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Is there a political word that expresses the technique politicians use to make a drastic change little by little?

For example: The pro-life advocates who couldn't get a bill to pass banning abortions, so they are slowly working at making them completely unavailable to the public by making small changes like defunding planned parenthood, then pushing for restrictions that would require costly upgrades to their facilities.

Another example: The anti-gun lobby has over the last decade progressively made changes to the restrictions and background checks that have slowly made automatic weapons illegal, as well as semi-automatic weapons, and now most recently high-capacity magazines.

5 Answers

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  • ?
    Lv 7
    5 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    The word that describes this is "incrementalism," meaning "bit-by-bit" or in small steps, but it is not a "political" word.

  • Anonymous
    5 years ago

    Gradual reform, or, more picturesquely, "boiling a frog" (from an old story or folktale about a cook who boiled frogs by putting them in cold water and then turning up the heat just a little bit at a time so the frogs didn't notice it was getting dangerously hot).

  • ?
    Lv 4
    5 years ago

    The word you may be looking for is "incrementalism", although it tends to be used in conjunction with narrative manipulation through Orwellian doublespeak phrases such as "common-sense gun legislation" and purely political terms like "assault weapons", which mean whatever you want them to mean, given your objective of the moment.

  • Anonymous
    5 years ago

    Yes. Marxism

  • ?
    Lv 7
    5 years ago

    I'd call it "policy creep".Kinda like "mission creep" but different.

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