the pendulum

I keep up with politics, but I honestly do try not to get bogged down in it. For anyone who has an interest in the ebbs and flows throughout society, even for the completely apolitical, observing trends in politics can be incredibly instructive as to how society works. It actually probably helps if a person is apolitical because learning about the mechanics of politics is probably more difficult for a partisan for a variety of reasons which I will not address here.

Many years back I determined that politics at the national level essentially operates like a pendulum whose inevitable swings will make it appear that society moves to the right and to the left at irrational speeds. No one can really change the political swings within a truly representative government because the things that most effectively hinder political change are the things that dilute representation such as gerrymandering. People and political parties can influence the rate of the swing, but most of the major political parties' natural tendencies to try to make things more liberal or more conservative only strengthen the pendulum's swing to the other side of the political spectrum.

The two strongest and most obvious examples of this tendency were the 1994 and the 2008 elections. In both situations I heard pundits talk as if there was a fundamental shift in how people believed. While there are certainly constant shifts in societal positions for every issue, I do not believe that vast philosophical shifts are responsible for most swings in power, and my impression is that they are much rarer and typically much slower than is purported.

The biggest reason for such dramatic political shifts, I believe, is that voters exist at all points along a continuum rather than concentrated on one side or the other. In fact, it is more complicated than even that because a continuum is two-dimensional and varying political positions are not two-dimensional, but I'll stick with describing it as a continuum for now. When a political party comes into power it finds that it is next to impossible to pacify a majority of people because most issues have vast intricacies that guarantee disappointing large numbers of people along the continuum who voted for the people in power.

As a simple example of the problems the party in power faces, if you are a conservative how do you balance the desire for a small government with the desire for a strong military? This is at the root of a lot of conservative's distaste for Bush policies. If you are a liberal how do you balance support for green initiatives with support for union jobs (a very large percentage of which are in carbon-emitting or polluting industries)? This will be a very relevant issue in the next election, and moreso than most people realize. One issue may not cause a huge loss of voters, but at some point a critical mass of voters will become disillusioned and the pendulum will swing the other way. Neither remaining moderate nor trending toward the extremes is safe because voters can be lost from all points in the continuum.

Really, the only thing that I can think of that can slow the pendulum is the ability to blame the other side for the way things are, but to also maintain enough power to take credit for whatever goes well. Reagan was fortunate to come into power immediately after an unpopular president in the middle of an economic morass (he was in a very similar situation to Obama, really), but I think the biggest key to his enduring popularity among those trending to the right and his ability to get overwhelmingly reelected in 1984 was that Congress was dominated by the Democrats while he was in the White House. The same can be said of Clinton. Few would count his years with a Democratic Congress between 1992 and 1994 as his best in the White House, but he maintained popularity after 1994 in spite of some of the other things that happened in his administration, I believe largely because he had a Republican Congress.

Now that the Democrats have a supermajority in the U.S. Senate I know that some version of this pendulum effect is in the minds of strategists in both parties already. It is not a mistake that Democrats more than Republicans have talked up the fact that the supermajority is more symbolic than practical, because it makes them more easy to blame for anything that people do not like coming out of Washington. The paradox is that, like with Clinton, the thing that would most add to Obama's longevity in office and benefit his legacy would be for Republicans to win big in the 2010 elections. The complexity of working around these sorts of conundrums is why good political strategists make the big bucks.