When formal entrenchment is blocked, policy actors substitute physical or functional barriers instead.

Evidence

But functional entrenchment is hardly limited to a small set of landmark, quasi-constitutional statutes. For example, critically assessing the prohibition on legislative entrenchment, Posner and Vermeule observe that other types of government actions, beyond formal entrenchment, might share the purpose and effect of altering the downstream political environment in such a way as to increase the costs of changing course, even to the point of practical impossibility. They offer the example of a legislature intent on entrenching a policy against riding bicycles in a park: if barred from enacting an unrepealable statute, the legislature might instead replace the existing concrete paths in the park with bicycle-unfriendly gravel, effectively raising the downstream 101. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 185

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s core question about rationalizing ideologies persisting via material/legal embedding versus disposable rhetoric. — connects to: Political entrenchment means making political change more difficult than it otherwise would be — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 47; When one entrenchment form is blocked, actors switch to the other — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 160; Political actors route around legal bans through substitute channels, not direct violation. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 530 (+1 more)
• SEED: The gravel-for-concrete substitution is a vivid causal mechanism example of entrenchment switching forms when formal means fail.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Political actors route around legal bans through substitute channels, not direct violation. #corroborates (0.90) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 530
• Learning and adaptive preference shifts under a policy can themselves function as entrenchment #expands (0.82) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 56