By Fester:
I don't think the political world is made up of people who have single minded and immovable convictions on most or all moderately to highly salient political issues of the day. In fact, I am quite glad that the world is made up of people who are willing to engage in trade-offs and concentrate on a few issues that really are important to them or their constituents. Otherwise almost nothing could be achieved as everything would be the highest priority and thus nothing would be a priority. A world in which people are willing to engage in trade-offs allows for both priorities to be ordered and compensation for losers to be arranged on a Pareto basis if possible.
This visualization of politics and thus politicians as having a few core convictions (one of which is often re-election) and then a much broader array of preferred but malleable preferences is key to pressure and incentive based activism. The idea behind pressure activism is to be able to threaten or aid a politician on one of the few highly salient core convictions (including re-election) in order to get an activist preferred policy outcome on one of the malleable preferences. That is why the unions dangle their mobilization and funding support contigent on EFCA committments, that is why Wall Street donates money contigent on votes for banking regulation, that is why NARAL and NOW endorse candidates that support NARAL and NOW's core missions. It is basic politics. And it is interesting and fascinating as hell.
So when Chris Bowers laments the fact that Arlen Specter is responding to political incentives by reversing his position on the public plan, I am confused:
Specter's flip-flop simply must be the result of the increasing pressure he is feeling from Sestak. As such, progressive activists should be happy that our strategy of pressuring Democrats through primaries is validated, right? After all, this is a pretty clear example of a success for that strategy.
However, I'm finding myself depressed by this success. I got the "make them do it" blues, and here is why
The concept of making Democrats vote for more progressive legislation through primary challenges is predicted on the notion that we are dealing with people who are fundamentally self-centered, power hungry, and morally flexible....
When we actually succeed in flipping votes on important issues through primary challenges, we should pat ourselves on the back for developing a successful political strategy. However, it is also very depressing because it verifies that the members of Congress who flipped their votes are, as I said above, self-centered, power hungry, and morally flexible....
Shocking, politicians respond to incentives.... stop the presses.
Everyone responds to incentives.
If I was not getting paid a decent salary with decent benefits, I would not be showing up at my job every morning and giving my employers an honest day of labor. Is that fundamentally immoral in that I am doing something that others want only because I like the incentive that is offered to me in the form of a paycheck? I don't think so. My unconstrained time preference would be to spend a lot of time with my daughter as she is learning how to 'dance' on her dad's lap, spend a lot of time with my wife, and writing but I and everyone else operate in a world of constraints which includes the need to eat and keep a roof over my family's head.
I want to work politically towards a world where there is a working majority of representatives who have a varied array of immaleable convictions that are close to my political preferences. More importantly, I want a political landscape so that the default political analytical assumption on malleable issues is that the political incentive structure is weighed towards my political preference zone. At that point, activism and pressure is neither futile nor a rear guard action. But I definately do not want representatives who has not changed their mind or can not make a trade-off between competing priorities as we might as well just have an automon at that point.
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