Political Pendulum theory.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

(I'm just playing with this theory, so feel free pull it apart at will.)

I've been thinking lately that each nation has a political centre of gravity, the natural point that inevitably the political pendulum returns to time and time again.
Each nation has it's own centre, for instance, the Canadian centrepoint is different to the US one, the Mexican or British one different again. Governments can try to pull the agenda to the left or right, but inevitably, the public debate will return to the centrepoint. It won't swing to the opposite poll, it will return to that centre.
The centre can shift over decades, but only by small degrees, it takes many years to move significantly.
Do you think the pendulum has reached it's most rightward point in the US? Is it beginning to swing back? Where is the US centre of gravity?

[Homer12]

1. What is the political make-up of the USA's center?

It's not clear to me what it is/or is supposed to be.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

2. That's what I'd like some suggestions on. Currently the political debate

is considerably to the right of what it was pre-Reagan.
On edit - I don't mean centre as in centrists, I mean a field of debate, a more balanced area.

[bryant69]

3. Part of this is natural

It's a simple cycle seen all the time.

1. A party is concerned about a number of issues, but mostly concerned that they don't have much of a voice (As the republicans must have felt in the post-nixon era
2. They bind together working very hard to gain political power in a very unified way.
3. They gain power.
4. They no longer feel as threatened, and start pursuing their own ends, which mutual contradict each other (Libertarian Republicans are cool with legalizing Marijuana, Traditionalist Republicans are totally opposed to the idea).
5. The party infighting weakens the unity, the individual members get unenthusiastic about supporting the party.
6. The other side, humbled by being kicked out of power, realizes they need to work together, and defeat them.
7. The party loses power.
8. Go back to step one.

This is simplified of course, but it strikes me as accurate. I think that the fractures are there in the republican party; but I don't know if they are that strong yet. The Republicans have the capability to while controlling the white house, the congress and the courts, as well as the media, to believe themselves a persecuted victim of us. So they might not go through it as quickly as you might expect.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[Screaming Lord Byron]

4. Yeah, I think the pendulum shifts work out over long periods of time

but I am smelling something on the wind right now.

[Homer12]

5. I don't think it's a pendulum shift

The nation is very fractured on party and ideology lines, I don't think this is going to change, but what I think is happening is that people are getting the idea to paraphrase O'Neill that, "A blind man is their president and his cabinet are all deaf"

You could be sensing growing public reaction to Buscho's Corruption as a pendulum shift.

Afterall, I don't think all conservatives, republicans, and independents are mindless brainwashed clones; they are afraid to acknowledge that their, "answer to Bill Clinton to clean-up the white house and re-store integrity to it", is 1000 times worse than Clinton ever was or could have been.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

6. Possibly, like I say, I'm just floating a theory, I don't know how valid

it is.

[Homer12]

7. It's a good theory

I just wonder what the center of gravity is. I suppose that would take a lot of research.

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

8. I think pendulum is a faulty metaphor.

A pendulum swings on a constant plane where the poles are constant and the middle is constant. The left and right remain the same and every point in between remains the same. I don't think this is appropriate for the American two-party system.

I think you have to think of America in terms of Hegelian dialectic: you begin with a thesis, which automatically includes its own anti-thesis. From the collision of the two, one finds a synthesis. This synthesis is not necessarily a combination of the two, or even a middle point, or an averaging out. In fact, a synthesis could be further to the right or left of its original thesis/anti-thesis. The failure of the DLC to understand this basic point is what lost the dems. control of the house AND the senate.

O.K., so you have a synthesis. But this synthesis now becomes a new thesis, complete with its own anti-thesis. These two compete, and we have a new synthesis. In terms of game theory, this type of government is always going to be based on a zero-sum game--See "The Frozen Republic" by Lazare for a more thorough investigation of this principle.

Here's what gets very tricky (and extremely FRIGHTENING) about recent American political dialectics: the two dominant forms of thesis/anti-thesis in this country was government intervention versus individual rights. The country has always discovered new syntheses from this two positions. But somewhere along the way, between the 50's and now, corporate rights found its way into the synthesis and has not been removed (I believe this is what campaign finance reform will come to represent in our dialectical system). Not to put too fine a point on it, but corporate became the bastard child of individual rights and government intervention. Corporate rights now finds itself as part of both thesis and anti-thesis.

[rman]

10. I think DLC is supposed to be part of synthesis,

as far as the designers of the Dem party's move to the Right is concerned. If you look at the issues, both Repubs and the main body of Dems do behave in a non-left manner.

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

11. They are no doubt part of a synthesis.

Everything is always already part of a thesis/anti-thesis (therefore a synthesis). But their synthesis is part of the frightening corporatization of thesis/anti-thesis synthesis. They thought their move to the right was a cold-blooded calculation. I think it was more likely to be an unintended appropriation of the right's thesis. This would mean that the DLC as anti-thesis already has as a major part of it the right's ideology, and, more specifically, the right's corporate ideology.

[grannylib]

9. Geez I hope so...we have moved so far to the right that even moderates

or "Republican Lites" are being called Liberals (like it's a bad thing...)

[lapislzi]

12. this is an "all things being equal" theory

and as such, can operate only in a vacuum devoid of other influences.

You can't create a perpetual motion machine. Forces act on the system. The far-right is such a force. It's created a political fractal. Who knows where it'll swing next?