Pendulum effect

Great Debates
1

During discussions of politics on this board, I often see liberals claiming that “The pendulum will swing back,” while conservatives claim that that won’t happen. On the face of it, I would agree with the conservatives, that there is no law in politics that would imply that conservatives and liberals have to take turns in power. However, this is because I have never really seen a mechanism presented for how it would happen.

I would like to present such a mechanism. I submit that for almost any given issue, the closer one side is to success, the less compelling it is politically, for two reasons: 1. issues that are close to failure are more urgent then those close to success. and 2. issues that are close to failure give proactive solutions, while issues that are close to success only give reactive or maintainig solutions.

Consider Gay Marraige. In a state without Gay Marriage, the issue can be quite urgent, as arguments can be raised about Gays being denied visiting hospitalized spouses, and all the other rights that marriage brings. If that state enacts a Civil Union law granting all the legal benefits of mariage, those arguing for Gay Marriage lose the use of denied rights as an argument, and the issue loses a lot of its urgency. The worse things are, the easier it is to point out how wrong it is.

I think proactive solutions are more exciting to the electorate than reactive/maintence solutions. “I have a new plan that fixes ” is more exciting than “Bob’s new plan is dangerous” What’s worse, “Bob’s new plan is dangerous” shifts the focus to Bob, and that he has a new plan. If the Dems get success in say, Welfare, it is more exciting for the electorate for the Republians to come up with alternate plans and attacks on Welfare, than it is for the Democrats to say “Hey, I like the Welfare plan that we have.” It makes the Repubs look like they have vision while the Dems don’t.

My suggestion for the Dems? go slightly conservative on issues that liberals are winning, and go liberal on issues that conservatives are winning. Bill Clinton did very well on this with welfare reform. He was able to look like he had vision, on an issue that looked like it was a Republican money shot for vision. After all, liberals had Welfare for 50 years or so, protecting it is not going to be interesting. The key is to make changes that look significant, but still protect what is liberal (or conservative, in the theoretical future where conservative issues have enough success to make republicans look like they lack vision) about the issue.

So, my suggestion suggests that Democrats go pro-Gay marriage, pro stem cell, for Welfare, Medicare, and Social Security reform (but not the reforms that the Republicans are looking for)

This mechanism suggests that the longer a politial group is successful, the less oppertunities it has to present a plan that would represent progress and vision. At the same time, the booted party’s issues look more urgent the longer that political group is successful.

This, of course, assumes a two party system, and that both political parties have a decent political machine.

I would prefer discussion head toward an evaluation of the mechanism and the possible implications of it, rather than whether the Democratic party has a good enough political machine to capitalize on the advantage that this mechanism posits. Thank you.

2

I like your idea, but I have two broad comments.

The first is that I personally believe the pendulum effect operates largely because people have a inherent sense ‘stasis’ that they are comfortable with. That sense of stasis may change over time, but it takes many generations. When any social change pushes too far away from that central point society will react by pushing back towards the way it was in their parent’s time or their own childhood. That reaction will tend to occur whether the situation is ‘truly’ urgent or not.

And that brings us to my second broad point, which is that a sense of urgency relies on a pre-existing acceptance of the correctness argument. People don’t endorse social change is urgent because it’s urgent, rather they believe that the change is urgent because they already endorse the change. Obviously if they didn’t already accept the change they wouldn’t considerate urgent.

Take your own example of gay marriage. You claim that gay marriage will be supported if it’s an urgent civil rights matter. But there are people alive today, unfortunately not many, who faced a real risk of being herded into gas chambers for being gay. You really couldn’t get more diametrically opposed situations. On one hand the public saw it as urgent that homosexuals be eliminated completely, and on the other hand the public see it as being urgent that they get the exact same treatment as everyone else. And the first position was endorsed by an extreme conservative government while the latter is endorsed by extreme liberal.
And this is what I see as the biggest flaw in your thesis. The sense of urgency felt by the public isn’t the cause of public support for these issues and for the political institutions that endorse them. Instead the public already have to embrace these issues in order to believe they are urgent and to support them. In other words public support of any political position isn’t generated by a sense of urgency as you suggest, the sense of urgency is generated by the public’s pre-existing support for the political position.

What this means is that in order to exploit/negate a pendulum effect political groups can’t simply alleviate any sense of urgency favouring the opposition. That won’t work because it’s not addressing the fundamental issue, which is that the public has a primarily conservative outlook at the moment. A watered down liberal platform may mean that they lose fewer votes than they used to, but at the price of becoming second-rate conservatives. And when people want conservative they will go with the real deal rather than a second-rate copy.

People aren’t supporting welfare reform because they fell it’s urgent, they feel it’s urgent because they support it and feel that it’s needed. If people didn’t think it was required then obviously wouldn’t see it as being an urgent issue. If the liberals start promoting ‘Welfare Reform Lite’ then all they are likely to do is lose a lot f their core voters while gaining no support form those who obviously want urgent reform.

Oddly enough in this one are the US is in many areas behind many other parts of the world. Elsewhere such as the UK or Australia the political parties have essentially done as you suggested, playing middle of the road, popularist politics. The actual distinction between New Labor and the Tories has become almost non-existent. When Labor adopts position A the Tories say they want more of it and sooner or less of it and later. But almost never do the parties ever actually vary on what should be done.

What you seem to be suggesting seems pretty much the same system applied to the US. And the results I suspect would be exactly the same. Rather than overcoming the pendulum effect I suspect that all that would happen is that both parties would simply follow the pendulum as they do in other such systems, following rather than leading.

3

I don’t mean to burst your bubble, and it is a fine idea, except that it is not new. Classical liberalism has long understood the principle that, as you put it, “The worse things are, the easier it is to point out how wrong it is.” That is why many libertarians do not participate in the political process, and are actually encouraged by the increasing encroachment against our liberties by Congress, the President, and the Courts. There is little point in reintroducing the liberalism of our Founders until such time as people perceive their government as tyrannical.

4

That sounds dangerously close to “Rather than trying to fix the obvious problems in from of us, we’ll just stand back and let the whole the whole thing self distruct, and lay claim to the carcass afterwards.” Sounds extremely bad for the very real people who have to live in this country, and(at best) iffy for your political persuasion. If this country falls apart, do you think everyone else is just going to stand aside and say, “Gee, we couldn’t do the job-why don’t we just give up and hand it over to the Libertarians?.”
Not gonna happen.

5

Your gratuitous ridicule and caricature aside, it is indeed dangerously close to that. You have likely witnessed some of my discussions on the matter with El Cid right here. He is the libertarian’s libertarian, and although I understand the reasoning behind the premise, it frightens me. But the premise, in the end, is correct. Even the Declaration of Independence notes that people are longsuffering and are willing to endure quite much before doing something about it. Perhaps it would be different if whole generations of people learned from those of the past, but sadly they do not. As someone has said, if man were capable of learning from his mistakes, he wouldn’t have to number his world wars. It may or may not be the Libertarian Party that rescues America. Libertarians in general are not loyal to the Libertarian Party, but to liberty itself. We do not care who gets or claims the credit. In fact, I spend a lot of time here encouraging modern liberals to retake the highground they once held as defenders of freedom. If you turn out to be the one who rescues us from the State’s tyranny, I will kiss your feet and be forever grateful to you.

6

this I agree with, the pendulum effect won’t affect anything when looked at from a historical perspective, it’s just back and forth noise, while the historical trend still goes in the same direction.

I don’t believe that more urgency means more supporters, I believe more urgency will lead to the pre-existing supporters will be more invested in the cause, and be more likely to vote and be active in a cause, where they would be inactive if the cause was not in any trouble.

I would guess that most or all ideas have probably been thought by someone, somewhere, but the relevant question here is: have most of the people reading this thread thought of it, and applied it to this situation? It is clear you have, but since I have seen questions about how the pendulum is supposed to work and have not seen this idea given as an explanation, I would think the board has either not applied it in this way, or has rejected it.

If they have not applied it this way, this thread serves a purpose, and if they rejected it, I would be interested in knowing why.

7

General observations “pendulum effect” is the motivating idea behind much theory in the fields of philosophy (in the “Hegelian dialectic” of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”) and in the works of Marx/Engels and Lenin ("dialectical materialism," “subjective materialism,” etc.)

Have fun…

8

When my wife was in grad school she used to read her academic papers to me to see if I could catch any obvious mistakes before she showed them to her peers.

One evening we were doing this and in among all her other scholarship was the following sentence:

“A period of complexity in musical performance is usually followed by a period of simplicity.”

My response was:

" ‘Usually’? What else COULD it be followed by?"

If you’re looking at anything through a diametric lens, the only possible behavior is pedulum-like swings. A period of musical complexity MUST be followed by period of musical simplicity because until complex music starts getting simple again the “period of musical complexity” isn’t over.

A period of plenty is ALWAYS followed by a period of scarcity. A period of liberal politics is ALWAYS followed by a period of conservative politics. A period of public activism is ALWAYS followed by a period of public apathy.

9

The mechanism that makes the pendulem swing is the fact that most of the population is pretty much in the ‘moderate’ category. Too much freaky liberalism starts making those with more conservative leanings become more involved in the political process while too much stern conservatism has the opposite effect, causing those with liberal leanings to become more active.

The fact is that even though some people think gay rights, abortion, the flag, even the war on terrorism or Iraq is the most important thing in the world, most of us really can’t be bothered and would prefer to go about our business. It’s only when those issues start to affect us that we start to push back, eventually settling into a more moderate equilibrium.

And that, in a nutshell, is why the political pendulem swings back and forth.

10

True, but my point with the example of people urgently wanting to execute homosexuals and urgently wanting to grant them marriage rights is that urgency can swing both ways. Many conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, feel it is urgent to stem the tide of immorality and godlessness that is sweeping the nation, and that includes urgently wanting to stop or ideally roll back the social acceptance of homosexual unions. Don’t believe me? Read some Jack Chick.

That was one of my main points, if not well made. Urgency is felt by people who already support a cause. As the pendulum swings towards the conservative people will feel urgent about conservative causes that are actually antithetical towards many liberal ideals. Liberals can’t exploit such a pendulum effect by becoming Conservative –Lites because the the sense of urgency is the cause of the pendulum effect, it’s not caused by it.

This is a good point and well worth making.

However in the case of politics we don’t have a diametric lens. We can have historical reference points or comparisons to other countries or whatever. In music we need to define something as either complex or not. And we can do so with absolute reference. There is an absolute limit that has been reached in terms of musical complexity and an absolute simplicity. And as you point out complexity has to be followed by simplicity eventually as surely as drought follows rain. All that we can do is define what is simple and what is complex.
Politics isn’t quite so simple. A period can be defined as conservative or liberal based on a reference to some historical reference point is we desire. And as such we can have a situation where society simply gets steadily more conservative, even allowing for minor deviations, without ever being liberal. However I don’t; see that as being the case. Society genuinely oscillates. In some respects it is more conservative than it was 250 years ago, and in some respects it is more liberal. But there is a genuine pendulum at work. Society has never reached a point of ultimate conservatism and certainly never ultimate liberalism that we can use as a reference.