Opinion formation and political change
http://www.grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-16-brutal-logic-and-climate-communications
There's this pretense among Very Serious People that the vast and wise middle "tunes out" the intense on both ends -- that the extremes cancel each other out to no effect. That's about half true, but it doesn't mean what VSPs think it means.
VSPs tend to think the middle is full of commonsense folk looking for calm, measured, and sensible messages. But there's no evidence for that at all. The great mass of Americans believe all sorts of crazy, wrongheaded, and mutually contradictory sh*t. What the average person wants is simply to take the path of least cognitive resistance, to believe what's socially acceptable to believe, to believe what People Like Us believe. In a world filled with more information than any human being can absorb, it's a sensible enough heuristic: believe with the herd. (I don't mean that pejoratively; the vast bulk of my beliefs, and yours, are developed this way. There's no other way to do it.)
The reason climate is such an uncomfortable topic for so many Americans is that it's unresolved. There are these two opposing camps battling it out and it's not yet clear what Normal People are supposed to think. That, not the "extremity" of any particular view, best explains why public opinion is shallow and fickle on the subject.
So it very much matters who wins that battle of intensity. That is how the Overton Window is shifted, how views from outside the mainstream come to be inside. The right gets this. Forty years ago, supply-side economics and opposition to basic social safety net protections were crank, extremist views held by a small minority of hardcore conservatives -- the folks who rallied behind Goldwater in 1964 and lost. But as historian Rick Perlstein recounts in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, they didn't stop. They kept organizing and pushing, organizing and pushing. Then came Nixon, Reagan, GW Bush, Sarah Palin. Now extremist conservative views are part of the mainstream fabric.
What if they'd given up after 1964? What if they'd looked at surveys, concluded the American middle didn't favor their views, and spent the next decades trying to tone down and soften those views?
