House of Eratosthenes

Here’s the situation as I see it. Republicans are fated to lose elections from time to time, even under the best of circumstances, because we conservatives are Yin, by definition. That means we’re concerned with:

• Building borders around the things we do, concentrating our efforts on what takes place within the borders, and adopting a healthy, libertarian, somewhat-isolationist attitude about what takes place outside;
• Methodically linking the things we do to the inferences we have drawn, by means of a reasoned, intellectual, cognitive process;
• Methodically linking the inferences we draw to the facts from which they are drawn, also by means of a reasoned, intellectual, cognitive process;
• NOT showing off to prove what incredibly decent swell wonderful people we are, because we take the responsibility for self-assessing that as individuals.

Liberals, being Yang, are more concerned with socializing and communing…words derived from…guess what? <wink>

And so, people who live out their lives the way liberals do, tend to grow a sort of magical “antenna” that clues them in on what “everyone” thinks. They have to have this. It is their key to perceiving the world around them.

And so the temptation that arises for any conservative movement, Republican party included, is to sort of invade the enemy camp, steal the intelligence on what “everyone” is thinking, and make use of it. Presto! Palin’s a dumbass and isn’t qualified. A lot of folks who should know better, have caved in to this. From here I jump to Star, Buckley, Will, Krauthammer and Brooks.

Check ’em out, see what they have to say, and keep this one thought in mind: Joe Biden ran for exactly the same position. Joe Biden won. And that guy doesn’t even know what the Vice President is supposed to do.

Which means, all these conservatives yielding to the steal-the-Yang-intelligence temptation, have been caught. They’re just echoing talking-points; talking-points that don’t make any sense at all.

Only Krauthammer is making a logical point. But his point is about politics, not about things as they really exist. His point is purely about arguments that have been made against the Obama campaign, arguments that could & would be defeated with Palin’s selection as running-mate. It is a point with some merit to it. But, historically, I don’t think it figured into the election very much at all. We ran Will Smith against the grumpy old guy who told us to get the hell off his lawn, and made the election about who’s cooler. Wanna blame the Hockey Mom for the way things turned out? Really?

There is another danger involved in invading-the-Yang-camp-to-steal-intelligence method that is worthy of comment here. It is the central catalyst to why this is a bad idea, I think. The Yang, liberals especially, do not process information the way more productive people do..the way people who build things, do. To them, cause-and-effect merge together into a sloppy hodge-podge, neither one having been separated from the other in the first place. What that means is, you have poll-results, minutes-of-meetings, summaries of what it has been found that “most” people think…and you have talking-points designed to be pushed “out there,” and influence what “most” people think. These are one and the same. They have to be. The Yang are the bubbly, precocious, talkative toddlers all grown up. Since preschool, they haven’t had to deal with any difference between their own ideas and the “consensus” ideas. They’ve spent their lives in complete lockstep with the majority viewpoint, as they’ve perceived it, and they’ve spent those lives becoming experts at perceiving it.

They don’t voice individual opinions except as trial-balloons. And if the trial-balloons don’t float, they can be counted-on to repudiate them. To not only shoot them down, not only disclaim them, but to disclaim any association history would record between their individual identities, and that trial-balloon idea.

They are consensus-builders. That’s why this stuff works so well. That’s why you had all this slobbering admiration for the Tina-Fey-as-Palin skits on Saturday Night Live. It wasn’t because Fey was amazingly talented at what she was doing…which she was, and is…it was because the skits had such effervescent potential for producing a “consensus” that Palin said things she didn’t really say…which they did, and do.

That’s consensus-building. Now, if you want to lay a Rearden Metal railroad track so that you can ride the very first train across it at record-setting speeds, and be extra, real, damn-sure it’s all going to work as you risk your life on it — these are not the folks you want. They’re good at building things that have to do with popular opinion. They’re not that good at building things that have to do with reality. That ain’t their bag, baby.

So stop stealing their ideas. It’s rather like using two-stroke engine lubricant in your four-stroke car engine. Their ideas don’t work in our world; not built for the environment we have in mind. And, really, who’s been paying attention to what’s been going on over the last twenty years, who can dispute the following: Every single conservative who is plunged into these reverberating memes that he/she is an adorable dimwit…is at the tippy-top of the profile ladder, popular, and effective. Think back. Ronald Reagan. Dan Quayle. George W. Bush. Sarah P. Who else? There’s probably hundreds of dumbass conservatives out there. But the meme has only grown around those four, not because they were deserving of them, but because they were at the center of national campaigns — and showed real potential for for influence how those campaigns would turn out, in a positive way.

So if they weren’t dumbasses, they’d be walking incarnations of evil, like Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney, Oliver North, Newt Gingrich or Jesse Helms. Whatever works.

Conservatives who tap into this wellspring of ideas that have evolved to fit what the consensus will accept, are not quite so much betraying a movement. They are doing that, but they’re doing something far worse. They’re betraying reality. This is why McCain lost, really. First time they say something everyone understands is not true, but that the phony “everyone” accepts as some kind of truthy gospel, they toss out the complete inventory of everything they have to sell. Everything. The sales pitch, then, becomes one of “see, we can tailor our reality to meet the expectations of the noisy majority, too.”

And that’s what the 2008 elections were all about. Real-fantasy-people, or phony-fantasy-people pretending to be real-fantasy-people. Nobody was peddling reality, reason, logic or common sense. So Obama got lots of cross-over votes, because the electorate was choosing as much reality as it could. They chose a genuine liberal over someone pretending to be one.

In 2012, sell what you really are. The message should be one of “our policies are based on what’s real, and if that loses the election for us, then like 2008 it’s an election we never deserved to win.” Might as well — we know what happens when you go the other way, when you say “we’ll change our reality if that’s what people demand…whatever it takes to win.” We know where that leads. It leads to sacrificing everything just for winning, and then getting your ass kicked and being left with nothing.

Why do I have to point this out? Republicans turned their backs on reality, and got clobbered. Then the nation as a whole turned its back on reality. Now it’s getting clobbered.

There comes a point where, even though it makes you feel good to do something and this has a Faustian tendency to deceive you into choices that don’t work out over the long term…after a time, ignorance is no longer a good excuse, you know?

Reality. In 2012, give it a try. We’re going to be as hungry for it. Hungry as hell.

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On So-Called “Conservatives” Who Think Palin’s a Dumbass
Sunday, March 1st, 2009