Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to re: Clearly, a long term project

The soft, chewy Center
Fox — (archived)

Are you wrong? Far be it from me to say there is a right or wrong about nuanced political philosophy in a democracy (I do maintain that some other forms of government may be wrong prima facie... or is that prima fascist?)

And, since your last post decoupled HZ from our meta-consideration of political debate, I immediately see your point -- especially about the volatility of policy that may eventually emerge from polarized debate.

Excuse me for invoking the hoary pendulum paradigm...

Lateral forces on a pendulum have friction and gravity as their common opponents. Otherwise, the bob at the end of the string wouldn't swing back at all, and one end or the other would gain indefinite "hang time" (cf. the "permanent Republican majority," and other fantasies). Friction appears on the operational level -- that is, the means by which policy is carried out -- in the form of institutional inertia: for instance, the fact that career bureaucrats remain at their desks despite changes in senior administration, act out of habit (and a desire to remain employed), and are slow to change because there are so many of them. This tends to dampen extreme swings, even when the rhetoric is at its most vehement. Sadly, it also retards response in crisis (cf. FEMA).

The other component of the orthogonal vector the Right and Left both must overcome is that Center you talked about. My question is: which one? There is a politically active Center, personified these days by what are called "moderate Republicans" and "Blue-Dog Democrats". I, as you, hope that their resistance to extremism continues to modulate the pendulum's amplitude, as their historical antecedents have done.

[As an aside, that group may be who TB was talking about in his post in CE about independents.]

Of greater concern is the Apathetic Center. The fraction-of-one-percent "mandates" we lament derive from those who bothered to vote at all.* I've found preliminary turnout statistics for the mid-term election just past: the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American U. estimates that 40.4% of Americans eligible to vote last November did so. (Their full report is here.) Professor McDonald at George Mason U. develops a different set of numbers in his research, and estimates a slightly higher turnout: 41.19%. Not to quibble over tenths, that still leaves nearly 60% of the eligible population unrepresented -- by choice.

Small wonder that both sides of the aisle sometimes feel a need to scream, when only 2/5 of their potential audience appear to react at all.

[* -- Bad enough that the four-way race for governor of Texas re-elected Perry with 36% of the votes cast, because there is no requirement for a majority, hence no run-off -- but turnout was only 30.9%!

.36 x .31 = .11, to two sick figs... Eleven percent of voter-eligible Texans is the "mandate" Gov. Goodhair received.]

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