About Rick Bayan
Rick Bayan, founder-editor of The New Moderate
Born and raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the future founder of The New Moderate graduated with honors from Rutgers College. There he majored in history and gained his lifelong fascination with the rise and fall of civilizations (including ours). Bayan picked up a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, where he discovered the works of vintage American iconoclast H. L. Mencken.
During his career as an award-winning advertising copywriter and copy chief — first at Barron’s and later at Day-Timers — Bayan authored Words That Sell (1984, revised 2006), now a standard reference work in its field. By night he wrote The Cynic’s Dictionary (1994) and created The Cynic’s Sanctuary, a popular website for the world’s disgruntled idealists.
When he turned 50, Bayan quit his day job to write full time. He first launched The New Moderate in 2007 as a three-way discussion of dozens of public issues (featuring liberal, conservative and moderate opinions on each). In 2009, as the U.S. grew even more polarized, Bayan relaunched The New Moderate as the full-fledged blog you see today. He writes every word of The New Moderate except for the comments.
Bayan serves on the board of Americans United to Rebuild Democracy and lives in Philadelphia with his young son, who shares his dad’s enthusiasm for history, model-building and classic Popeye cartoons.
Rick Bayan is available for interviews, speaking engagements, book projects, articles and essays, creative consulting, copywriting (he writes a mean sales letter!) and web content. You can reach him directly at rick@i-cynic.com.
Rick,
My name is Steve Durgin. I live in Portsmouth New Hampshire. I spoke with your colleague Stephen Erickson last night in Portsmouth. He told me about the rebuild democracy site you have put up. It is a very good site.
I then followed the links to your site. I am very impressed with your writing abilty. The shear volume of content you have put on your site is extrodinary.
Your commentary and recommended solutions I have read so far to the social and economic problems we face are excellent. Well thought through and superbly written.
Thanks for your great work.
Steve Durgin
Thanks for the appreciative comments, Steve. I try. Stephen Erickson is one of the good guys… I admire him for all the effort he puts into the cause.
Hey there Rick,
As a recovering liberal, I am so pleased to have stumbled across your page. I agree, it’s high time for the emergence of a moderate party devoid of the demagoguery that has turned the Democrats and Republicans into so much Saturday Night Live fodder. My question for you is who would lead such an effort? Other than a pair of talk show hosts that I follow, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty, you are the only proud, sane and vocal moderate I’ve found!
Hi Michele,
Sorry I’m just getting around to you now. (Better late than never.) I appreciate the appreciative comments! I really don’t have what it takes to form a third party (I’m just your typical introverted writer and thinker… not someone with political instincts), but I’d like to think my writing is helping set the stage for a third party movement.
There are other moderates out there more prominent than I am (John Avlon of CNN, for one), but I see myself as more of a radical moderate: someone who believes we need to rebuild our corrupted democracy and financial system so that they favor no class of people over any other class. That, to me, is the essence of a moderate “ideology.” (Of course, we’re not ideologues, so we don’t really have an ideology… just ideas.)
If our ship is veering off to the right, we need to make a hard left — but only enough to pull us back to the center. Right now the situation is more complicated than ever, because our financial system is pulling us way off to the right, while on social and cultural issues we have an ongoing struggle between leftist intellectuals and right-wing fundamentalists. Only our vocal moderates really have the sense to see through the self-serving ideologies and pilot a course that moves straight ahead.
Mike Kingsbury from Palm Springs. Didn’t expect to agree with most every point you made, but do. Since I can’t call myself a disaffected old-style Yankee Republican anymore (who remembers who they were?), a Moderate will do. Keep up the valiant fight (err, discussion)!