the appeal to moderation is a fallacy, but one that the British seem uniquely susceptible to – we go out of our way to prefer a compromise between two extreme positions.

In the Liberal Democrats we still maintain the ambition of equidistance, which is not difficult. A cigarette paper to the left and a cigarette paper to the right.

This mindset, however, is what leads us to believe that you can achieve a – and it is desirable to see a – compromise between socialism and capitalism, even though both are two mutually contradictory solutions to the same problem (who gets what) – solutions that cancel each other out.

Same goes for attempting to reconcile the liberal idea of freedom and the socialist idea of freedom – one leaving individuals free to find their own way, and the other giving the state the ‘freedom’ to direct the affairs of the nation in favour of specific interest groups.

I’m not a moderate, compromising sort of person, which is why I don’t seem to hold our party’s constitution in high regard – being, as it is, a masterpiece of equivocation and contradiction defended with the argument, ‘yes, it’s difficult and a challenge reconciling these things, and that’s what we want to debate and talk about’ with seemingly no recognition of the difference between ‘difficult’ and just plain impossible. The objective is harmonious relations within the party rather than a clear message to communicate to those outside.

That the source of that contradiction was the Social Democratic Party isn’t true – the Liberal Party began seeing Socialism as the natural successor to Liberalism much earlier that that. I understand that now. It was, however, a painful and eventful mistake to make – one that’s destroyed liberalism in this country over the last 100 years, resurfacing only briefly in a distorted form as a conservative reaction against the seemingly inevitable march towards Socialism after the war – which seems to have served to stigmatise classical liberalism even further.

I’m beginning to think that libertarians (or classical liberals) need not be too fussed, at this stage, with persuading the public of the threat of collectivism and the advantages of individualism – how it robs us of things that we currently take for granted and denies us things we don’t even realise we have.

Nope, the job is much simplier than that: The trick is persuade Liberal Democrats. They believe in freedom, you see, and everything they do whether they’re from the left or right comes from that. The trick, I think, is to win the argument that socialism and/or social democracy does not offer freedom and never can, that the things we cherish – such as freedom from conformity and progress – only come from individualism, and get the party to vote accordingly at conference.

Whether people recognise this or not, we are all currently coerced into working towards the grand designs of this particular state, and for too long the Liberal Democrats have been playing the same game – offering their own alternative ‘vision’ rather than fighting for the people’s right to have their own vision of their own lives (i.e, the duty of the state not to impose it’s vision on individuals)

Yet progress comes not from states and their grand visions but from individuals being able to do their own thing – getting together themselves to work or working alone on whatever it is they want to work on, being free to sell whatever they produce at whatever price they can get for it, and that’s what freedom is – and the benefit of freedom is human progress. Slowly, perhaps, but that is what it achieves whether people like it or even expect it.

This country doesn’t believe that any longer, and that’s why liberals, libertarians, classical liberals and even many conservatives need to come together to stand up against this particular tyranny of the majority.

I look at Jo Swinson’s recent attack on airbrushing and I despair. Is this what the modern liberal movement really represents? Is this really what we’ve been reduced to? How did it come to this?

Thing is, if you can persuade the Liberal Democrats you can persuade anyone, and suddenly you have a powerful political ally on your side. It would also mark the end of ‘compromised liberalism’ and perhaps, just perhaps, a possible end to the ‘bad politics’ of the 20th Century.