Detached Immoderates

When radicals become detached from moderation, moderates become radicalised.

This is not always a good thing.

Those who are unprepared to budge an inch get so wrapped up in their own cult that they end up staring at their own reflection, convinced that their antagonists are themselves fully committed non-budgers. And in so much as the latter might become so, it’s nearly always the fault of the extremists.

For instance, in England a decade or so before the Civil War, public opinion was almost uniformly opposed to royal policy. But then the radicals started to say (and do) the quiet stuff out loud, thus driving a significant group in English society to coalesce behind a new anti-radical sentiment, which sought to preserve the essentials of the existing order.

This is actually the commoner form of civil strife. One does not need two diametrically-opposed, ludicrous propositions.