That’s the problem when you give the most extreme elements of a political platform a stage.
They don’t need to represent many people.
They just need to be loud enough, organised enough, and sufficiently obsessed to make politicians afraid of losing them.
The United States is an especially good example because it has only two major political parties.
That means each party has to cover an enormous amount of political ground.
You have to appeal to the centre, the moderates, the activists, the ideologues, the single-issue voters, the people who are angry about something, the people who are terrified about something, and the people who have built their entire identity around one particular political cause.
Everybody has to fit somewhere inside the same tent.
And that gives the fringe an extraordinary number of pressure points to play with.
If you are a political activist representing five percent of the electorate, you don’t need to persuade fifty percent of the country.
You need to convince the party that without your five percent, it cannot win.
That is a very different proposition.
And it creates a peculiar kind of political leverage.
Europe has the same problem, of course.
In some ways we have institutionalised it.
Our fragmented party systems allow small parties to acquire influence far beyond their electoral weight, particularly when larger parties need them to form governments.
But the American system is an extreme version of the problem.
There are only two large containers.
Everything has to go into one of them.
And once an issue becomes sufficiently important to a small but highly motivated group, the party has very little choice but to accommodate it.
This is where the extremists become dangerous.
Not necessarily because they are numerous.
Usually they aren’t.
They become dangerous because they are committed.
And commitment is political currency.
Especially when everybody else is tired, distracted or simply trying to get through the week.
Take the climate movement.
There are perfectly legitimate questions about climate, energy, pollution, technology and environmental policy.
There are also perfectly legitimate arguments for reducing emissions where doing so makes economic and technological sense.
But the extreme end of the movement has developed something that looks considerably less like politics and considerably more like religion.
And religious warriors are difficult negotiating partners.
You cannot bargain with someone whose position is not merely a preference but a moral truth.
If I tell you that I would prefer policy A because I believe it produces a better outcome, we can argue.
We can compare costs.
We can look at evidence.
We can negotiate.
Perhaps you persuade me.
Perhaps I persuade you.
But if I tell you that policy A is morally necessary, that anyone opposing it is either ignorant or evil, and that the underlying proposition is no longer open to discussion, then we have left politics.
We have entered the territory of faith.
And faith has a peculiar relationship with facts.
It doesn’t necessarily need them.
It has words instead.
And it repeats them.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Eventually repetition begins to sound like evidence.
The same phrases appear everywhere.
The same warnings.
The same slogans.
The same predictions.
The same moral accusations.
The vocabulary becomes almost ritualistic.
And because the people repeating it are often completely convinced of their own righteousness, compromise becomes almost impossible.
There is no negotiated middle ground between truth and heresy.
You either accept the premise or you are the problem.
That is the point at which political movements begin pulling their own parties toward the extreme.
And this is where the irony appears.
The fringe may have enormous influence over the direction of policy without actually having enough support to sustain that policy politically over the long term.
Because eventually people have to live with the consequences.
That is the inconvenient part.
You can build an energy policy around moral imperatives.
You can make electricity more expensive.
You can restrict supply.
You can impose increasingly elaborate requirements on businesses.
You can force consumers into technologies before the infrastructure is ready.
You can tell people that the sacrifice is necessary.
And for a while, perhaps people will accept it.
Until they get the bill.
Then they start asking questions.
And increasingly those questions are not abstract.
They are not about some distant future.
They are about today.
The electricity bill.
The cost of heating.
The price of a car.
The reliability of the grid.
The competitiveness of an industry.
The cost of living.
Jobs.
Housing.
Food.
At some point, the political argument stops being about whether a policy is morally beautiful and becomes a much simpler question:
Is this actually making my life better?
That is a much harder question for ideological politics to answer.
Because ideology is very good at explaining why the sacrifice is necessary.
It is considerably less good at explaining why the sacrifice never seems to end.
And eventually people notice.
This is where extreme positions become long-term liabilities.
Sometimes they are even short-term liabilities.
Policies that once sounded virtuous can become electoral poison when people begin experiencing their consequences directly.
And politicians, naturally, discover this with the speed of politicians everywhere.
Politicians have spines made of rubber bands.
They can stretch them almost indefinitely.
And then, when the electoral wind changes direction, they can snap around 180 degrees with remarkable speed.
The same politician who spent years telling you that something was absolutely essential will suddenly explain that, upon mature reflection, there are actually some legitimate concerns.
The policy wasn’t wrong.
The implementation was.
The principle remains.
The circumstances have changed.
The voters have changed.
The weather has changed.
The moon has changed.
Anything will do.
Because politicians have a very simple survival instinct.
They want to remain politicians.
But there is a catch.
They still cannot afford to lose the few percent of voters who genuinely care about the scare.
Those people may be unreasonable.
They may be impossible to satisfy.
They may represent a tiny fraction of the electorate.
But they vote.
They organise.
They campaign.
They donate.
They shout.
And, most importantly, they can punish a politician in a primary or internal party contest.
So the politician is trapped.
Move too far toward the centre and the activists threaten to abandon you.
Move too far toward the activists and ordinary voters begin to wonder what on earth you are doing.
This is the political gravity of the fringe.
The extreme minority pulls the party toward it because it cares more intensely than the majority.
The majority pulls back because eventually it has to live in the world those policies create.
And somewhere in between stands the politician, rubber spine bending in whichever direction seems electorally necessary at the time.
The mistake is to assume that political movements become powerful because they represent the majority.
They don’t necessarily.
Sometimes they become powerful because the majority doesn’t care enough to fight them.
That distinction matters.
A few percent of people who care passionately can have more influence than fifty percent of people who are mildly supportive but don’t care enough to vote on the issue.
Until the consequences become impossible to ignore.
Then the balance changes.
People who previously didn’t care suddenly care very much.
And politicians discover that the political centre they thought had disappeared was actually still there.
It had simply been quiet.
This is why extremism contains the seeds of its own defeat.
Push far enough and eventually the public notices.
Turn an abstract concern into a concrete cost and people start paying attention.
Demand enough sacrifice and eventually someone asks what the sacrifice is buying.
And once people begin asking that question, slogans become much less useful.
You can repeat the words.
You can repeat them louder.
You can repeat them with greater moral indignation.
But eventually somebody still has to pay the bill.
That is where reality has a rather unpleasant habit of winning arguments.
Not immediately.
Not elegantly.
And certainly not because politicians suddenly discover courage.
They don’t.
They simply discover which way the electorate is moving.
And then, with their customary rubber-band flexibility, they move with it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/01/democrats-climate-policy-hushing