Au contraire, moderates are far more valuable to an extremist than extremists. As an extremist, your job is to convince the moderates. You will not do this if you appear to extreme.
We're talking about 80% of the population here at least. It's pretty diverse. Perhaps some "moderates" may be folks who simply haven't heard the right argument. Yet we saturate the airwaves and internets with arguments every day, so while historically such people may have been more significant in number, I suspect their numbers have been steadily decreasing for some time. Most moderates are moderate for basically the same reason, that being that unless you are literally burning down their homes and starving their friends and families, they don't want to get involved. They might vote if they remember that day, although you can't count on them to figure out for whom, and they certainly have opinions, but they have better things to do than reason about them or articulate them to more than a superficial degree. They may occasionally get passionate about something but then they lose interest. In short, they have to be given a concrete, not an abstract, reason to care about anything.
Most people don't fly, so they don't care about the TSA.
Most people aren't Iraqis, so they don't care about Iraqi war dead.
Most people aren't Paypal, so they don't care about Anonymous.
Most people don't have much to say, so they don't care about the First Amendment. And they don't expect that anyone wants to search their home, so they don't pay too much attention to the Fourth, either.
And they're not rich, so they don't see how tax cuts for the rich are any of their concern.
I mean, we supposedly had this great national progressive moment in America not two years ago. Well, what happened? Would you say that the so-called leader of that progressive movement, Barack Obama, has spent too much time appeasing his base, and not enough time convincing moderates? (I'm not even sure what his base is anymore but let's pretend it's the left for the sake of argument.) His entire Presidency so far has been about trying to hog the center, while the Republicans spent the last two years nurturing the fears and hatreds of their most extreme and vocal supporters, while ceding as little ground as possible to the victors of 2008. So, who won?
So no, au contraire, I don't agree that the job of the extremist is to convince the moderates. His job is to basically leave them the hell alone, and outflank his opposition so as to relieve them of their hold on the status quo. Then, replace it with one of his own. The moderates will go along because they don't give a shit either way. In this case a good start would have been to get the Fairness Doctrine reinstated in the FCC by revoking the executive order of 1987, and hit the Right where it hurts. But now we're talking tactics.
Actually, I think a lot of people take a moderate view on things because they recognise that the world is rarely black or white, but rather a full spectrum of shades of grey.
Of course, in saying this, I have to acknowledge that some people hold moderate views out of laziness (it's not black and white). Of course, there is probably an equal proportion of lazy extremists.
