<The thing about moderates is, their responses to extremism are, well, moderate. They live quiet lives, not aggravated by a grand obsession. They recognize the value of ordinary virtues like generosity and perseverence. They make good neighbors and have limited imaginations when it comes to seeing evil in the people around them, until it conks them on their collective noggins. Moderates will act, after they figure out what's wrong, and then who to team up with, and then what to do. But it takes a while. Their response is measured and lacks the passion of extremism because, in their hearts, they're moderates.

This is actually a brilliant point. The type of people who you would really like to be leading are not set up psychologically to be leaders.* It may be less a problem of "limited imagination," which wrongly seems to imply a lack of intelligence, but maybe just a lack of whatever gift--or flaw--makes people want to be in charge of others and be leaders. A gift in the case of someone like George Washington or Winston Churchill, a flaw in the case of someone like Stalin or Hitler. If I knew exactly what turned a leader toward either the Light Side or the Dark Side, I could probably get a Nobel Prize.

Like you say, sometimes a moderate rises to the occasion, and is dragged kicking and screaming into leadership. I have found historically that these people often make the very best leaders.

I personally think our society might be a lot better off if Senators, congressmen and Presidents were not elected, but drafted.

* I have run into this type of thing before. When I first began getting into libertarianism, I used to complain about why we can't seem to get any libertarian politicians into the mix. The simple answer is that the type of personality that makes one a libertarian--live and let live--is exactly the opposite of the type of personality that makes a politician. A libertarian Senator would be like a Quaker ninja.

This realization is one reason why I never formally joined the Libertarian Party. Just their wanting to be elected makes me suspect the libertarian philosophy of the candidate, although I often vote for them. Republicans of course are not libertarian by a long shot, but it's still better than the Democratic slide toward socialism.