Former Republican aid turned lobbyist John Feehery has one of those "pox on both houses" repudiations of ideological extremism that inadvertently reveals the whole fallacy of the thing:
Reduced to the absurd.
Ideologues on both sides of the philosophical divide fall dangerously into this trap.
Conservatives who believe that government does not need to exist are every bit as wrong as liberals who believe that the private market must be completely controlled by the government.
The truth is not somewhere in the middle. It is exactly in the middle.
There is literally no such thing as "liberals who believe that the private market must be completely controlled by the government." There are people who believe the private market should be completely controlled by the government, but those people by definition are not liberals. They're socialists. Very few of them can be found.
Feehery is no doubt reacting to the constant, sweeping attacks on government he hears from fellow conservatives, and assuming an equally sweeping view exists on the left. It doesn't. The fundamental asymmetry between conservative and liberalism is that the former has strong, a priori philosophical views about government while the latter does not.
Right-thinking people everywhere believe that a neutral position on government -- for it where it works, against it where it doesn't -- places them between liberalism and conservatism. But that is the fallacy.