The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

by Jonah Goldberg

If I say we need one hundred feet of bridge to cross a one-hundred-foot chasm that makes me an extremist. Somebody else says we don’t need to build a bridge at all because we don’t need to cross the chasm in the first place. That makes him an extremist. The third guy is the centrist because he insists that we compromise by building a fifty-foot bridge that ends in the middle of thin air? As an extremist I’ll tell you that

the other extremist has a much better grasp on reality than the centrist does.

I want to remember this example of the fallacies of compromise (in certain situations). Sometimes the “extreme” view is the 100% correct view.