"The Ratchet Effect" in Politics

"The ratchet is a simple, ubiquitous, ancient bit of machinery. There's one in your bicycle wheel (it allows you to coast without pedaling), there's one in your watch (if you're the old-fashioned type and have a mechanical watch) and there's one in the jib sheet winches of your boat (if you're a yachtsman; but then in that case you probably aren't reading this book). What the ratchet does is permit rotation in one direction but not in the other. Here's a diagram:"

(You can actually see the diagram at the site.)

"The American political system, since at least 1968, has been operating like a ratchet, and both parties -- Republicans and Democrats -- play crucial, mutually reinforcing roles in its operation. The electoral ratchet permits movement only in the rightward direction. The Republican role is fairly clear; the Republicans apply the torque that rotates the thing rightward."

"The Democrats' role is a little less obvious. The Democrats are the pawl. They don't resist the rightward movement -- they let it happen -- but whenever the rightward force slackens momentarily, for whatever reason, the Democrats click into place and keep the machine from rotating back to the left. Here's how it works. In every election year, the Democrats come and tell us that the country has moved to the right, and so the Democratic Party has to move right too in the name of realism and electability. Gotta keep these right-wing madmen out of the White House, no matter what it takes."

"(Actually, they don't say they're going to move to the right; they say they're going to move to the center. But of course it amounts to the same thing, if you're supposed to be left of center. It's the same direction of movement.) So now the Democrats have moved to the "center." But of course this has the effect of shifting the "center" farther to the right. Now, as a consequence, the Republicans suddenly don't seem so crazy anymore -- they're closer to the center, through no effort of their own, because the center has shifted closer to them. So they can move even further right, and still end up no farther from the "center" than they were four years ago."

read more. . .

http://www.smithbowen.net/linfame/stopme/chapter02.html

The whole book is worth reading, and is all online, but this chapter is particularly good at explaining why we keep moving to the right in US politics.

or they'd piss off righties.

no other comments. I was hoping to hear more about what people thought of the article. Maybe you've started a trend.

his premise is that Gore lost in 2000. He did not. "The dummy won, though narrowly", as the author says, because of Republican shenanigans and Supreme Court pretzel logic collusion. If his entire premise throughout is that the Democrats are rightwing enablers, that's one thing, and I'm sympathetic to that point of view; but to ignore the agency of Republican cheating, and the co-opting of the judicial branch of government and of the Fourth Estate, all of which reinforces their power threefold—well, that makes for a weakened argument in my view. Maybe he gets into these factors later, but he lost me by not setting it out in the beginning.

but not about any particular election in detail. Given that, I can see why the author chose not to discuss how * "won" in 2000. The story is well-known but if he'd said the election was stolen, he'd have had to spend a whole chapter spelling out how that was done, and would have probably lost some readers there, because it is well-known and some would think "Oh, I know this."

I'm sorry he lost you there because I think the book is worth reading.

wouldn't be many books to read, would there? I think this author chose not to discuss how Bush won because it would have undercut his premise, which is how the Democratic Party bears responsibility for the rightward turn of the government. As for stories being "well-known"—well, you and I know how many people in this country consider it well-known that Saddam was directly in league with al Qaida for the 9/11 attacks.

I watched events unfold and still I read Thomas Hicks' "Fiasco" and Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty" and Clarke's "Against All Enemies". I didn't expect them to skip over events, in essence saying to the reader, "Oh, you know all this already, I don't have to tell you." I expected them to analyze the events that happened, and they did. They didn't start out with a theme and studiously ignore events that didn't fit their premise, as if they had no bearing on things.

And, "not about any particular election in detail"—!?!?! Surely you don't mean to be so dismissive of the 2000 election, as if it was just like all other presidential elections, and has nothing to do with what has happened to politics in the last seven years! That's pretty outrageous. I know you wish to defend this author, and I would have been happy to follow him along in his ideas, until I realized that, if he wasn't being outright dishonest in avoiding the events surrounding the Gore-Bush election debacle, he was at least stacking the deck to make his premise stronger. Too bad. He has an entertaining style.

"You may be right."

Still, I think the book makes some good points. In "Against All Enemies," Clarke doesn't address all that I'd have liked him to address but I thought the book was good overall. His novel, "Scorpion's Gate" is good, too, if you haven't read it.

You wrote:

"And, "not about any particular election in detail"—!?!?! Surely you don't mean to be so dismissive of the 2000 election, as if it was just like all other presidential elections, and has nothing to do with what has happened to politics in the last seven years!"

I certainly don't mean to be dismissive of the 2000 election. I was horrified at the line the media was parroting, that "democracy had prevailed." I will never forget December 12, 2000 and I haven't lost any of my anger about it. Everything has gone downhill since then.

But if this book had analyzed the 2000 bloodless coup in that first chapter, I'd have been thinking "I know this, what else have you got to say?" There's not much new to say about it, as far as I know, and there are more recent events to be concerned about.