The problem with moderates has always been that they don’t have a magnetic idea. Recent moderation has been a bland porridge that defines itself by what it doesn’t like.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

What is the core problem facing America today? It is division: The growing gaps between rich and poor, rural and urban, educated and less educated, black and white, left and right.

What big idea counteracts division, fragmentation, alienation? It is found in Leviticus and Matthew: Love your neighbor. Today’s left and right are fueled by anger and seek conflict. The big idea for moderates should be solidarity, fraternity, conversation across difference. A moderate agenda should magnify our affections for one another.

There are four affections that bind our society, and moderates could champion a policy agenda for each:

We are bound together by our love of our children. The first mission is to promote policies to make sure children are enmeshed in webs of warm relationships: child tax credits, early childhood education, parental leave, schools that emphasize social and emotional learning.

We are bound to society by our work. The second mission is to help people find vocations through which they can serve the community: wage subsidies, apprenticeship tracks, subsidies to help people move to opportunity, work councils, which are clubs that would offer workers lifelong training and representation.

We are bound together by our affection for our place. The third mission is to devolve power out of Washington to the local level. Out-radicalize the left and right by offering a different system of power, a system in which power is wielded by neighbors, who know their local context and trust one another. Create a national service program so that young people are paid to serve organizations in their community.

We are bound together by our shared humanity. The fourth mission is to embrace an immigration policy that balances welcome with cultural integration. It’s to champion housing and education policies that encourage racial integration. Neither left nor right talks much about racial integration anymore. But it is the prerequisite for national unity.