The Overton Window, Political Psychology, and Stare Decisis

I found this paragraph in my recent reading about political psychology very interesting:

"For example, Tversky demonstrated that most people possess a natural aversion to extreme options or situations. Thus, just by creating one more extreme option, a manipulative adviser can encourage a decision maker to choose the middle option that would have previously appeared unacceptable without the contrast effect of the even more extreme additional option."

This is, of course, exactly what the Republicans have been doing for the last few decades. You start out with a world with the Democratic option and the Republican option. Now the political consensus does not accept either option in its pure form. But the Republicans are smart, they get psychology. So they change their position, make it more extreme. Now their old position isn't extreme anymore, and thus becomes more acceptable.

I feel like there's a kind of political stare decisis. Political issues are raised, and debated, and then society comes up with an answer. Then we treat that answer as settled, and move on to the next issue, and by and large we don't reopen settled issues. In the 1930s, for instance, we had a big huge discussion about, basically, socialism. And we decided that government pensions and disability/unemployment insurance, some assistance for the poor, and public works programs, were okay. Later we also decided to annex medical care to those provisions for the elderly and poor. But anything beyond that, any kind of proper social democracy the way the European countries do it, is off-limits. Now, there are many of us who dislike that conclusion. Maybe it's a third of the populace; maybe a bit less. But we understand, at the organized political level anyway, that it's a settled question. We're not going to get that verdict overturned, so we stay quiet about the whole thing. Quieter than we'd like to.

The main thing Republicans have done over the past few years, I think, is stop respecting that consensus of stare decisis. They're advocating that we overturn essentially every political decision this country's made against them for the last hundred-and-thirty years. And so many people, scared at the extremity of the vision Republicans are currently advocating, try to appease them by offering what they used to want. Sure private retirement accounts, deregulation, and tax cuts seemed extreme ten short years ago, but if we can avoid banning contraception and abolishing the welfare state altogether it's a small price to pay, right? I don't know if it's cynically intentional, but one way or another the Republicans have been masters of advocating for more than their original position so they get their original position. Democrats are too nice to fight back. We won't say, en masse, "let's nationalize industry!" so that people will accept a simple public option for health care. We just accept the consensus, and refuse to exploit a quirk of human psychology. Asymmetrical politics.