Nick -
What I think you are describing, is a structural problem with our
system. While I don't want to disagree with the likes of Winston
Churchill ("Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all
the rest"), I think the form we have come to, which feels like a
slow-motion tug-of war between two huge factions, each being sponsored
by huge corporate interests, leaves us in this situation. The actual
alignment of the tug-of-war rope shifts over time, but in any given
moment there seems to be no room for innovation or compromise, just pull
and tug.
When we don't have a "centrist" in office, "cementing in place
institutions" ... we have an extremist (well, only barely by some
standards) tearing down the institutions of the last group in power and
replacing them with new ones (to be torn down later).
I'm probably harping to the choir here, but our *mental* model of a
single political axis (left/right) is as damaging to the possibility of
anything else as the more mechanical institutions (election law) that
help to put/keep us there.
Some of the alternative models of the "political spectrum"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum> allow for 2, 3 and
even more dimensions of alignment.
The early work (some of the sociologists/psychologists here can probably
elaborate/correct me on this) of folks like Ferguson
<http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00223980.1944.9917194#preview>
(American) and Eysenck
<http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=id3h_mlWrUsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR15&dq=eysenck+psychology+of+politics&ots=xejGb00-fI&sig=rSeKPcNrkvW992guHLZWayt4xyE>(german
living in Britain) seem to offer some pretty insightful thinking on this
subject. Even they used factor analysis to reduce the dimensionality to
3 or 2 (respectively). This is useful for analysis perhaps, but I think
it is *always* risky to forget that the process is lossy and can be
obfuscating of important properties...
I believe that the dimension reduction (to 1) contributes significantly
both to the "stuck in the middle" artifact and the "wildly swinging
pendulum" artifact. I'd be interested if anyone has more
information/insight into this problem.
- Steve
Dear Friammers and Kitcheners,
These websites caught my attention, and I think they ought to catch
yours.
http://www.dsac.gov/Pages/index.aspx
<http://www.dsac.gov/Pages/index.aspx>
http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html
<http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html>
There is a danger that Obama, because he is a centrist, will cement in
place institutions that would have been unthinkable only a few years
ago. Where is Frank Church when we need him?
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
http://www.cusf.org <http://www.cusf.org/>
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