Norman Mattoon Thomas (November 20, 1884 - December 19, 1968) was a
leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential
candidate for the Socialist Party of America. He said this in a 1944
interview:
The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under
the name of "liberalism," they will adopt every fragment of the
socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation,
without knowing how it happened.... I no longer need to run as a
Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party
has adopted our platform.
This statement reveals several key ideas:
The *first* is that a third party can win support for its policy
positions without winning any elections if one of the two main parties
adopts its positions.
The *second* is that it is a winning political strategy to advantage a
small segment of the voters at the expense of a smaller segment. Do that
for enough small segments and eventually you will have socialism.
The *third* is that it is a winning strategy to avoid allowing your
ultimate objective, or the constitutional implications, to be framed as
the question to be decided by the voters. People wouldn't vote for
socialism, or for violating the Constitution, if the question were
framed in those terms, but will vote for incremental steps toward it,
and fail to understand the opponents when they try to explain to voters
what those steps lead to, or that they are unconstitutional.
The problem for libertarians is that liberty doesn't sell as well as
government benefits. People don't really appreciate liberty until they
have lost it, and too often they will not even realize they have lost
it, or they will attribute the loss to something other than their own
past election choices. It is easier for most people to imagine a
prospective financial gain or loss than a loss of liberty. Money can be
counted in a way that liberty can't.
The same may be said of constitutional compliance. Few politicians make
it a leading issue in campaigns. Most people don't understand it and
have come to think that calling the opponent's position
"unconstitutional" is just rhetoric. The few who do understand usually
don't have enough influence over the others. The number of people who
can understand what is and what is not constitutional is fairly small,
and always has been. The only time in history it was large was during
the first three American revolutions: the War for Independence, the
ratification of the Constitution, and the Election of 1800
<http://www.constitution.org/rf/vr.htm>, the last of which entrenched
the Jeffersonian position on constitutional interpretation for the
period from 1800 through 1824, and then to a declining degree for most
of the rest of the 19th century. But even during the ratification
debates it is unlikely that the majority of the people really understood
the proposed Constitution in its entirety. Some focused on particular
provisions that seemed dangerous, and opposed it until their fears were
alleviated. Most probably supported it because George Washington did,
demonstrating that the way to get complicated reforms is not to educate
all the people but to get the support of charismatic personalities the
voters like and trust.
Most of Ron Paul's constituents don't vote for him because they agree
with his positions. They vote for him because they like and trust him.
It is more important for most voters to be comfortable with the
personality than with his positions.
"Bait and switch" works in political selling as well. Voters are offered
some charismatic personality or government benefit and never told that
either represents a violation of the Constitution. Some will argue that
the people have voted for the departures from constitutional compliance
and thus ratified them in some sense, but that is deceptive, because the
people were deceived by not having the constitutional implications of
their choices explained to them. They did not vote for violation. The
issues weren't framed to them that way.
That doesn't mean it is not a productive activity to educate people on
constitutional compliance. We need to create a learning environment in
which some of those charismatic personalities can "get it" and then
bring their insights with them when they take office. We have to spread
the education around because it is not always easy to discern who will
be the charismatic personalities of the future, and because such people
are herd animals like any other who are going to want the reassurance of
like-minded people before they will venture forth with constitutionalist
positions. The trick is to both educate those individuals and enough of
the individuals around them.
What we learn from the study of the diffusion of innovations
<http://www.constitution.org/col/03317_diffusion.htm> is that most
people don't adopt new things because they learn about them from some
kind of broadcast message. They are influenced more by the examples of
those they look to as role models, and that chain of influence tends to
sort itself into levels, with "early adopters" at the top, "secondary
adopters" below them, "tertiary adopters" below both, and "quadranary
adopters" below the first three. We also learn that most people don't
adopt new things in long leaps or from single exposures to messages or
examples. Except for the early adopters people generally adopt in small
steps spaced over a period of time in response to repeated messages.
That means you need to target people who are ready to take the next
step, figure out where they are and how far you can get them to go on
that occasion, then move on to others, but return to the first before
they go cold and move them on to the next step, repeating the process
until you get many people recruited. Then you need to keep them
recruited with positive reinforcements, because most adopters won't
stick to a new things unless it rewards them in some way, and because
there are usually competing innovations that may win them over if you
neglect to hold them.
-- Jon
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