Moderate
The false compromise, or Argument to Moderation, is the logical fallacy you’re making when you believe that two opposing positions create a sort of truth at their midpoint.
The fallacy occurs when you ascribe truthfulness to a compromise, owing merely to its nature as a compromise.
This is one I tend to fall for because I often think that every strongly held idea is false, and so, I tend to think, truth can be best estimated by lining up two opposite strong ideas and looking at the way they reflect off each other.
But the opposite location of two ideas simply does not confer the character of truth to their median. There is nothing inherently truthful about moderation.
If you say the sky is yellow, and I say the sky is blue, the argument from moderation says the sky is green. This is false. I happen to be right about it being blue, and any movement toward your dumb idea makes me more wrong. Because it turns out in this case, there are characteristics of the sky that make it appear quite blue, and your saying it’s yellow has no impact on that basic reality.
Some strategies cannot be compromised without losing their core identity. A strategy of winning the wing of your party through uncompromising dogma is fundamentally undermined by any compromise. A lot of good business strategy has this characteristic: any deviation from it spoils it in almost a digital way, like the strategy was in play (1), and then the slightest of compromise took the strategy out of play (0).
And I notice that ultimately every idea technically has this kind of purity boundary, where at some point, it’s ruined. It’s just a question of how much compromise a given strategy can withstand before it suddenly crosses a line and is wrecked.
I often see political or social arguments between two people or two groups that seem to me to be a case of each side evaluating the boundaries of this purity element of the strategy differently. A radical libertarian may articulate that freedom and the consequences of it are the aim, and the slightest compromise toward social services is a greener sky, period. A more moderate libertarian may argue instead that the benefits of some social services outweigh their cost, and should thus be supported. The radical may accuse the moderate of, through moderation, sullying the entire effort. Their frustration with the moderate may not be (as it often appears to be) about dogma and loyalty to an idea, but rather true disagreement over tactics perceived by one as fundamentally ruinous to the cause.
This is why I try, as a radical moderate myself, not to be too upset at the wings of any ideology, or to accuse them of inherently bad faith. I try to remember that any launching rocket is going to have what look from the moderate middle like a blast zone, a big ole fire ball under the rocket, and some people are going to take heat if they are standing near and not on the rocket. Any movement getting started has this heat under it, must, if it’s to break out of the atmosphere and reach orbit. I do try to keep my distance from the flames.