[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

People usually have different and conflicting priorities, when those line up in large clusters the center is unstable.

(SNIP)

That's sorta close, but you need to refine your model, a bit. Think about it, this way:

Political opinion falls along the same bell-shaped curve as everything else (Yay, GURPS!). Most people lie in the moderate middle, and just want government to work, and provided needed or desired services, with minimal negative impact on everyday life, an no need for constant oversight. (No, this isn't that realistic, but it's what most people expect.)

The vast majority of people don't think much about political issues -- or about issues of any sort that lie outside their everyday needs and responsibilities. They have jobs to do, kids to raise, expenses to pay, social status to maintain, friends to see, and vacations to take.

A full 90 percent (at least) of any population in any society knows nothing about politics, or macro-economics, or foreign policy, or even who represents them. And that's in Western cultures, with advanced mass communication technology that allows people to quickly and easily access information of all sorts.

In more traditional societies, the general citizenry might know a tribal elder or two, or the village headman, or the local imam, or whomever.

Incidentally, this basic ignorance isn't restricted to politics and economics. Most people have little time for art, or literature, or history, or philosophy, and the only thing they know about ethics or morality is what their parents taught them by rote, and what they hear in church/temple/synagogue/mosque.

People only have so much time, and being parents and responsible employees/business owners/volunteers takes up most of it, and leaves only enough for the occasional game, and (maybe) a vacation once per year.

That's your "water behind the dam." A lot of people who just want to live their lives without having to think about big-picture issues, because they elect/hire people to handle that, for them. They want government to work like public accounting or banking or utilities -- professionals do the job they're hired to do, reasonably honestly and effectively, and get it done with minimal fuss and bother.

That's it. That's all they ask.

About 5-7 percent of any given population has enough interest in politics to read the columnists, or watch 60 Minutes, or pay attention to talking heads. Only a fraction of the so-called "pundits" have any interest in rational discourse and intellectual honesty, anyway -- most have an agenda to push, and they use whatever manipulative tactics they can to do so.

Only about 2-3 percent of any given population participates in political activity. These are the party workers, and campaign volunteers, and issue activists, and bureaucrats and government officials, themselves.

That's politics as usual. A vast, bell-shaped curve of uninterested, uninformed people, and a smaller, much flatter, curve of those who actually participate in governance.

That much smaller curve of people is so much flatter, because it consists of people who have an active interest in politics. Those out at the extremes have the greatest emotional commitment to political activism, so they participate more frequently and more energetically.

As such, when it comes to "politics as usual," the activists have a disproportionate impact on day-to-day political discourse. That means active political discussion is emotional and ideologically-driven to a much greater extent than how the rest of the population views things. Most of the 90 percent find this at least somewhat annoying, so they try to ignore it.

However, at certain times, the issues become so fraught that the general population can't ignore them. What happens then largely depends on the ease of access that the 90 percent has to the political system.

In Western societies, people may bitch and moan and whine and gripe about government, but access to the political system is actually really easy. Anybody can attend party meetings or go to neighborhood caucuses, government buildings are open to the public, every official has a Web site and most willingly meet with constituents in town halls or local office hours.

Moreover, people can and do vote early, and vote often, in primary elections, as well as local, state and national elections. A lot of states allow the citizenry to bypass normal representative government and sponsor citizen initiatives.

Those who care enough to make even a modicum of effort can be heard. Those who put in a bit more effort can make at least small changes.

In those societies, the "business-as-usual" political types remain keenly aware of what they call "trigger issues." These are the issues that penetrate the fog of ennui and annoyance that keeps most people out of politics.

When the mass population perceives that a particular issue, or set of issues, has the ability to impact them directly (especially if that impact is negative), it can trigger a mass movement. Suddenly, politics stops being "business as usual," because John Bull just walked into the china shop.

When that happens, which it does about once a generation, the politics of a nation goes through a "seismic shift." A lot of the old guard find themselves sidelined and irrelevant.

The last time that really happened was during the Reagan years, with the election of a man able to emotionally motivate people with an effectiveness rarely seen. He pulled in fundamentalist Christians in unprecedented numbers.

However, the economic difficulties of the mid-70s due to the OPEC cartel, combined with Carter's perceived ineffectiveness during the Iran Hostage Crisis, are what penetrated the fog enough that the general citizenry willingly listened.

The fundamentalists didn't get Reagan elected, the frustration with the oil shortage and the Carter administration did.

In the previous generation, the items that penetrated the fog were the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War.

With the Civil Rights movement, it wasn't Stokely Carmichael and SNCC, or Malcolm and the Nation of Islam, or the Black Panthers, that caused the change. They were a side-show. It was the televised brutality used against peaceful protesters by a violent minority of the white population, combined with the eloquence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Remember, King was only considered an "extremist" by southern "Dixiecrat" conservatives and blue-collar whites who didn't want to have to compete for jobs with blacks. To the vast majority of the nation, which was steadily making the shift to middle-class, his was the calm voice of reason and compassion. The political opinion of the majority of the population -- the center of the bell curve -- had already shifted toward belief in desegregation and greater equality.

The brutality shown on television, followed by the assassination of King, acted as "trigger-events" that actually got the general population involved enough to support civil rights laws.

The Vietnam War followed a similar trajectory. The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) had little influence over anyone. The Progressive Labor Party and the Young Socialist Alliance, didn't either. The "trigger-event" occurred with the ongoing violence seen on television every night, combined with the widespread perception of grotesque incompetence on behalf of the administration in general, and William Westmoreland in particular, combined with the fact that nearly everybody knew a young man who had fought in an unending war, and quite a few knew someone's son or brother or father who had died.

When the middle-aged, middle-class parents of dead soldiers started to appear in protest marches, the administration began to look for a way out of the war. In contrast, nothing done by extremists groups, or even student protesters, had accomplished that.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Extremists have pulled cultures kicking and screaming toward a better society. Civil rights movements have always required aggressive fighting against the majority opinion.

Extremists help illustrate issues, and in so doing help penetrate the fog. However, influence is not governance.

During the '60s, the SNCC could never govern, nor could the PLP or the YSA. They could illustrate the issues, and provide dramatic footage, but they could never have fulfilled the routine responsibilities of day-to-day governance.

The right-wing extremists who drive the Republican Party can't govern, now, for exactly the same reasons. That's why their preferred policies continue to fail, throughout the country. They've shifted so far to the right that they've alienated a slim majority of Americans, and demographics are against them. Their supporters are mostly older, and many of their most vocal opponents have only just reached their 30s and 40s.

In fact, I'd guess that, if anything, the backlash against the Reagan-Bush shift to the right should have happened a long time ago, and doubtlessly would have except for the events of 9/11. That put a damper on things for a decade, but that's only allowed the pressure of the backlash to grow.

But, again, while the extremists will have influence, they can never govern. The country has begun a shift to the left, but it won't go as far as the most vocal of the gay-rights' activists think, and the supporters of single-payer health care won't get what they want, any time soon, and the 2nd Amendment is in no danger.

I think the future of THS will see similar patterns. On Earth, with its huge population, extremism fails, regardless of how much memetic engineering takes place. That's why so many groups build habitats where they can control the spread of information and ideas. Extremist ideas can't compete, so they flee.