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seawaspThere is a famous logical paradox, called Zeno's Paradox. (it's actually two related paradoxes, but we'll focus on one) It goes like this:
Suppose Achilles, fastest man in the world, wants to go shake the paw of his friend the Tortoise, who is waiting for him on the other side of a room. The Tortoise knows how fast Achilles is, so he stays in one place, waiting for Achilles. But Achilles has a terrible problem! Before he can reach the Tortoise, he must get halfway there. So far so good. But now he has to get halfway THERE. Then halfway again. It quickly is obvious that while Achilles is cutting the distance in half with every move, Achilles can NEVER REACH the Tortoise, because there will always be some distance to go!
The logical flaw in this is of course obvious; in real life, Achilles is moving at a constant speed, which means that he's covering each "halving" of the distance in half the time, and thus will reach the Tortoise in exactly twice the time it took him to get to the first halfway point.
What does this paradox have to do with politics, you ask? So happy you inquired!
In the standard perception of bargaining of any sort, it is generally assumed that (A) both parties are negotiating with reasonably good faith, and (B) any compromise will therefore lie somewhere near the middle of both sides' preferences.
If these assumptions hold true, then an extended sequence of repeated negotiations would be expected to cause both sides to move closer and closer to the middle, eventually to be almost indistinguishable from each other except by the fact that one is *just* on the right side of the middle, and the other is *just* on the left. If the negotiations take roughly the same amount of time, each side is in fact making Zeno's Paradox a fact; they will never *actually* reach the middle, just approach it arbitrarily closely (and presumably debating about smaller and smaller differences).
But what if one side has no intention to negotiate? If they move virtually no distance?
Well, if a negotiation *HAS* to be concluded (as is the case in governmental operations -- no one really wants, or can afford, the entire government or large portions of it to shut down), then the REASONABLE people -- operating based on principles (A) and (B) -- will make an offer halfway between them and the other. The non-negotiating side will grudgingly agree to that, the Reasonable People will feel a compromise has been reached. Then on the NEXT negotiation, the SAME THING happens.
But now, instead of each side converging on a central goal that satisfies SOME of each group's preferences, the Reasonable side is now converging on the OPPOSING side's position. In the FIRST step they REACHED the acceptable middle ground. In the second step, they've reached the fairly hard-line opposition's views. Subsequent steps take them arbitrarily close to the lunatic fringe of the far side -- IN ENTIRELY REASONABLE ATTEMPTS TO COMPROMISE.
This is what has happened with our government of late, and with Obama in particular. Thinking about it, I believe that Mr. Obama is, at heart, an "honest politician": he believes that his job is to state particular positions he would LIKE to achieve, and then be prepared to negotiate to some halfway point with his opponents.
His opponents, however, are NOT politicians. They are ideologues, absolutely certain that their way is not only the right way, but the ONLY way, or they are people with a clear and selfish agenda that does not allow for compromise, and they thus WILL NOT MOVE. They force the other side to come to them. And in doing so, the other side ("we are all reasonable men") are following the Nietzschean path; they're dealing with fanatics, and the fanatics position is slowly becoming their own.
It's a very, very hard lesson to learn for a politician, and an even HARDER one to put into practice, when our entire government has, in general, been founded on the concept of fair bargaining and compromise, but the simple truth is this: when dealing with unreasonable people, the only reasonable position is to be unreasonable yourself.
It's even WORSE once you've found you've gotten caught in this trap, because then you can't just START being stubborn; you're already well past the point you were willing to reasonably approach. You now have to BACKTRACK, which means you may well start looking like a lunatic extremist compared to your opponents, just going in the opposite direction.
Yet one should consider looking at things with perspective. Ronald Reagan was once the very epitome of the far right politicians -- more personable than most, but clearly on the far right side, too influenced by the Christian Right, etc. But if you examine Reagan's positions on many issues, he would be on the LEFT -- and fairly far over -- by today's standards. That's how far the Reasonable People have already taken us.
We don't WANT reasonable people right now. We want some fanatic power on OUR side, I'm afraid. We've compromised ourselves into a pit in the past ten years; now we have to start backing up, and it's going to be HARD.
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-02 08:03 pm (UTC)We won. Deal with it.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-02 11:08 pm (UTC)Which, admittedly, BOTH sides' partisans say on a regular basis. It's absolutely amazing how often the Gallant Democrats get hammered by the Goofus Republicans (and vice versa), if you listen to their supporters.
Frankly, my feeling is that the Republicans were had. The debt ceiling was raised in return for...what? Spending cuts? No, there are no cuts. For reductions in the rate at which federal spending will continue to metastasize over the next ten years.* Always assuming, of course, that the cuts actually happen as promised. Which, yeah, that's not gonna happen. If the intransigent, vicious, mean-spirited Republicans couldn't get a commitment to cuts now, under this kind of pressure, what are the odds that a later Congress will follow through...instead of buying their OWN re-elections with more profligate spending?
*Only in Washington is that considered a "cut" in spending.
Speaking as an Outsider
Date: 2011-08-03 02:08 am (UTC)It has given an impression from way over here that Obama is far too willing to compromise ... and the right wing are very very nuts. Though my view is biased by the way our politics are all very far to the left of the current US situation.
I've seen something kind of similar in computer programs, in the sense of "Each step they took to get to this situation made perfect sense at the time, but the result, viewed in total, is insanely bad code."
-- Brett
Re: Speaking as an Outsider
Date: 2011-08-03 02:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 04:14 am (UTC)scary......Tea baggers wanted us to fail???
Date: 2011-08-03 05:07 am (UTC)Oh, I just loved the way the house went on vacation with the FAA deal hanging. ah, those are my boys.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 01:02 pm (UTC)Re: Speaking as an Outsider
Date: 2011-08-03 01:59 pm (UTC)As someone who's been observing the situation as an adult citizen since before Reagan's election, the current US situation is well to the right of how Ronald Reagan governed. Reagan used to talk about how "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the party left me." If he held to the positions he held as President, Reagan would be near the center-of-mass of the Democratic Party again.
Re: Speaking as an Outsider
Date: 2011-08-03 02:10 pm (UTC)Of course, we're defining "higher taxes" as "lower taxes than under Reagan" here. Taxes this year are set to tie the post-WWII record as smallest percentage of GDP, which makes all the screaming about confiscatory tax rates seem rather odd.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 11:41 pm (UTC)Re: Speaking as an Outsider
Date: 2011-08-08 03:02 am (UTC)I would say something...but I think I've written that code. Several times. And debugged it. It often works until, for example, someone asks about the user interface.
The political version is something like "A Democrat in the White House? No way! Nobody told us we might have to work with other people!"
Compromise
Date: 2011-08-23 11:21 am (UTC)In that case, there were Slavery Defenders, who wanted an absolute guarantee the Union would in all cases act to preserve slavery, forever (which was, by the way, impossible to implement, as it required the decisions of the 1850s to determine the opinions of the population of the future); there were the Free Soilers, who wanted no further slave states or slave territories, ever (which, if implemented, meant that eventually the free states would be a three-fourths majority, anslaveryey dies), but who were otherwise willing to leave the slave states alone; and there were the Abolitionists, who wanted slavery ended unconditionally. The various sides couldn't compromise, because there was no possible overlap among the various positions. The nearest to cooperation anyone achieved was that some abolitionists 'compromised' with the Free Soilers by joining them in the Republican party, as a first step towards eventual, total abolition.
As Peter Drucker pointed out, most US politics comes down to money, and the question of how much money someone gets can always be compromised. But our current politics is about the fundamental direction of govt. policy. It's about whether any money should be spent on certain things at all. There's no point in trying to compromise the details of 'Obamacare' when the two sides real point of dispute is whether the program should exist in the first place.
There are other obstacles to compromise. Neither side any longer trusts the other to keep its side of a bargain. Since Congress can't bind its future behavior except by Constitutional amendment, and since no constitutional amendments are going to be passed, the question of 'what mix of spending cuts and increased tax rates should we implement' is pointless. The promises about what will be done in future would automatically expire the day the 'mix' became law.
What is needed is for the electorate to make up its collective mind on certain issues. Around 1930, a solid majority of the voters decided that government intervention in the economy was a good idea, and the Democrats won election after election until the Republicans threw in the towel and stopped trying to repeal the New Deal. But suppose 48% of the voters had been adamantly in favor of FDR's policies, 48% opposed, and 4% kept fluctuating? Ouch, we'd have seen things like farm price supports, the TVA and Social Security passed, repealed, expanded, cut and repeatedly transformed. Metaphorically, that's where we are now.
The best thing would be for Congress to drop almost all talk of compromise, admit the two parties are in an ideological struggle to the death, and just continue straightforwardly until one side annihilates tpoliticallypoliically speaking. The battle could be prosecuted like a football game, with an utter determination to win, but without hate for the opponents.
Re: Compromise
Date: 2011-09-25 04:47 am (UTC)Re: Compromise
Date: 2011-09-25 12:06 pm (UTC)Re: Compromise
Date: 2011-10-12 03:32 am (UTC)How many people realize that even IF things turn around immediately, that it is still going to take time to get back to what it was like, before the beginning of the downturn? If we had, today, the amount of job and economic growth that we had during the Clinton Years (which was the largest growth rate over a good time frame), that it would NOT be until 2017 (or later) before we were back to where we were in 2006/7. THAT many jobs.
No one has a wand that big to wave to give it to us today. But they promise that and that's their ideology. On both sides of the isle.
Re: Compromise
Date: 2011-10-12 03:38 am (UTC)Morons is what I think they are.