Concentrating Authority

In the Asplund Chart, political power will concentrate along the lines A, B, C, and D.  Because politicians attain power by obtaining the support of multiple factions, they need to occupy (or at least seem to occupy) the ideological ground near the boundaries between these factions. If political involvement was distributed equally between every possible ideological stance, the distribution of power would look something like the figure below.

The yellow areas around the numbered points represent the four equally powerful political consensus points.  The blue area shows the political mainstream, while the darkening shades of gray represent successively more extreme and marginal ideologies.  This is the best case scenario under the Asplund Chart framework.  As I'll go over in more detail in a later post, this is the type of balanced political system the framers were hoping to institutionalize through the second US Constitution.

Any political system that does not maintain separate, competing, and equally powerful coalitions at or near those four points will transition into the power arrangement in the figure below.

The coalition that occupies point 4 will come to dominate the political landscape.  The smaller concentrations of power at points 2 and 3 represent coalitions that sometimes support and sometimes oppose the coalition at point 4.  The political battles between the coalitions at point 2 and 3 will tend to distract attention from the systematic centralization of power at point 4.  The fourth consensus (point 1) will be politically powerless and only barely inside the political mainstream.

This creates a Prisoners' Dilemma situation where opponents of the central authority (anyone above line C or D) must choose between supporting a somewhat powerful consensus (points 2 or 3) that will possibly sell out to the central authority or the powerless and ineffective anti-establishment consensus at point 1.  As long at most political participants choose to support consensus 2 or 3, the moderate consensus establishment at point 4 will maintain its hold on the political decision-making process.

The only relatively peaceful way to get from the second figure to the first is for the minor coalitions at points 2 and 3 to break all ties with the coalition at point 4 and actively cooperate to empower the ideology of the anti-establishment consensus at point 4.  This type of transition is extremely unlikely, but would be better than the other alternatives.