The Political Pendulum

Politics, like many other systems, moves in cycles or swings between opposing views.  The political spectrum is typically divided into Left and Right.  The "Left" includes "Liberals" and Progressives". The "Right" is made up of "Conservatives" and "Libertarians."  These labels, of course, are generalizations.  Some who have very "Conservative" fiscal views can hold "Liberal" social views or vice versa.  As with any range, there are also extremes.  The "Far Left" includes "Socialist" and "Totalitarians."  The "Far Right" includes "Survivalists" and "Anarchists."  The majority of the population are somewhere in the middle...between the extremes.

A pendulum can be used to illustrate the movements of the political cycles.  The pendulum, hanging still in the center of its range, in the state of equilibrium, represents the views of the majority of the population.  Depending on what party wields control of the levers of government, the political pendulum moves toward one end or the other of the political scale.  As policies and practices of the government move farther and farther from equilibrium, the majority of citizens become more and more dissatisfied.  This dissatisfaction leads to political action by the majority to swing government back toward the middle.  As with a pendulum, however, the range of the swing can many times be directly correlated to the initial deflection from equilibrium.  In other words, a 40% move to the Left will eventually swing back to the Right by a proportionate amount...but seldom is it in equilibrium.

What the Left has attempted over the years is to move their positions farther and farther Left.  Then, they say that The Right must meet them in the Middle.  They also tend to point at anything on the Right and characterize it as extreme.  In this way, they attempt to move the Middle more to the Left.  This has been called "the fallacy of the misplaced middle" by some.  The Middle of the political spectrum is not the center point between extremes, but the place where most of the population lives...philosophically.  It could also be depicted as a bell curve.

As I pointed out in an earlier blog (No Left Turn), The results of the Gallup poll, released July 6th, 2009, found that Americans “by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal.”  Additionally, Gallup polling shows that “Conservatives" are the single-largest ideological group in America.  By a margin of about 2:1, more Americans call themselves Conservative than Liberal.  Moderates are also a much larger group than Liberals.  So while Liberals try very hard to define the Middle as more left, clearly, more of the population is Conservative and Moderate.  This is the true middle.

 

With President Obama's and the Democrats' approval numbers low and going lower, it seems to me that the pendulum has begun to swing back in the opposite direction from where they have tried to lead the country.  This swing may be very large indeed...since this current government has pushed farther to the Left than at almost any time in our history.  Hang on the swing will be quick and it remains to be seen how far back it swings...but this was brought on by the very Leftists themselves.