The Left's Ratchet Effect and Zohran Sanders

There is a tactic that progressives/leftists employ. It's the ratchet effect.

Many people have written about this subject, but few get into precisely how they achieve the effect. It's not that they convince anyone per se, what they do is offer future examples of what they wish to achieve -- nearly always at the extreme end of the spectrum.

Take Zohran Mamdani for example, he's proposing things that are extreme, like city-run grocery stores, and taxing the people of New York City based on their race. Nobody takes these things seriously, and that's the giveaway.

Bernie Sanders was the Democrats' candidate to run against Hillary Clinton -- but he was never going to be allowed to win the nomination. He was only there as a place holder, he was there to gather the attention of those on the far end of the progressive/leftist scale. He was there to get all of his "Bernie Bros" to throw their vote behind Hillary Clinton. Only in that particular case it backfired because Hillary was just such an unlikable candidate, the usual voter base manipulations couldn't overcome that fact.

Another example of the ratchet effect is the proposal of legislation to restrict gun rights, offered every few years by some Democrat politician. The idea is never to get these laws passed, because they are often over-the-top and would immediately cause legal issues for large swaths of the population who own guns.

The idea is to pass something much more watered down, then Republicans can say, "See, this is common sense gun legislation, not the draconian restrictions the Democrats wanted..." Meanwhile our Second Amendment rights are still slowly being eroded.

But back to the New York City mayoral race.

Zohran Mamdani might not win the general election, and that's just fine with the Democrats. They have two other candidates that can win, Eric Adams (the incumbent mayor) and Andrew Cuomo (which are Democrats running as Independents).

Once in office, Adams, or Cuomo can sign off on legislation that's 1-2 clicks to the right of what Zohran Mamdani was proposing, and claim it's less extreme. They will say, "Just imagine how much worse it could have been for New York City businesses if Zohran Mamdani would have won the election."

Meanwhile, they are going to keep moving the political atmosphere further and further to the left, and eroding people's rights along the way.

If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile, but they'll do it very slowly, so hopefully you won't notice.

What do you think?

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