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1. The political science literature on moderates winning elections developed when moderates actually won elections. Key assumptions of that work—that the median voter is in the center, requiring ideological parties to moderate—no longer necessarily hold in national elections
2. As I discuss in my book Temptations of Power (books.google.com/books?id=7W7eA…), the natural constituencies of Socialists and Christian Democrats in Western Europe were inherently limited, requiring them to move to the "middle." So it's partly a question of population distribution 
3. In polarized contexts—including the US (but also across Europe, India, Israel, Brazil, Indonesia)—there's the issue of voter "inelasticity," which basically means that even when ideological parties moderate, their opponents will still see them as ideological
4. If ideological moderation isn't rewarded by the other side and is instead cited as evidence of "double discourse" or lying about your aims, then this decreases incentives for moderation. After all, moderation is partly intended to persuade skeptics that you're not that radical
5. In theory, two(ish)-party systems should be different, but that's not necessarily the case, in practice, as the US & UK demonstrate. If systems are quite literally designed not to produce Trumps or BoJos, but then they do, then that should push us to question assumptions
6. Once "inelasticity" sets in, it's difficult to undo. Even in a different time, what Obama did didn't necessarily correspond to how voters saw him. He governed from center-left, yet many in GOP *believed* he was a socialist (and a Muslim)
