The Ratchet and the Pendulum

A response to David Greene's "Yesterday is Today is Tomorrow"

David's list got me. It was supposed to.

Duck and cover. The Missile Crisis. Three assassinations. Gas lines. Watergate. He asks how much your heart rate went up reading it, and mine did, and that's the point — the exercise works. If you lived through even half of that list, you already know something a lot of people currently don't: the floor has felt like it was going out before, and it didn't, and here we are arguing about it on the internet.

So: yes. Everything he says about perspective, I'll take. Negativity bias is real and measurable. The headline study he cites — anger-provoking headlines more than doubling over two decades — describes an industry that has learned exactly which button to press and presses it roughly forty times before breakfast. Remembering that we've been frightened before isn't denial. It's calibration.

And then he ends the essay with this:

"Though President Trump's personalized 'lawfare' has historical precedent, the modern presidency probably makes the practice more destructive than it was before."

Read that again next to Ecclesiastes.

Nothing new under the sun — but more destructive than before. Those aren't the same claim. They're not even the same shape of claim. One is a pendulum: it swings out, it swings back, wait and it returns. The other is a ratchet: it clicks one direction and doesn't unclick.

I don't think that's sloppiness. I think it's the honest wobble of somebody who lived through both and can't make them line up. I want to sit in that wobble, because underneath it is something neither metaphor will let you see.

Both of them are machines

Here's what bothers me about the pendulum. Nobody's hand is on it.

A pendulum swings because of gravity and a pivot. It doesn't decide. It doesn't organize. It doesn't lose for thirty years and keep going anyway. The metaphor is soothing precisely because it removes people from the story — if the swing is automatic, you don't have to do anything except outlast it.

But the ratchet has the same defect, so I can't switch metaphors and feel superior. A ratchet is also a mechanism. So is "it's a feature, not a bug" — that's engineering talk, and it says the same thing: the system is behaving according to its nature, and its nature isn't up to us.

Pendulum, ratchet, feature-not-bug. Three ways of saying this is physics. All three take the thing that actually happened — an enormous number of people making decisions, some of them for decades, most with no idea whether it would work — and turn it into weather.

Somebody already tried this

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. built a theory of American history on the pendulum. He got it from his father: roughly thirty-year alternations between eras of public purpose and eras of private interest. He published The Cycles of American History in 1986.

Think about the timing. A serious historian, a genuinely learned man, hands the reading public a clock. And plenty of readers took it exactly how you'd expect — as a promise that the era they disliked had an expiration date printed on it, and that patience was a plan.

That's the risk in David's essay, and I say it with affection, because it's one he mostly avoids by accident. Reassurance and passivity share a border. If the past tells you we came through it, the next question has to be how, and who, and what did it cost them — or the reassurance turns into a nap.

So what are the people actually doing?

That's the fair challenge to everything I've said so far. Fine, it's people and not physics — doing what? "Get involved" is a bumper sticker. Here are three things that are none of them mysterious, and all of them have hands on them.

Backlash. A win in one arena provokes a counter-mobilization in another, and the counter is frequently better funded and considerably angrier than the original. Michael Klarman built much of his work on this. Notice what it produces: motion that looks exactly like a pendulum from a distance, and is made entirely of people deciding things. That's the whole argument in one mechanism. The swing is real. It just isn't gravity.

Policy feedback. Programs create the constituencies that then defend them. Social Security is the example everybody already understands — it manufactured tens of millions of people with a direct stake in its survival, and that is why it doesn't swing. This is a genuine ratchet, and note that it has nothing to do with executive power. Anything that generates its own defenders acquires this property, in any direction.

Drift. Jacob Hacker's term, and the sneakiest of the three. An institution can change meaning while its text stays identical, because the world moves and the rule doesn't — a threshold nobody indexes, an authority nobody repeals, an enforcement office that quietly stops enforcing. It looks agentless. It isn't. The actors are the people blocking the update, and blocking is also patient, boring, decades-long work.

That last one is uncomfortable for me and I'm going to leave it uncomfortable. The moral of this essay is that unglamorous committee work is how things actually change. That's true no matter which direction somebody's pushing, and the people pushing the way you don't like are working just as hard as you are.

What it looks like when it works

Two examples, deliberately from opposite directions, because the pattern isn't partisan and I don't want anyone thinking I've smuggled a team in.

Charles Hamilton Houston started building a litigation strategy at Howard Law in the 1930s. Not a lawsuit — a strategy. Pick the cases in sequence. Start with graduate and professional schools, where the "separate but equal" arithmetic was most obviously fake. Maryland in '35. Missouri in '38. Texas and Oklahoma in 1950. Thurgood Marshall inherited it and kept going. Brown is 1954 — roughly two decades of deliberate groundwork by people who largely wouldn't see the payoff. Houston died in 1950.

Now the other direction. The Federalist Society is founded in 1982 by law students who were, at the time, a distinct minority inside their own institutions. What follows is a long project: build a pipeline, cultivate a bench, do the doctrinal spadework in law reviews and conferences until arguments considered fringe become arguments considered respectable. Results arrive across the next four decades.

Different aims entirely. Same architecture — long horizon, patient institution-building, a theory of where the leverage sits. And each one is partly a response to the other's earlier success, which is the backlash mechanism running in slow motion, in both directions, for eighty years.

If all you've got is the pendulum, that whole story is the weather changing.

Two things I have to concede

First: I picked winners. Everybody reaches for these two cases precisely because they worked, and two wins don't establish a rate. There's a graveyard of equally strategic, equally patient, equally well-funded projects that produced nothing at all, and we don't cite them because nobody writes the retrospective on the campaign that fizzled. So I'll state the claim in the weaker form that survives: preparation doesn't reliably win. Unpreparedness reliably loses.

Second, and harder: some big changes really do happen without anyone organizing them. A meaningful share of long-run opinion shift comes from cohort replacement — people die, and are replaced by people raised under different assumptions. Nobody was persuaded. Nobody was organized. It's about as close to agentless change as the record offers, and it's a real limit on my argument rather than a footnote to it.

The frame I'd rather use

There's a version of this that keeps David's consolation and drops the nap.

Call them critical junctures, or punctuated equilibrium — the structural claim is the same. Most of the time, arrangements are locked in and individual effort moves almost nothing. Then a window opens: a crisis, a scandal, a death, a war, a collapse. In that window effort moves an enormous amount, and whatever gets built while it's open constrains everything after, sometimes for generations.

That explains what the pendulum can't. It explains why decades of pushing look like failure right up until they don't, and why the people pushing usually can't tell which period they're in. Houston couldn't. He was four years short.

It also explains David's wobble. Yes, things swing back. They swing back because somebody was prepared when the window opened. The ratchet and the pendulum aren't competing descriptions of history. The ratchet is what happens when nobody's ready. The pendulum is what we call it afterward when somebody was.

So what

David describes himself as an old teacher, coach, and mentor passing along what he's learned. Take him at his word — it makes the lesson sharper than the one his essay lands on.

The lesson isn't it was worse before, so relax. It's that every recovery on his list was somebody's work. Usually somebody's boring work. Committee hearings, case files, precinct lists, appointments to obscure bodies with unpronounceable names. The dramatic moments we remember are the windows. The reason anything happened in the window is that people spent years being unglamorous first.

So I'll take his Ecclesiastes. What has been will be again. But that verse is a description, not a promise, and it doesn't say who does the doing.