David Sirota has an excellent piece up on the direct mail guru Richard Viguerle’s book “America’s Right Turn” on how the conservative movement (not the Republican party) turned the country right over the last thirty years. It’s an excellent review and teases apart a couple different strands, but it’s this part I want to bounce off of:
Put another way, Democratic politicians couldn’t muster the intelligence (guts?) to appreciate the value of having an outside progressive movement setting the boundaries of the debate at $8 so that, when it comes time to compromise, the final number can be set at $7.25. Instead, the cry like little infants over potentially hurt feelings, and idiotically suggest that it is more advantageous to start negotiating at $7.25 ”“ thus creating the very real possibility that the ”œcompromise” will be much lower.
It’s not just politicians who don’t understand the value of a vigorous movement, it’s a lot of movement types who seem to think that they should pre-compromise. When NARAL compromises on abortion rights it undercuts the politicians. When bloggers play politician, and pre-compromise on policy, it helps make the outer boundaries of the position weaker, and thus requires a deeper compromise from the politicians. This is just basic bargaining – when you’re bargaining in a hostile environment (this doesn’t necessarily apply in all bargaining situations, but definitely does in the current House and Senate) you start with the very far end of possible positions so you have room to bargain. The job of movement types is to set those boundaries as far to the left as possible.
I learned that as a kid in third world bazaars.
Example:
When I bargain for a belt in Bangladesh, I offer 80 taka, hoping to get 150. The vendor starts at 500. I am, however, willing to walk away and he knows that and since I’m a westerner and he’s going to wind up at least double charging me what he’d charge a Bengali he’s desperate for me not to walk away.
I don’t expect to cut health insurance companies completely out of insurance – in fact, what I want is to allow them to do top up insurance or some variation depending on plan specifics. But to get there we start by talking about cutting them out utterly, so that when they are allowed in – we’re at the place we wanted to end up. I am, however, if push comes to shove, willing to, if we can, cut them out entirely if they won’t deal – or damage them in other ways (passive agressiveness is not a flaw in multi-issue bargaining relationships. Punishing people for screwing with you is necessary.) If insurance companies think you’ll do the equivalent of walking away (take away all the money) they’ll be desperate to make some sort of bargain.
But unlike with my Bengali merchant, if they think (or know) you won’t or can’t, then they’ll never cut a deal – the status quo already favors them so much that they have no incentive to do so.
You define your ideal endstate first and foremost, they define theirs, and you work towards a compromise.
You do not under any circumstances begin with a compromise and work towards a worse compromise.
You shift the Overton Window -
- in your own favor, while resisting its shifting in the opposite direction.
Another clearly expressed article details it nicely:
I hadn’t heard that phrase before, thank you Escher.
Thinking of the politics of the last two generations – no wonder the political left got its ass kicked. It didn’t even know the name of the game it was playing – let alone what the rules were – so it never even understood why it kept losing.
“Conservatism” and “progressivism” (I can’t even say “liberalism” any more – as soon as it became associated with neocons, and “economic liberalism” in the form of compelled global corporatism, the word became meaningless) have different and complementary strengths and are both necessary to political discourse. If one wing flips its wig and declares war on the other, then the other wing must push back with equivalent force in order to maintain balance. As I’ve written elsewhere, a radically heeling boat capsizes if everyone reacts to the heeling by sitting in the center; this man isn’t leaning out to flip the boat in the other direction, he’s leaning out because the boat will capsize if he doesn’t.
Sidenote – psychologically, the shifting of the Overton Window describes discourse and not core belief – more like “everyone seems to be saying” rather than “this is what I believe to be true”. While it may be possible to superimpose a radically shifted Overton Window on a public through discourse manipulation (coughthelastfortyyearscough), I believe the resulting cognitive dissonance inevitably eventually leads to aberrant and pathological cultural psychology – much like a person whose actions are seriously in conflict with their beliefs.
I wonder how many aberrant social phenomena we’re seeing nowadays are symptoms of this; every so often I muse about the recent spike in violent crime.
Anyone concerned with the psychological well-being of a society should be concerned with making those Overton Windows more closely overlap societal baselines. The idea is the two gates should line up, just as any healthy person’s actions should reflect their beliefs.
In addition to setting higher/better/larger goals, successful negotiators also don’t bend from their publically-stated objectives until very late in the negotiationg process. They were teaching that to us twenty years ago in marketing seminars I attended for a Fortune 10 company. Clearly the Democratic leadership has been snoozing for the last twenty years if they weren’t aware of the most elemental tools available for negotiating skills development. I suspect that the Republicans will be experiencing a nasty shock when increasingly more Democrats begin applying modern techniques toward dealing with Republican tactics.