Yes, moderation is dead. To embrace moderation one need to have doubt about his beliefs, to accept that someone else might hold a part of the truth. It's difficult and tiring and imply to constantly change one's state of mind and ideas. Moreover, it's much more fun and easy to treat everything as a sport match where you choose one side and you are against the other side.
In some way I notice the irony that these incentives for automakers (aimed to reduce pollution, to keep jobs, to communitize part of the drawbacks related with cars, ecc...) are a form of socialism in the US. Well done Yankees.