Overton Straitjacket

Low taxes on the wealthy is not a popular position. The only other reason to vote Republican is the white nationalism. (Ok, there’s also super pro-lifers. Set them aside for a moment.)But the taboo on “racism” that you’ve discussed before prevents explicit white nationalism from becoming socially acceptable.

I think the overton window varies based on the topic.

Which is more rightward, the USA should decrease its foreign entanglements and close all the foreign bases and bring the troops home or that the USA should fight every war?

People like Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts are in very different spots from what you may be characterizing as conservative opinion.

Another example might be a position on easy money, the Fed and the IRS. The right wing of the rank and file have no trouble whatsoever in every possible theory or belief about the the conspiracies or ill effects of those entities. So on an issue like auditing the Federal Reserve there does seem to be a lot of ground on the right for right and more right. But the nationalism and capitalism get in the way of the populism on this issue.

I am curious on your epistemic measure how you benchmark this over time. Where would you rank left and right opinion versus historical benchmarks of right and left. Conservatives, if they are conservative of tradition would be nature seem to be moderate from an historical perspective because they would be closer to historical positions.

Another example would be Israel where the position of the right on Arabs versus Israel has a pretty wide range of opinion. How the neoconservatives pulled off having the right become supporters of Israel is no mean feat. Again, its not clear to me what the left-right axis is on Israel. The evangelical right, the neoconservative right, the libertarian right all would measure this differently.

On religious and social issues there is a huge difference between the activist government right, which wants government control of abortion and marriage and the anti-government right which does not.

As for the moderatism of the left, the racial and ethnic make up of the democratic party constrains how far left the party can go. Republicans are dividing white people left and right, but the democrats have almost all the African Americans and many of the hispanics. Julian Bond told me that blacks are mostly conservative and if the Republicans would change on affirmative action, they would get a bigger share of that vote.

The stronger the role race plays in who the Republicans attract, the more diverse on a left-right basis the non-white democrats become.

The exciting part is that the civil war among the republicans combined with new media, is that the discourse among the right will become a free for all ideologically. Glen Beck is off script, the socially moderate evangelicals are off script, Justice Kennedy is a free agent, the libertarians are off script, its exciting as hell on the right.

You’ve got two metaphors going here – one explicit and one implicit. The explicit one is the Overton Window. The implicit one is the bell curve: You’re assuming that there’s a continuum of political opinion and belief that can be represented from on a 2-D graph, and you’re wondering why there doesn’t seem to be a “moderate” majority the takes form of the bell in the center, with long tales of “left” and “right” extending out from either end.

But you really can’t map conservative opinion on a 2-D map. “Moderate conservatism” isn’t “moderate” because it’s held by a group in the “middle” and doesn’t fit on a linear continuum from left to right. It’s “moderate” because it represents the views of the traditional ruling elite. And it’s “soggy” because it has no appeal to the conservative base.

I’m not saying anything remotely original when I point out that the modern Republican Party, beginning with Nixon’s southern strategy, made a devil’s bargain and the time is coming for it to surrender its soul to hell.

I’m put in mind of the classic “World As Seen from New York City” picture, in which there’s a vast distance between Wall Street and Central Park, but San Francisco and Tokyo are adjacent. When the only legitimate political views are very close to your own, you spend most of your time and energy minutely detailing them, while the illegitimate views are lumped together (which also makes it easier to dismiss them).

As Martin James suggests, there is tremendous diversity of thought throughout the so-called right wing of politics in the US (this, conservatism, and the Republican party are in no way identical). If you think George W. Bush was as far “right” as the wing-tip — John’s notional Overton Window space on the right — you don’t understand anything “left” of center. Bush was a classic “moderate conservative”, as was Mitt Romney, and the “base” was fairly unhappy with both of them. And this is without getting into the category error of labeling libertarianism “right wing”, another artifact of forcing modern US politics into a simple left-right spectrum.

It might be useful to distinguish between the spectrum of beliefs (which is analog) and the range of choice at the polls (which is digital, even in a multi-candidate primary, and always includes a null choice–stay home–as belief doesn’t.) Do the right fringes of the Republicans and the left fringes of the Democrats behave comparably when it comes to choosing candidates–that is, do they make similar calculations about electability? I have an intuitive sense that people on the Left are more frightened of a Republican victory, and thus more willing to support a moderate Democrat than people on the right are frightened of a Democratic victory and willing to support a moderate Republican. Anybody got any evidence about this, one way or the other?

In the US, creationism is taught in (some) highschools, the Bell Curve is gospel for a large percentage of the population, George Zimmerman is considered to be a hero, the Civil War is thought to be about something other than slavery. Ayn Rand is the best selling novelist/philosopher, Glenn Beck has successfully claimed the mantle of MLK Jr. and George W. Bush never lost an election in his life.

How much more conservative can we get?

rootlesscosmo @ 11

It’s not symmetrical in any way, if only because it is demagogues cyncially fabricating hot-button appeals on the right, media consultants synthesizing anodyne slogans in the middle for the corrupt centrists, and morons babbling incoherently on the left.

But, you make an important point, since voting isn’t mandatory in the U.S. — increasingly, in many jurisdictions, it isn’t even an option unless you are very motivated — distrust and cynicism can be expressed by simply not voting at all. And, this may be the most rational response. A viral Russell Brand interview revolved around his admonition to the young to not vote, as it just legitimates a system that throws up no choice worth making.

Sorry, John, you are wrong. Over the past 50 years, the right-wing faction of US politics has moved ever further to the right, and that trend shows no sign of abating. It’s worked well for them; they’ve accomplished most of their policy goals, and what remains looks attainable, with the bonus of endless opportunities for grifting and personal enrichment of rightist demagogues. Their political party, at least in my lifetime, has been vastly more effective than the other major party and has done a fine job of dragging the Democratic party ever rightward behind them.

BTW, you may not see it because you’re safely ensconced in the ivory tower and surrounded by intelligent, thoughtful, moderate-to-liberal persons, but in the Republican county I live in, most everybody I encounter is fully on board with the radical insurrectionist fire-breathing tip of the right wing, they’re fully convinced that only Fox “News” and Rush, et. al. are the only ones telling it like it is, and that all the rest of the media and political establishment is engaged in a conspiracy to deceive and oppress them. They’re wholly unapologetic for their point of view, and their complaint, if any, is that their elected representatives and political (and social) institutions are not conservative enough.

When right-wing pols make comments they have to walk back or gloss over, they’re not doing so for their own partisans, they’re doing it to limit the damage done among the vast non-informed bulk of the American electorate, who can’t be bothered to be informed and who continue to vote for Republican candidates far in excess of the numbers one would expect given that in opinion polls conservative Republican policy prescriptions are consistently not in keeping with majority American preferences. Deception and dissembling work.

From my anecdotal experience, it is absolutely the case that for a large and well-organized minority of Americans, it’s totally normal and uncontroversial to say all sorts of dumb BS. Anything that fuels the paranoia and confirms the perception of victimization among wing nuts.

I’m a huge fan of Crooked Timber, and enjoy reading your scribblings, but I think you missed it on this one, John. From where I’m standing (caveat: anecdotal experience), there’s an insatiable appetite for this crap and this crazy train has a lot more track on which to run. Keeping my fingers crossed that the young folks today seem remarkably well adjusted and less susceptible to this stuff than my generation (X) and that of my parents, so maybe eventually the tide will turn. But not holding my breath.

given how dominant a certain brand of extreme right politics is, why isn’t a slightly more extreme brand of extreme right politics more normalized

Isn’t it because the dynamic is see-saw/lever-ish? (That’s not exactly the right metaphor, but it’ll have to do.) The Brooks/Frum/Boehner(?) types don’t really want the lunatics running the asylum, so they keep trying to, I don’t know, get them under control somehow? Meanwhile, the crazy types keep getting kookier and moving further right* and often pulling the “establishment” somewhat further right along with them. I mean, “legitimate rape” was something that actually happened, and people in the “establishment” didn’t exactly point out that this was utter lunacy. What more do you want?

*Count me in the apparent minority that thinks the left-right axis is perfectly useful in thinking about contemporary US politics.

David:

“Obama . . . and the rest of his Centrist “PragProgressives” have done a pretty great job at outmaneuvering the Republican Party at every turn thus far. Under Obama the Dems have run a continually canny strategy. The country is shifting ever so slowly to the Left simply because the Republicans can’t help harming themselves on matters of principle. So, on the inside we all obviously want to see the Dems move to the Left, but would that really be a smart move in the current system?“

I completely agree with your premise — that the left-right spectrum works remarkably well in describing the partisan dynamics. Better than usual in U.S. politics, by historical standards, since historically, there were right and left ideologies and single-issue-movements represented in both Parties in previous eras. Temperament questions — like, “do you think economic success is more a matter of hard work or luck?” — do a good job of sorting out partisan identification.

On the record, as far as policy is concerned, neither Party does anything to challenge existing hierarchies of economic power, and that’s where it gets ambiguous. Probably a good portion of voters, who identify as Democrats wish for a mild challenge to established power, where the key word is, “wish” with its connotations of magical intervention. The Tea Party types are a bit fiercer in their expressed desired to bring down the established hierarchies of power; I think it reasonable to believe the leaders are insincere about this, and the followers delusional, but it should be noted that this is the thrust of their politics.

If there’s any way that the U.S. has moved decisively to the Left, in economic policy terms, in the Bush-Obama years, I’m unaware of it. The decline in economic welfare for the mass of people is palpable, and the shabbiness of infrastructure and eclipse of college by debt peonage hard to miss. The TBTF banks are bigger than ever, and more criminally corrupt than ever, and the Food Stamp allotment has been cut (with Democratic support in Congress, it may be noted).

There’s a lot of desperate, hopeless people in the country, and their numbers and desperation is swelling. That could be the foundation for a move to the left or to the right. With the surveillance state put into place under Obama as groundwork, movement to the right seems more likely.

If Obama and company have been “canny”, it has been in the ways they’ve kept their base corralled or depressed, depending on how you see the remarkably passive way the left accepts the continuation of all Bush2 trends.

I think it’s easy to overrate the importance of the cable-news noise machine. The really salient fact is that most people are not reached by any political communication; they don’t pay attention and their ideological consciousness, for lack of a better term is atrophied, so what they do pay attention to, is usually sound-bites and phrases of a few seconds duration, which get filtered in often really weird ways, and to which they respond with less intelligence than Pavlov’s dogs.

Fervently right and left matter less as political dimensions, as other commenters have said, than passive and ignorant. Passive and ignorant, as political dimensions, deserve more attention.

For instance, Welfare is supposed to be ‘left’, but Welfare was earlier the Bismarckian scheme to forestall socialism, hardly a leftist aim.

The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’, etc., could be used coherently, but people choose not to.

Bruce @24 – “The really salient fact is that most people are not reached by any political communication; they don’t pay attention and their ideological consciousness, for lack of a better term is atrophied…”

Your opinion or do you have a source to back this claim? I’d like to read the study that shows most people are not reached by any political communication.

You may feel cable news is overrated. But the stratification of news on cable makes it possible for people to hear only what they want to hear. I am related to a number of people who politically calcify as a result.

The US is really way too large to be one liberal democracy

It sure cannot be one on the model of a metropolitan democracy, like England or France, or a continental league of cities, like Canada or Australia.

Geographic mobility has collapsed along with social and economic mobility. In a half-generation or so, there may be sufficient centrifugal force to fuse with anti-globalization, pro-localization ideologies on the right and left, to make politics, regional, or even break up the country. Lots of smart people foresee the possibilities. Some of the eco-left is very pro-localization; the Tea Party draw some of their main strength from folks, who want to rule as Local Notables, a political tendency that goes back to the early days of anti-Federalism.

Well, on some level even well developed social democracy is “rube bait” because it serves to reinforce bourgeois dominance. They apparently feel secure enough without that sort of thing nowadays of course.

Anarcissie @ 27

Forget Bismark’s old age pensions; what about Obamacare? or Bush’s Medicare drug benefit? Or, Democrats voting to cut Food Stamps, in some voting-for-it before voting-against-it scheme?

Partisan strategic scheming aims at incoherence, I think.

“given how dominant a certain brand of extreme right politics is, why isn’t a slightly more extreme brand of extreme right politics more normalized. (Knock on wood.)”

I am not really sure how much more extreme the “normalized” section of the right can get John. Check out the posts on EDNA at Red State. These people are proud bigots and are in no danger of being kicked out of the party.

Terry Eagleton, Ideology

“as in the case of fascism, where a ruling sector of finance capitalism takes over
for its own purposes the prejudices and anxieties of the lower middle class. ”

This alliance has been underestimated and dismissed before. When the petty bourgeois is faced with the violent choice, they usually have chosen property and tribalism.

Now this incoherent moron has to get back to Eagleton, not wasting time on a taxonomy of troglodytes.

John – you are looking at one tiny story and generalizing from it. They claim a great deal of alarmingly right wing ideas.

And here’s Ted Cruz himself, talking about his father’s “bad joke” on CNN News: “Speaking to CNN affiliate WFAA on Friday, the first-term Republican senator from Texas said, “sadly, those who are trying to play the politics of personal destruction are trying to smear him and use that to attack me. That’s a shame.”

“I love my father,” said Cruz. “He is a pastor. He is a man of deep integrity. And he made a joke.” http://cnn.it/1euYy1L

Sounds like he’s owning it – and attacking those who question his father’s “joke” about sending Obama back to Kenya.

John – we disagree on interpretation. I see Ted Cruz owning what his father said. He says getting upset over this “joke” is a smear tactic. So yes, they say MoJo and other liberal outlets smear them, but they certainly own their beliefs. Those who disagree are attacked. That’s SOP in today’s GOP. Why work things out when you can attack?

As noted earlier – I live in a state where this party owns it all – including their rhetoric. It is ugly. Very ugly.

Dr Hilarius: The real question is why the absence of anything remotely leftist? NPR and PBS the voices of the left? Oh dear.

And, the real answer is that most of the population refuses to pay for anything political or join anything political, which might require any more effort than a bumpersticker. They want everything free paid for by corporate advertising, and so everything is paid for by corporations and the mega-rich, who know a bargain when they see it, including politics and political news. But, PBS & NPR sure are grateful for the generous support.

> Overton Window 101. But this doesn’t actually seem to be the way of it. Rather, what
> we get is this big weight of conservative opinion, this huge clump of conservative
> grass-roots, right at the edge of what is considered at all acceptable, in US political
> discourse.
The Overton Window theory actually works much better in a Westminster style democracy where the Prime Minister must stand in front of members of the opposition and say things without looking ridiculous. This simple fact explains a lot. George W. Bush would have been laughed out of Premiership in a matter of a few months in a Westminster style democracy.

> several things happened to shift the GOP (and the nation) to the radical right:
Good reasons. At the end of the day, it is all a numbers game. The proximate reasons for the problem are that the very bedrock of the American polity, i.e., representation of the people, has been shaken to the core. This is because of the following facts : (1) gerrymandering has left many seats uncontestable (this means that an R seat will be won by someone who will appeal to the Republican fringe rather than the Republican center to scoop up the fringe votes; same with D seats); (2) using the electoral college system where one party scoops up all the votes means that politicians pay almost no attention to states like California and New York which are overwhelmingly Democratic. (3) using the electoral college system means that swing states matter a lot now (because states like Florida matter a lot and since we have one party scooping up all the votes for a state, parties go all out to appease specific interest groups in these states. e.g. the Cuban-Americans in Florida, the Jewish community in Florida, et cetera); (4) the very expense of running a political campaign means that Senators and Representatives are trying from Day One in office to raise money for the next election as opposed to actually doing their jobs.

I have routinely stated that if Reagan ran for election today against Obama, that Reagan would be denounced as being to the left of Obama. And I believe that if you actually look at what both said in speeches and accomplished in office, that my statement would be true. That is the Overton window in operation. It has happened so slowly that people haven’t really noticed the rightward shift in their own politics. Like the old analogy about a frog in boiling water. Neiwert wrote a lot about the rightward shift and rise in exterminationism at Orcinus (and he’s back after a break at Crooks and Liars).

That shift has happened very slowly over the years. The sort of healthcare that was normal for a worker in the 1980s is now called a “cadillac plan”. Pensions are pretty much gone for private sector workers, and more than half of those covered by private sector pension are retired. And now that the private sector workers don’t have them, time to turn on the FYGM some more and take them away from public sector workers. It all happens so slowly that the average person doesn’t notice. Just grumpy old geezers.

Also, I think that part of the appeal of the GOP is that they’re also catering to the narrowly focused interests of different groups. The pro-life groups don’t really care about the rest of the GOP platform as long as abortion is getting shut down. The pro-gun groups don’t care about the rest of the platform, because Democrats have proved to be the enemies of guns (again) and the enemies of everyone owning one. Each group gets a specially crafted message for their own, and all swear undying fealty to the big elephant. And if racial equality is your pet issue, you’ll only notice the racists in the GOP and ignore the rest.

how about querying them on who the true conservatives are

I’m reminded of a comment promoted vigorously by Limbaugh: “conservatism has never failed, it has only been failed”. Which means that if you failed (to get elected or whatever), then you aren’t a true conservative (whatever “true conservative” means). Or aren’t conservative enough. And that leads to a greater fervor among the teahadis: the push to “the right” won’t stop until the country is dead. Or until the Koch brothers quit funding it. And that is why the push is to “primary” the RINOs and replace them with “true” conservatives.

The Occupy movement was the last left wing movement in the US. I claim it is the last because most states passed laws prohibiting such demonstrations from happening again. The wiretapping and surveillance state will also prevent any Arab Spring from happening here in the US. The people participating did so because the Democratic party was so corrupt and right-wing that there exists no political party in the US that represented the movement.

How much more conservative can we get?

If the Democratic party cared to, they could be a leftist party. Instead they are in thrall of Wall Street. Because they’ve repeatedly refused to stop the rightward shift, then the country will continue the glacial march to the right. And this rightward shift, like a glacier, will crush everything in its path. Even European right wingers like Golden Dawn are to the left of American politics.

Why is the ‘normal’ Republican so frequently walking right up to the line, risking getting caught out saying something he’ll have to walk back? Why doesn’t that very fact make it normal and uncontroversial to say these things?

Tribalism and the “echo chamber”. People in the US are so used to communicating only with a small narrow range of people with similar interests. This leads to an echo chamber effect where the people yakking only speak with people of similar interests and don’t remember what it is like to have someone else disagree with them. With so many channels on cable, people can watch only what they want to watch and can therefore self-select themselves into different groups. These groups are becoming so incompatible with each other that we as a country are breaking up into separate tribes. At the moment one has to give at least some lipservice to the idea that we’re all Americans. But there isn’t enough pushback that the “wrong” sort of people aren’t American too. On this very blog, Chris wrote about that in England a couple days ago: “screw the taxpayer”. That those who didn’t pay taxes weren’t one of “us” and were instead some sort of “them” that needs to be gotten rid of. Romney got busted for it when he whined about the 47%. The day is coming when that sort of talk will be considered totally normal. And that any remarks to the contrary will be the wining of old farts complaining about walking to school in the snow and it was uphill both ways.

As for the end result of tribalism? We saw it in the place that used to be called Yugoslavia, and in Rwanda & Burundi. I believe it will happen here.

“the Civil War is thought to be about something other than slavery”

I read thatt the first (and last time oustide blogs, but there too, it is really about how other people think the civil war was not about slavery and how evil that is – or more acurate how could anyone dare to think anything else could have played a role) in a political science textbook written by a very left leaning Prof. doing a marxist analysis of the civil war. Found the analysis quite convincing.

Re:@51
Maybe that is a down under sort of thing though, even Murdoch journalists probably refer to our soldiers as Diggers (w/connotations of the levellers and miners) from time to time, while Murdoch makes speeches that has to combine liberalism with egalitarianism

“For Australia is on the cusp of becoming something rare and valuable in this new world: an egalitarian meritocracy, with more than a touch of libertarianism.

But we can’t wait for later.”

I don’t think any of it “counts” as particularly left wing.

This just sounds like you’re conflating relative vs. absolute measures, though. (And I say this as someone who’s almost certainly to the left of you, absolutely speaking—though I also take things like reproductive rights (and e.g., the ways in which ACA will in particular help people who are not white dudes) far more seriously than a lot of white-dude lefties do. Just to be clear, I take such issues to be central issues for the left.)

Given that so many people think this way, why not just say: that’s right, David Corn. We think this way.

Over a bit of time, though, this is exactly what happens. Anything from lack of mobility is totally not a problem to rape doesn’t induce pregnancy (as voiced by congressional candidates). Or, as MSM pointed out, it didn’t take that long for Cruz fils to embrace Cruz père, in the relevant sense obviously. So again, not seeing what’s missing. Obviously, it’s not bell curve-ish, but that’s for unrelated reasons.

Because I thought I was challenging an inappropriate use of relative measures to make conservative policies sound “left”-ish, and thereby confuse the context of our times and politics.

And I was saying that given the context, it’s wrong to think of it as a conservative policy, though I wouldn’t call it a left-policy myself—in the time and place we live, ACA is a moderate-liberal policy. Taking its intent and effects as a whole, I don’t see how one can argue otherwise.

One thing about the “racial entitlement” bit: It annoys me to no end that some self-described lefties think of so-called “cultural” issues as symbolic (in the best sense of the term). If you (not you personally) think that giving women control of their bodies or ensuring that non-whites have full political rights doesn’t challenge established hierarchies, then I’d humbly suggest that you don’t understand much about established hierarchies as they exist in this time and place. This is the one thing that’s misleading about the “plutocracy” framing. Not that I’m not happy to rail against the plutocracy myself; just that not all actually existing social hierarchies are plutocratic, and it’s a giant mistake to think that only the last needs fighting against.

Conservatism might be defined by a deference to long-lasting traditions and tacit social norms. In many ways, the right in the USA is not currently conservative. They do seem to me to be quite authoritarian, though.

Some of these social norms are what makes Congress work, inasmuch as it does. I think of how the Senate is not expected to filibuster everything, how the President should be able to expect, by and large, for his nominees to be appointed, how the debt ceiling is supposed to be largely symbolic, how the minority is supposed to offer suggestions for policy change but not supposed to use procedural gimmicks to stop everything from passing.

For these social norms, I think, John’s thesis works to some extent. The Republicans deny, when talking to mainstream corporate media that they are violating social norms. Appointing judges to empty seats now becomes pretended “court packing”, and they also pretend that holding the debt ceiling hostage has also been done many times before.

Why do they tell these obvious lies? I would submit that many of Bruce’s passive and ignorant do not know anything about how traditions on the filibuster have been abused over the last half-decade, for example. But I do not know if trying to promote ignorance and fill the news with stupid nonsense is enough to explain this.

The Overton Window presupposes some intellectual content, ideas. What they are peddling on their talk radio is just a word-salad. Obama is accused of being anti-colonial; a devastating indictment, apparently. The liberals are murdering millions of babies. They hate the country, and they are deliberately destroying it. That’s Der Sturmer-quality stuff.

This is not the Overton Window, no more than being able to say ‘shit’ on day-time TV. It’s something else. Crude propaganda. An attempt to woo the marginal vote. Some of the crazies will turn up and vote for the Republican candidate, who otherwise wouldn’t. Republicans win, some corporation will make more money. All there is to it. No reason to treat this as a war of ideas.

Re Overton window shifting to the right –
I think this view depends on defining the set of “left” wing views so as to leave out many issues where the US arguably does really well, and has been moving in the right (meaning left) direction. A related phenomenon is the intuition that left-right spectrum is shifted far to the right in the US compared to Europe presumably. The Democrats are center right and the Republicans are fascists, that sort of thing. The view is well-rehearsed, so a listing of topics left out may be useful as reminder:

1. Multiculturalism. Racial diversity and tolerance generically plus immigration policy. The country has been getting steadily more permissive on this, and gets more so each decade. A new front on this is Islam, where IMO the amount of prejudice manifested post 9/11 is minimal. You may compare to Europe on that for example, or for that matter on multiculturalism in general (France and Germany are somewhat whiter than Kansas…)

2. Church state – the courts have established more and more stringent rulings on things like prayer in schools or state funded displays. Impending theocracy in the US is some county trying to teach intelligent design in schools. Not bishops with automatic seats in parliament or a state church (however milquetoast).

3. Abortion law in the US is extremely permissive despite attempts to roll back.

4. Ditto first amendment and speech laws. There is actually supermajority support for speech rights for racists or minority religious views or communists or whatever, with strong support from both sides. Again, support has trended up not down.

Some more points as evidence against rightward shift:
A) gay marriage, where the pace is quite rapid along the proper trajectory. In fact it’s impressive even by international standards: if you compare US states to European states, the pace of the change is comparable I would argue. And there are about as many people in the US in states with gay marriage as there are people in European countries with gay marriage.
B) Religious belief and practice are down not up, with very large shifts in the under 30 crowd especially.

I would posit a very different model of the crazy right than burgeoning power. Let’s talk evaporative cooling instead – as your movement commands fewer people, those left inside still are of necessity the nuttier ones. Indeed, even as the crazy right grows crazier, the size of the right is down. (Check out party identification as R/I/D)

Thank you for your response.

“they WERE the ruling class; their leaders the protestant aristocratic oligarchy who ran the state for the benefit of themselves and for their own their allies’ mercantile interests. They were against the arbitrary rule of one person, and the older forms of feudalism which were against their interests. They were anti-catholic because statist protestant ideology was under their control and served their system.”

I really didn’t intend to imply they were not the ruling class, I don’t think people who were not of that class could become parliamentarians at that time (perhaps this is wrong?). But you have just shown that they weren’t conservative at all – they didn’t support the crown (how is hereditary rule arbitrary. It is a fairly simple not arbitrary mode of selection), they were against older feudalism, they were against the Catholics. All these things make them liberal progressives. How can you argue otherwise?

“Before it changed its name to the Conservative Party, the modern Tory party evolved out of the Pittite faction of the Whigs opposed to the French Revolution”

So, I read a slight bit more, as you recommended. I will just copy it down here for your reference.

Burke 1729-1797

Conservative Party founded 1834

Whigs “contested power with the rival Tories from the 1680s to the 1850s”

Tories “hold a political philosophy (Toryism) based on the traditionalism and conservatism originating with the Cavalier faction during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. This ideology is prominent in the politics of the United Kingdom, and also appears in parts of The Commonwealth, particularly in Canada. It also had exponents in parts of the former British Empire, such as the Loyalists of British America who opposed American independence during the American Revolutionary War. The Tory ethos has been summed up with the phrase ‘God, King and Country'[citation needed] (“Deo, Regi, Patriae” [1]). Tories generally advocate monarchism, are usually of a High Church Anglican religious heritage,[2][3] and are opposed to the radical liberalism of the Whig faction.
The Tory political faction emerged within the Parliament of England to uphold the legitimist rights of James, Duke of York to succeed his brother Charles II to the throne. James II was a Catholic, while the state institutions had broken from the Catholic Church—this was an issue for the Exclusion Bill supporting Patricians, the political heirs to the nonconformist Roundheads and Covenanters. There were two Tory ministries under James II; the first led by Lord Rochester, the second by Lord Belasyse. Some were later involved in his usurpation with the Whigs, which they saw as defending the Anglican Church. Tory sympathy for the Stuarts ran deep however and some supported Jacobitism, which saw them isolated by the Hanoverians until Lord Bute’s ministry under George III.
Conservatism emerged by the end of the 18th century—which synthesised moderate Whig positions and some of the old Tory values to create a new political ideology, in opposition to the French Revolution. Edmund Burke and William Pitt the Younger led the way in this. Due to this faction eventually leading to the formation of the Conservative Party, members of that party are colloquially referred to as Tories, even if they are not traditionalists. Actual adherents to traditional Toryism in contemporary times tend to be referred to as High Tories to avoid confusion.”

Judging from UK experience, it’s pretty much a rule that party members are more extreme (left or right) than the people who vote for their parties and, indeed, more extreme than politicians representing those parties (Duverger called it ‘the law of curvilinear disparity,’ if you want a label). The Conservative membership is, even right now while we have a Conservative government, convinced that it is being run by a ridiculously lightweight moderate who is doing his best to exclude the (much more right-wing) views of the majority of the members from any kind of representation.

So that’s pretty much a given: politicians have a much better idea of the views of the electorate than members do, whereas members are deluded that the electorate would vote for *their* views if given half the chance. The interesting question, then, is why and under what circumstances the extremists in the membership succeed in ‘capturing’ the party. In the UK it was often said (especially in the early 80s) that this was going on in the Labour Party, but it wasn’t really, and it has very much *not* been the case since. It has rarely been the case in the Conservative Party, the Thatcher government aside (and Thatcherism was of course a very complex phenomenon). Why are the Republicans *now* representing these views, even though they look like electoral suicide? Maybe Prasad is right, and the moderates are leaving the party. I don’t know.

Coming back to John’s original question, my guess would be that the GOP has become a sort of regional/ethnic party, and because of this, its electorate is capable of becoming more radicalized without being able to influence non-members of said regional/ethnic group as much.
They have become the party of southern whites and older white people, basically, and many of their ideas (racism, chauvinism, etc.) don’t “travel well” outside of that groups.

“That is what the word conservative meant originally”

Well, I know what I thought it meant, as I said. (Although I have often wondered about the distinction between conserves and preserves in jam). But I can look it up and read the meanings.

Apparently it’s from the Latin conservare, com + servare

com: cum [for skom, Sanscr. root sak, together; cf. sequor, and Gr. κοινός, σὐν], designates in gen. accompaniment, community, connection of one object with another (opp. sine, separatim, etc.), with, together, together with, in connection or company with, along with; sometimes also to be translated and.

servare: “servābÄ­lis, e, adj. servo. * That can be kept or preserved, preservable: uva sine ullis vasis, Plin. 14, 3, 4, § 40 .—*
II.That can be saved or rescued: caput nulli, Ov. Tr. 4, 5, 21 .”

So: together to keep, to save, to rescue???

Then I will turn to English, I have taken out a great many of the exemplary quotes, but I don’t know the laws of quotations (although if the dictionary is composed of quotations itself I don’t really see how it could argue against quotations), but if it is too great a quote to be lawful, mods, please delete.

” a. gen. To maintain (a person or thing) in continuous existence; to keep alive, existing, or flourishing; to preserve.
Common until the 18th cent.; now rare except as passing into or coloured by specific senses.
1398 J. Trevisa tr. Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum (BL Add. 27944) (1975) I. i. xvi. 51 He makeþ alle creatures and conteyneth alle and conserueth and kepiþ.
1483 tr. Pylgremage of Sowle (Caxton) iv. xxvii. f. lxxijv, He [sc. the soul] hath also power vegetatif and generatif for to conseruen his kynde and multyplyen.

b. To preserve (a condition, institution, privilege, etc.) intact; to maintain in an existing state.
c1405 (▸c1390) Chaucer Melibeus (Hengwrt) (2003) l. 667 Þt youre good name be alwey kept & conserued.
1908 Iowa Unionist 13 June 1/2 Such associations as falsely pretend that they are conserving the liberties of the people.

c. To keep or preserve (a person or thing) in a state, from some injury, etc. Similarly without complement. Now rare.
a1425 (â–¸c1385) Chaucer Troilus & Criseyde (Corpus Cambr. 61) (1895) iv. l. 1664 While that god my wit wol me conserue I shal so don.
1694 E. Phillips tr. Milton Lett. of State 2 That you will..conserve inviolable to the Merchants of our Nation their Privileges.

d. To preserve (a property or attribute) unimpaired.
1577 J. Northbrooke Spiritus est Vicarius Christi: Treat. Dicing To Rdr. sig. a, The Vessel wil conserue the tast of lycour very long.
1638 W. Rawley tr. Bacon Hist. Nat. & Exper. Life & Death 33 This..conserveth the Greennesse, and slacketh the Desiccation of it.

e. To keep (culture, language, tradition, etc.) from being lost or changed; to preserve for posterity.
Earliest as fig. use of sense 2a.
1714 T. Hearne Ductor Historicus (ed. 3) I. iii. 400 Colleges of Priests, who..conserved Knowledge among them with such Secrecy and Care, that, [etc.].
1836 Amer. Monthly Mag. Sept. 228 To preserve and conserve the sanctity of the language of our ancestors, by not applying old words to new uses, but inventing new words.
1913 Times 17 Jan. 37 Under the Constitution thus interpreted they [sc. French Canadians] had the clear right to speak French and to conserve the language throughout the Dominion.

a. To preserve or store (something material), esp. for later use; to keep from harm or decay by preserving (cf. also sense 4).
Formerly common in contexts in which preserve is now the usual term.
a1413 (▸c1385) Chaucer Troilus & Criseyde (Pierpont Morgan) (1882) v. l. 310 The poudre in which myn herte y-brend shal torne..þow take and it conserue In..an vrne.
2007 Hindustan Times (Nexis) 21 June, In bygone days, ‘Sushi’ was referred to as pickled fish conserved in vinegar.

b. To guard, retain, or husband (some material or resource); (hence) to avoid using in a wasteful or destructive manner. In later use influenced by conservation n. 1e.
1593 T. Buckehurst Let. 29 July in Mirror of Lit. (1836) 23 Apr. 265 [The comissioners have authority] to conserve the fish of al rivers and waters, and also the fowle in them, and to punish the offenders in bothe these cases.
1708 in H. S. Sheldon Documentary Hist. Suffield (1879–88) 157 Every Mine, or Mines yt do..appear..within ye Township of Suffield: is..conserved for ye whole Town’s use.

c. To prevent (something of natural or environmental importance) from being damaged or destroyed; (now esp.) to preserve by conservation (conservation n. 1e).
1908 Times 31 Oct. 10 We have tamed..the rivers of India,..we have conserved her forests.
1939 Times 22 Aug. 13 Efforts are being made to conserve the land by controlling the floods [of the Mississippi].
2005 Church Times 11 Mar. 9/2 The severity of this disaster could have been greatly lessened..had..peatlands been conserved in a healthy state along these..coastlines.

d. To use specialized techniques to preserve or restore (artefacts or sites of archaeological, historical, or cultural significance).
1964 R. J. Forbes Stud. Anc. Technol. VIII. ii. 42 In order to provide us with the maximum possible information they [sc. excavated metal objects] should at least be cleaned and properly conserved for future generations to study.
1994 Times 18 Oct. 20/8 It was estimated that it would take 6,000 man years’ work to conserve and stabilise the Liverpool Museum’s collections.

†3. trans. To keep (a commandment, counsel, promise, etc.); to observe (a custom or rite). Obs.
c1425 Lydgate Troyyes Bk. (Augustus A.iv) iii. l. 2105 (MED), He swore he wold conserven his beheste.
1566 W. Painter tr. O. Landi Delectable Demaundes iii. f. 77v, What is constancie? It is a vertue which conserueth good counsell, and maketh a man perseuer in honorable dedes.

4. trans. To preserve (fruit, etc.) in sugar or by similar means; to make into a conserve (conserve n. 2). Now chiefly U.S.
1538 T. Elyot Dict. at Ollares, Grapes conseruyd in pottes.
1638 T. Herbert Some Yeares Trav. (rev. ed.) 139 Dates, Peares, and Peaches curiously conserved.
1942 Charleroi (Pa.) Mail 9 June 8/4 Many who need the sugar..for canning and conserving fruit are unable to get it.”

That gives the gist of the word and its uses, although I have left out the modern technical uses.

A lot of people in the U.S., probably a majority, have leftist or leftish views, if we include preferences for Social Democracy in ‘leftish’. However, they are curiously weak in political organization. Hence, the Democratic Party, while still keeping its base, can move and has moved far to the right, driving the Republicans, thus deprived of their natural territory, into the wilderness of unreason. I understand that the powerful and rich find it easy to buy off or frighten the representatives of the people, but one might still think the opportunities for gathering votes and contributions among that majority might appeal to some fairly tough political types, tough enough to believably threaten splitting the party if the base is not reasonably served, and thereby arrest the Democratic Party’s rightward march. This is a considerable mystery to me.

I frequently quote this, but yet again I find it relevant, because there’s no point in a discussion if you can’t agree what you’re discussing. One has to be aware that that there are always some, both in power and aspiring to power, who will attempt to pre-empt and coerce meaningful debate by seizing control of the language.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less”. “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be the master, that’s all.”

There are many competing versions of Newspeak, whose purpose is to make opposing philosophies unthinkable!

Bruce @ 56

First, some factual errors. Food Stamps and Unemployment benefits have been made more generous, and in the case of SNAP, easier to get. their recent expansion is not simply due to increased unemployment. And the ACA is not a formerly right wing plan. The formerly right wing plans you mention (e.g. Heritage care) all involved blowing up the group market, not merely subsidizing the individual market. the ACA goes in the opposite direction. As for the right wing and financial integrity, the right is all for it, but don’t think that top down regulation is the way to get it. the Left does, and over the last decade and a half, the amount of that regulation has increased dramatically.

More philosophically, yes, absolutely these are all left wing moves. Even if I grant that the ACA was a right wing plan to universalize healthcare, it is still universalizing healthcare, a left wing goal for decades. Ditto the other expansions to the safetynet (I note you didn’t mention the medicare expansion), and increased federal involvement and spending on education. In reality there are maybe \4 ways domestic policy has moved meaningfully the right since the collapse of the post war consensus. Monetary policy, crime policy, welfare reform, and the often overstated de-regulation of the 80s and 90s, and each of these was only a partial reversal of previous leftward movement.

I think a piece of the puzzle might be the finding of the General Social Survey that large majorities of Americans, even those who are ideologically far-right, are “operational liberals,” i.e. they support an activist government when asked about specific programs. Think the Tea Party protester with the “keep Government out of my Medicare” sign. I think it might be the ideological vs. operational paradox on the right that has led to such schizoid politicians.

@86 – “Both words have simply taken on other — and I think often many simultaneous and contradictory — meanings.”

Yes! :) And from my perspective, the problem in the US is that people speaking the same language can no longer communicate with each other. On the “right”, that is even true of nominal allies.

The concept of the Overton window presupposes a high degree of social cohesiveness. I doubt it was ever true, but it certainly isn’t now. Tea Party supporters seem to class a majority of their fellow citizens as enemy aliens.

Metatone,

Republicans will be advocating that only married people vote in 2 or 3 years?

I think the moderate positions along these spectra reflect differential weightings of competing binary political values. The ideological extremism is a result of conservative self-purification leading to an unwillingness to accept other political values as at all legitimate. Beyond that, it’s a game theoretical calculation to maximize electoral success, whether it’s good or bad to be seen to be expressing the extreme position or whether denials still signal acceptance to the predisposed listeners.

Republicans will be advocating that only married people vote in 2 or 3 years?

It strikes me as perfectly within the realm of possibility that within the next few election cycles we’ll see Republican candidates running for federal office arguing that single women having the vote isn’t necessarily the best idea. How is that all that crazier than what we’ve already seen? (And obviously, the piece isn’t all that exercised about single men.)

What if there is no centre? Think a binomial distribution, not a normal distribution. The notion of a vital centre implies that there is overlap between the parties, enough that a normal is a reasonable approximation. But I think US politics is better approximated as two non-overlapping camps trying to out-mobilise each other.

Just on the face of it, the Overton Window seems to represent something that doesn’t matter that much for politics. So there’s two ways I see of looking at it this way:

1.) The public’s “window” is much wider than people assume. Additionally, arguably the parties in the U.S. are quite close together on most issues.
2.) The general public doesn’t matter as much as people think. The enthusiastic electorate – the people who feel galvanized by candidates and short-term factors in an election cycle – often go to the polls because they want to vote for a candidate. If they don’t care or are turned off by candidates, they stay home.

Of course, if governance in the nation strayed too far from what was acceptable, we’d see some strong efforts at reform – from new conventional political parties and rioting to anti-system parties and rebellions. But most of these things don’t come to pass – so exactly what we’d expect to see if the Overton Window was violated remains mysterious to me.

Empirically, I think the Overton Window must be of relatively limited use, at least given the generalized description I saw for it.

Politics is always about choice, and choice, at the last point in the process of making a choice, is always dichotomous: yes or no, for or against. But, it’s a process and a path, that gets people to the final yes or no, which is, of course, never really final. We’re constantly being reconciled to choices already made, or in the process of being made, by the political process, itself, by the process of debate and discussion and compromise and betrayal. Propaganda and the social construction of political norms is part of the process. If you want to rationalize a political policy of slavery for negroes, you have to have an ideology that makes slavery a good thing; if you want, instead, a society of racial diversity and political equality, then you have to have an ideology that supports that, and tell stories that highlight the injustice of apartheid or segregation, stories of lynchings, for example.

I suppose there’s something to the idea that no society is ever looking out the Overton window at the full range of political possibility, though some visionaries can certainly see into the distance. The choices that a body politic are confronted with at the moment are going to focus attention, but it isn’t crazy to imagine that focusing attention is also going to determine the choices of the moment. Some people in mid-19th century America could imagine and hope for racial equality. Some political localities could debate, for example, whether to integrate the public schools, at the same time the nation was worried about the fugitive slave law or slave rebellions.

“Progress” was a very, very powerful idea, which gave liberals political leverage beyond their numbers, on and off from the 18th century onward. It bedeviled those reactionaries, who wanted to resist the modernizing driven by the industrial revolution. Getting right with progress was what made Pitt, Burke, Peel, Disraeli and Bismarck politically successful “conservatives”. Progress carried the antislavery cause, the cause of widening suffrage, and a variety of progressive reforms well into the 20th century.

It seems to me that Progress seems to be losing its potency, as the continuing success of Movement Conservatism in stacking the judiciary, suppressing voter participation, and driving the economic agenda, sinks in, and the corruption of Obama’s brand of centrism is revealed. Or, in Europe, the antidemocratic, anti-social-welfare agenda of the Eurocrats is revealed in the punishing effects of the Euro.

Talk about the Overton Window concept has become just a stand-in, an excuse for expression of this anxiety about the lost potency of “Progress”. And, that anxiety is likely to grow, as the implications of climate change, peak oil, and ecological collapse sink in.

Oh, I could add one other set of data points to the discussion:

Since the 1964 election, there has been a gender gap between male and female voters. Female voters have mostly retained pre-1964 voting preferences, with either a preference for Democrats or a more or less even split. Male voters have shifted considerably to the right.

Incidentally, some of the typical answers that seem (to my limited understanding of the theory) to support the Overton Window, like “women are more caring than men, so more liberal” simply do not work, because the assumption that women score higher on caring indexes is flawed. I also think that an attempt to cast the difference as “men are obsessive and so less susceptible to short-term electoral factors” is going to fail, as well.

Bruce,

How does the propaganda divide people if there wasn’t some divide already existing?

How does the propaganda effect the genders differently if theren’t existing differences in the individual needs and desires of the genders?

I did want to make a point about the media. It was stated above that the media shouldn’t have much effect, because so much of the electorate isn’t watching it. However these people are embedded in the larger culture, they can’t help overhearing discussions among co-workers and associates. So broadcast propaganda -if it is effective, gets widely repeated as soundbites, and various memes are re-enforced every time someone repeats them. So disinfotainment media has an effect on the meme-sphere far beyond those that are actually its audience. I am often distressed hearing people who I know are liberals repeating conservative talking points. These memes can have a life of their own far beyond their natural constituency.

Its also true that there are dynamic centrifugal forces at work. Echo chambers and identity politics create a situation where most people end up choosing one camp or the other. So a natural bell curve can in extreme cases bifurcate into a bi-modal distribution.

I’m sympathetic to Bruce W.’s perspective but I would put it a bit differently. Bourgeois political parties (including of course both Dems and Rs) all work for the plutocrats, but that doesn’t mean the differences between them are somehow a trick or an illusion. Better to think of them as franchises of policy contractors competing for the business of running the state. They are offering the same basic service to Capital, but they have their distinct specialties. One (the “right”) puts in a low-cost bid, assuring the Bosses that public goods are unnecessary expense and that labor costs can be held down by a combination of divide-and-rule tactics and old-fashioned coercion. The other (“the left”) charges more but insists that public investment will pay off down the road and that squeezing labor too hard risks an explosive reaction. Capital balances short term profit against long-term growth and stability by picking one contractor or the other, and the contractors adjust their bids based to be close to whatever offer was accepted last time.

When you look at it this way, then yes, electoral politics is entirely about the interests of the plutocrats. But that doesn’t mean it is not also about the interests of ordinary people. The “left” program is genuinely more in our interests than the “right” program, and the more fuss we make, the more likely the Bosses are to choose the strategy of mollifying us rather than squeezing as hard as they can.

> If the divsions are all the result of plutocrats wanting deep division and close
> elections, why are so many states not closely contested?

>> Well, a lot of plutocrats are dumb. Poor class mobility works both ways.
But … but .. the plutocrats don’t actually control the parties directly. Their organizations are actually quite smart – whatever you may think of the intelligence of the plutocrats themselves.

I maintain that it has to do with the phenomenon of “all you have to win is the primary”. This has resulted in the Republicans having to pander to their far right base during primaries because since many elections are going to be either R or D for sure, and so the candidate simply has to win the primary. This means that they have to be more left- or more right- wing than the Overton Window would suggest.

Both parties have done their best to gerrymander districts and done various other things to ensure that elections always go their way and, of course, both parties have “plutocrats” backing them. And each state has its own set of economic interests. So, the reason why so many states are not keenly contested cannot be simply answered. Certainly not with a single line. Each state is different.

@ Omega Centauri

I understand the point about people being embedded in culture and having access to media – but in practice that is not how it worked out.

Remember Cindy McCain? People either loved her or hated her – so you would think from the discussions people had in politics. Yet the overwhelming response from the electorate was “who’s Cindy McCain?” Overwhelmingly people didn’t know who she was, and didn’t care. And there are plenty more examples like this.

Ditto Ted Cruz – some recent polls (taken shortly after his filibuster in the Senate) have shown that peoples’ overwhelming response to Ted Cruz is “who’s Ted Cruz?”

The convention is to call these people, when they vote, “low-information voters,” but it might be just as well to call them “low-enthusiasm voters.” And of course, there is a much broader class of Americans that don’t engage and don’t vote, but even amongst people who vote, there’s quite a few who simply don’t engage as strongly as the party faithful.

So much of this discussion is disappointing because it’s heavily based on “common sense” arguments, when we have access to the National Election Survey data (for example) that can actually put some of these notions to bed.

> MA and Texas are two very different environments; different levels of
> urbanization, population density, industries, surrounding states, etc.
> Propaganda doesn’t create politics out of whole cloth, it can only affect, shift it.
+1 Mao Cheng Ji. But note that Texas voters are also perfectly rational – their economic interests are being taken care of at the center by the Republicans (think “big oil”). .

> Ditto Ted Cruz – some recent polls (taken shortly after his filibuster in the
> Senate) have shown that peoples’ overwhelming response to Ted Cruz is “who’s
> Ted Cruz?”
Yes, most voters are “low information” voters. Yet their behavior as a whole is perfectly predictable. Example: all the Republicans in Ted Cruz’s district -will- vote for Ted Cruz come election time. This is because the typical voter is like the father in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” – he will vote for whoever the Greek Orthodox or Baptist or Catholich Church tells him to vote for (I totally cannot see him do anything else unless someone really pushed to do so). People -will- predictably (statistically speaking) vote along identity and religious lines because voters have “inertia”.

Again, the fact is that there is “voter inertia”. A voter at rest in the R or D camp will continue to remain at rest unless and until a force is applied to him in the other direction. This, I believe, is because of two reasons – principle and profit. The two reasons are : one, a large number of people have already made up their minds about whether they are going to vote D or R before an election due to the persuasiveness they ascribe to the two party platforms (i.e. principle); two, economic interests in different districts often mostly align with party R or party D, and so it is perfectly rational to vote R or D if you happen to be in those districts; and three, parochiality reigns supreme in America (i.e. profit). The third ‘p’ parochiality is thankfully not there – virtually anywhere. People in America, no matter where they live, don’t look down upon you for voting for the other side.

Put differently- each voter is seeking to attain a local maximum of satisfaction. The incentives are not in place to attain a global satisfaction maximum because America’s resources are decentralized to a very large degree and so people are incented to vote to maximum local satisfaction constraints.

AJ: People in America, no matter where they live, don’t look down upon you for voting for the other side.

Uh …

> It takes a very, very, very long time for demographics to shift to make these
> “safe” districts unsafe.
+1. I hadn’t mentioned the time component. Yes, that is another important factor.

PS: Motivation for a right-leaning party to cede power to the far-right in the scenario described suggests a disregard for moderate conservatism in favor of “winning”. My definition of an overly moderate government being one where all agree on a continued, slow progress, with moderate liberals being the ones focused on making sure progress is maintained, and moderate conservatives being the ones who focus on make sure that elements of the status quo are not discarded without due process, as opposed to being purely anti-discardation (discardment?).

CaptFamous

And, if the conventional wisdom is, like our neoliberal nostrums, a lot of claptrap, scripted to exclude any sensible policy option even from imagination? And, the political parties dedicate themselves to some combination of gridlock and consensus or bipartisan politics to avoid responsibility for destructive choices and negligence?

Bruce – That would be the prioritization of “winning” (or to your second point, “not losing”), which seems to become the goal when job security in government is tied entirely to “electability” and not at all to “doing your job well”.

@ AJ:
I believe this encapsulates your view –
>People -will- predictably (statistically speaking) vote along identity and religious lines because voters have “inertia”.

In terms of what wins elections, this is false because it is incomplete – because not all voters “have ‘inertia’.” Details: Certainly party faithful, “high-information voters,” exhibit inertia in their voting patterns (but at the same time they keep up enthusiasm for going to the polls).

But (relatively) low-information or swing voters are consequential to elections, and short-term forces (which, by their very nature aren’t systemic, in terms of persisting from election cycle to election cycle) swing those voters enough to help the winning candidate. Consider all the excited voters who showed up in 2008: Certainly some of them showed up for McCain, but that part of the electorate breaks decisively for Obama. Many of these voters didn’t show up in 2012 and few of them showed up in 2010. If we put these vanished voters in the ballot box at this November’s ballots, they would vote Democratic again, but inertia also helps keep people away from the polls. Inertia alone won’t win elections – you need excitement to get people to vote.

I don’t want to trash the “inertia” idea – in some respects that’s a good analysis of what happens. The majority of voters form their political opinions based on who the President is at the time they start voting. In fact, of all Presidents going back to FDR and possibly earlier, only at George W Bush’s second election do we not see evidence that happened, and that seems easily explained in terms of Bush’s terrible approval ratings.

Bruce Wilder @122, “The original bourgeois parties, the Whigs and the Tories”

I know I’m fighting a losing battle here, but – die hard, die kicking and all that – the *Whigs* were the *liberal progressives* and the *Tories* were the *traditionalists*. The *Conservatives* were *liberals who got scared by the French Revolution* and hid under the skirt tails of tradition.

How you might come to trust in this interpretation is in the meaning of Tory – I will quote the etymology for your convenience:

“1566, “an outlaw,” specifically “a robber,” from Irish toruighe “plunderer,” originally “pursuer, searcher,” from Old Irish toirighim “I pursue,” related to toracht “pursuit.” About 1646, it emerged as a derogatory term for Irish Catholics dispossessed of their land (some of whom subsequently turned to outlawry); c.1680 applied by Exclusioners to supporters of the Catholic Duke of York (later James II) in his succession to the throne of England. After 1689, Tory was the name of a British political party at first composed of Yorkist Tories of 1680. Superseded c.1830 by Conservative, though it continues to be used colloquially. In American history, Tory was the name given after 1769 to colonists who remained loyal to George III of England.”

Ed Herdman @ 128

How did it come to be that these two radically opposed sentiments, apparently both pro- and anti-science as I read them, found their way into one paragraph?

It’s a novelist’s device, shamelessly borrowed for more mundane, i.e. more polemical purposes. First the author pretends to be himself, then he pretends to be the people whose judgment he questions. The turning point comes at <To think that we are…

In his arrogance, the author presumes that a) he’s left enough breadcrumbs, and b) the reader is nimble enough to follow them through the maze of viewpoints. Did the author outsmart himself in the process, and risk being dismissed as an obscurantist, or worse yet, a confused Romantic? We report, you decide….

Bruce Wilder,

I would say those who were for parliament ahead of the king during the so-called glorious revolution were liberals.

“Liberalism and the idea of progress were ideological inventions of the French.”

I have heard John Locke referred to as a liberal, though I’ve not read him, and he wrote during the glorious revolution..

“@120 This is the best . . . model of American opinion dynamics . . . ”

I agree. That’s probably worth reposting when it’s more likely to be discussed.

“But what is it that keeps the range of acceptable right-wing opinion from naturally spreading out ever further to the right, as much as you might expect?”

If they end up getting involuntarily committed then they won’t be able to own or purchase firearms. That’s enough reason for most of them to pretend to be saner than they are. Not much saner than they are. But just sane enough to keep from getting a label of paranoid schizophrenic slapped on them.

It’s not the journalists that “hold the line against norms of acceptability shifting”, it’s the psychiatrists.

Holbo says: “the left-wing of the left-wing party, the Democrats, is so wimpy, comparatively, that it sounds funny even calling the Democrats ‘left-wing’, per se. ”

I have noticed recently that more than 90% of my comments sent to the New York Times have been judged unworthy of publication. (I used to have close to 100% acceptance, even two years ago.)

However, I did not change, I am still for universal single payer public health care. Yet I came to view the democratic main stream, in theory and practice, way too similar to the Republicans (GOP). I came to that conclusion after working hard, exclusively, and without compensation, for 2 years for Obama’s 2008 election. (Culminating with influence on, or co-writing of, several pro-Obama books.)

So it’s clear to me that there is a sharp swing to the right. The Tea Party is clearly winning hearts and minds, even at the New York Times. Voices like mine are viewed now, even at the New York Times, as crazy left wingers unworthy of consideration. After all, who proposed, say, sequestration? The crazy right wingers? No, the Obama cabinet.
PA

Apologies if this point has been made above, I confess to just quickly scanning most of the comments. To the post I would add this: have you considered that by general standards the mainstream Democratic Party views are basically centre right? So the vast majority of voters are in fact right wing. So my case is that you don’t worry about the shape of the curve, you just need to shift the centre point. I think this is very similar to what New Labour did to the Tories. They shifted labour to the centre right and it took the Tories nearly twenty years to realise that their reaction should not have been to move further rightward (making themselves unelectable) but to contest the centre. They are nearly allowing the same thing now by permitting UKIP to pull them rightwards but seem more aware of the folly of doing that. Just a thought.

Brad Delong has something interesting to say about this in the specific context of the primary challenge to Mitch McConnell. If there were a continuum, McConnell would sit at the right-edge just before you cross the red line into bizarre-world:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/11/zombie-senator-mitch-mcconnell-rule-and-ruin-weblogging-the-view-from-the-roasterie-xxxiii-november-14-2013.html

Many fascinating comments above.

I am not sure that Overton “Window” is a useful concept, but the Overton “Straightjacket” is obvious.

Overton Window seems, to me, to be a sort of “discourse analysis”, determined by the available channels + the ownership-control over them (on the “pitching” side), and personal attention budgets + intellectual capacity (on the “receiving” side). These things could change, over time.

On the other hand, the “Overton Straitjacket” in U.S. culture and politics is defined by, or is coextensive with, the “U.S. secular religion”.

The U.S. secular religion is described by something like the following: “individual self-determination; all people are created equal; freedom of speech; equality before the law; private property”, etc. — ideas which are projected and protected by the “secular bible”, comprised of the Declaration and the Constitution. (These are general principles, because circumstances may introduce variations: eminent domain, for public works, infringes upon private property valuations, etc.)

If a person’s political statements run outside of these general principles, then most of the rest of us will stop listening. Therefore that person cannot win an election.

I think the discussion about the far right should begin by dividing the discussion into two parts: 1. the current circumstances which have led to this rightwing resurgence (or perhaps coalescence, see below), and 2. the more basic nature of the right vs. left polarity, with the greater number of rightwing resurgences in U.S. history.

1. The current rightwing resurgence is up against the Overton Straightjacket because people in pursuit of political power, in a democracy, need to sway voters in order to get elected. That persuasion is mostly emotional, with intellectual concomitants and catchphrases to distinguish the position: it is a matter of rhetoric. The U.S. Republican Party has received the rhetoric of Reaganomics, has indeed made it a subsidiary religion with a Ronnie avatar. This is now an enormous circumstantial problem they may not be able to overcome, because we are heading into future with a slightly-larger welfare-state.

2. It strikes me that the right/left distinction in U.S. politics is misconceived, because they may be logically distinct KINDS of things. What if the right is a polar position, but the left is a directional arrow?

Remember in elementary school? You were taught the number line, stretching from the negative numbers through the zero point into the positive numbers. Now, the teacher says, erase the positive side of the line, from the zero point: you have what is called a geometric “ray”.

I think right and left may be a unipolar ray. The rightwing is the point. The left wing is the arrow.

Then, the rightwing is a POLE, a position, coalescing more easily and frequently in U.S. history, and always right up against the U.S’s Overton Straightjacket, i.e. the secular religion.

The left is not a “wing”, not a position, it is a DIRECTION, — and always a little slipperier to hold onto, conceptually.

This would make the U.S. a rightwing political structure, which is always ameliorated by the left. All within the “straightjacket” of the Declaration and the Constitution.

The left will proceed a little bit further now, in the immediate future, due to things like “capital-biased technological change” and increasing inequality.

***This is also why the worker bees in the mainstream media have a visceral, pre-conscious awareness that promoting a calm, rational discussion of the issues is not what their employers want.

Ed,

For example, some conservatives are very quick to trot out the “downfall of society” arguments in support [sic] of gay marriage and abortion (which both seem to be individual rights issues).

You’re right to point out that when we move from economic to cultural issues things get murky. It certainly seems to be the case that the left tends to agitate for change while the right is all ‘don’t rock the boat.’ To me, that is evidence of a greater faith in human nature on the left compared to a serious deficit of such on the right.

Even if a conspiracy theory (about JFK’s assassination or Obama’s true motives) is poorly reasoned and ultimately dead wrong, it can still be honestly believed.

Ed, not all conspiracy theories are paranoid and delusional. Do me a favor, read Anthony Summers, Not In Your Lifetime. This is a broad overview of JFK’s assassination. Very dispassionate, very well done. THEN, read Gaeton Fonzi’s, The Last Investigation. If you are not awed by Fonzi’s investigative skill and courage I will seriously eat my hat.

Please, read those books. You will not be the same.

http://screen.yahoo.com/will-ferrell-snl-skits/george-w-george-sr-cold-000000232.html

originally aired before the 2000 election, I thought this might be somewhat relevant.

I’d class this as “elected crazy wingnut” vs “unelected crazy wingnut”. Elected crazy wingnut, even as a product of gerrymandered districts, is a kind of anointing, and the window moves through the election of someone crazier. So Steve King and Louis Gohmert and Michele Bachmann and Ted Cruz are anointed crazy.

That’s not a clean: there are wingnut welfare crazies who are considered acceptable to the DC (and even NYC) media because political media in the US is astonishingly lazy and enjoy being able to fill space or airtime with people who have too much time on their hands and always answer the phone.

> In terms of what wins elections, this is false because it is incomplete –
> because not all voters “have ‘inertia’.”

I have been rather busy in the past few weeks and have not put in the time to look back at the comments, and so I will simply reply to the one person who (from my quick check) has replied to me.

-+-

No, I do believe that this analysis holds for the last 50 years at least.In fact, it even applies to George W. Bush’s second election. (Of course, I believe that American voters made a disastrous mistake in re-electing Bush and that it was a terrible, terrible turn of events for America). So, let us see how we can apply the “inertia” argument here.

First, it is obvious from the 2004 election that people don’t use “all available information” (denoted by ‘&’) to make electoral choices. Proof of this fact- the “Swiftboat Veterans” made a dent in John Kerry’s chances of being reelected. Second, let us think a bit about what really happened. Because there is heavy discounting going on voters’ minds of ‘&’. New information I2 (the Swiftboat allegations) that comes close to the election seems somehow rather more important than it should have been as compared to old information I1 (the disastrous outcomes in Iraq).

What time discounting means is that the bodies in inertia can be moved decisively in some direction (‘L’ or ‘R’) by means of unfair attacks and smear tactics.

QED.

-+-

See? It is a very clever model. Basically, what underlies this model is the fact that (organizational) leadership in America is believed to be based on charisma. Charismatic (organizational) leadership is a huge part of what wins and loses elections in America – going back to JFK’s television debate win. Of course, people are *too* “inertial” in this sense – without any question.

> the chemical properties o
Lest someone is looking to swiftboat, I might also add – also, the physical properties of a cosmetic such as reflectivity.

Hey, I’m also late to check back, so that worked out well! Fair points mainly, and I see that I seem to have gone on a tangent – although I am now confused about why you would say I assume that everyone in America has “access to the same information” (I assure you this is not the case; I do mention low-information voters) and then promote a model that appears based on assumptions like those in the rational man model voters…even though that doesn’t imply an even level of information, I think that it’s not a useful generalization because the differences in how much information is available to each person are profound. I think it likely that any useful model of the electorate will have to distinguish at a minimum between multiple different groups independent within the electorate, so that independents don’t distort the partisans and the reverse.

I’ll admit that I don’t get what is meant by “utility functions” when we are talking about people responding emotionally to dog whistles, five o’clock shadow, lipstick, and other things of a similarly whimsical nature, as well. I am out of my depth, but I don’t get utility out of calling something that is apparently decided by a psychologically salient impetus “utility” or using what I thought is the language of rational decision-making.

About your comments on the model – I found your response about the model not needing to cover the entire electorate very useful to get myself back on-point, but I would like to try and make a cogent re-statement of what I was attempting to convey earlier: When you state that “People -will- predictably (statistically speaking) vote” a certain way, you seem to be implying that this is akin to a major determinant.

I agree that a model doesn’t have to explain everything – and I wouldn’t say that a model which tries to smash everything into an average isn’t a model (because it still is a model). I would just say that it’s likely to fail too often to be useful.

When I look at many recent elections, I see the inert blocs of voters (i.e., aging New Dealers) all arrayed against each other and moving gradually out of political life in a relatively orderly fashion. So those “inert,” stable fragments of the electorate rarely move away (the big shift, which appears to be continuing through at least the 2008 election, is of men away from the Democratic party, which has been underway since 1964). What’s left which is interesting is what happens with voters who are relatively less inert – the people who get caught up in the short-term forces.

So yeah, some elections appear determined by the partisan blocs. But other elections are determined by voters acting measurably under the influence of short-term forces. In short, I agree that the model is useful despite not being definitive (enough).

I also would like, though I am not sure yet what to do with the belief (I am not able to credit myself with an insight) I expressed that the conventional left-right distinction (or its psychological underpinnings) is perhaps not a timely abstraction if we have the ability to use big data to find with more precision what actually motivates people. (Of course, this is a big “if.”) Additionally, when any of us try to reason out what the left-right continuum entails in terms of views, we will certainly make some errors. Big data should help prevent this. All this being said I am intent on keeping firmly in mind that even in the light of more promising sources of information, that other model can still remain useful – I would not like to follow up an apparent blunder with a stubborn blunder this time!

@ mattski:

There are some well-thought-out conspiracy theories regarding JFK. I am sure you are also aware there are many rabidly scene-chewing self-promoters who’ve entered the scene over the years to promote their own JFK conspiracy theories.

I will take a look at those books, but I think at this point I have become pretty inured to the reality that sometimes things just look more compelling than the actual evidence (which we don’t have access to) would have actually warranted. There has been entirely too much ink spilled on the assumption that the limousine JFK rode in had its seats all level with one another, and so the majority of people never get past the catchphrase “magic bullet,” which turns out not to have been magical at all.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I credulously read some of the latest allegations in relation to Princess Diana’s death. I would be ashamed to admit some of the things I’ve read credulously, in previous lives, so I agree it’s useful to try to reflect on whether one has a reflexive bias against arguments based on their format, but my major problem with many conspiracy theories is that they argue for psychologically or empirically unlikely events, like the perfect exclusion of contrary evidence from the public sphere and the perfect silence of what is likely a sizable group of people.

It is easy to become convinced about things that one has no means to decide one way or another, based on the luck of your draw of who got to you with an account first. This is not to say that the conspiracy theories are necessarily wrong, but unfortunately if a person is without means to analyze much of the purported evidence around a topic, then one must delve into even less rigorous modes of reasoning, like trying to weigh authorities – it’s a nasty business but nobody else has done it for us.