The Realignment at WelcomeFest 2026 | The Difference Between Good and Bad Moderation with Steve Teles

The Realignment

Saager Enjeti, Technology, Policy, News, Marshall Kosloff, International Relations, Politics, News Commentary, Public Policy, U.s. Politics, National Security, Economics

4.8 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2026

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Realignment host Marshall Kosloff and Niskanen Center Senior Fellow Steve Teles are set to appear at WelcomeFest 2026 today in Washington, DC. WelcomeFest is known as the biggest annual gathering of the political center. Steve will appear on a panel titled, "Building Centrist Abundance." Marshall will interview Senator Ruben Gallego and San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins on the center's lack of a broad story and worldview that can respond to an anti-status quo moment. Ahead of their appearances, Marshall and Steve discuss their problems with "moderation," an approach to politics associated with gatherings like WelcomeFest. While defending moderation as a personality and instinct, they differentiate between "higher" and "lower" forms of moderation and offer alternative approaches for politicians, organizations, and movements associated with the idea.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the show. Today I am hosting a special
0:07.5	conversation with Steve ahead of Welcome Fest, 26. The two of us are appearing at the big
0:15.1	annual gathering of centrist and center-left Democrats. Steve is going to speak about abundance and centrism,
0:22.9	and I'm going to interview Senator Ruben Giego and San Francisco District Attorney,
0:28.5	Brooke Jenkins, about the missing narrative within the broad political centers,
0:34.3	politics that I've written about and discussed on this podcast plenty.
0:38.2	Out of our appearances, though, we wanted to discuss our long-running and increasingly
0:43.7	developing beefs with the word moderation. Welcome Fest is officially billed as a centrist gathering,
0:51.0	but in a lot of the reporting about the event beforehand and what I suspect
0:56.1	the reporting afterwards, this will be lots of throwing around the term moderate instead. So ahead
1:01.5	of the event in the next few hours, we wanted to just share our pre-op and we'll be looking
1:06.4	forward to discussing afterwards. Hope you all enjoy the conversation. I look forward to sharing what I
1:12.1	record on this feed later this month.
1:17.9	Steve, welcome back to the realignment. Here we are. Once again, let's do it. Here we are once again.
1:24.6	So this episode is effectively a tie-in to Welcome Fest, which is going to
1:29.7	happen on June 3rd. Steve and I are both speaking slash interviewing slash paneling in our own
1:36.4	capacities. So I thought this would be a good chance to sort of not only review ahead of time,
1:41.1	because a lot of friends of the show are going to be there, but also sort of talk about the state of the broad political center, the sort of moderate category term that you
1:50.1	and I are huge fans of. So let's just start with, Steve, you're going to be on stage.
1:56.0	Give us a preview of what you're going to be talking about. So, yeah, I'm going to be on stage with two sort of moderate, maybe abundance,
2:05.7	hopefully abundance, pill members of Congress.
2:10.8	And I think we're going to be talking a lot about pushing this distinction between
	...

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