House of Eratosthenes

To fight for change, and emerge victorious against a resourceful and determined oppositional force, conservatives must go about it the way it’s always been done: By attacking the opposition on a fault line. Dividing and conquering.

Blogger friend Irish Cicero had an encounter with one of the persons I think of as “The Hooked”: A waitress, probably angling for a larger tip, commiserating with him by means of such twaddle as “We of the 99.” The bait is gone, the hook has set, she’s not yet fully reeled in but the line is taut. These aren’t individuals anymore for they have willingly given up their individual identity even though they don’t know it. This is a monolith; it’s a blob. It’s everywhere, it’s annoying, it’s maddening, it has all the characteristics of a zombie infestation and it looks unbeatable. Even worse, the closer you study it the more you despair. If these people gave a rat’s rear end about jobs-jobs-jobs, or conservative-versus-liberal, one might nurture some hope about cluing them in. But since they go through life feeling their way around problems rather than thinking their way through them, you might as well argue with a hamster. They are beyond reason, and any one among them is ready, willing and able to fully cancel out your vote. What’s the use of even trying.

But then you look closer still, and you see this is the key to the opposition’s defeat.

Quoting from myself, during a discussion about Cicero’s unsettling encounter:

If this is cast as a conservative/liberal thing, people react the same way they react to a Cowboys/Niners thing. They’ll just line up with their favorite team and stay there. So I would counsel away from this…The so-called “liberals” who are really the enemy, are the Washington liberals, vastly outnumbered by the liberals who are like your favorite lovable Southern Baptist Auntie, and their concerns are far different from hers. They are the dupers, she is the dupee. The object of the exercise is not to get her voting Republican for the rest of her life, it’s to help her to stop being duped.

There is a palpable anger against “millionaires and billionaires” and “bankers” and “Wall Street” and “business.” Much of it is ill-thought-out and ill-advised, but it’s silly to try to assert it’s completely unfounded…Why end up in the same old plate-smashing sneering snarling Thanksgiving drunken brawl over labels, when both sides in fact share a common enemy? What a waste. So much common ground.
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So my suggestion is: Swivel the topic of conversation around, ever so slightly, to the question of what these “millionaires and billionaires” have actually produced…

Join in on the two-minute-hate, after doing your part to make sure it’s pointed in the right direction. Then tell ’em a thing or two about a guy named George [Soros]. More often than not, you’ll find they’ve never heard of him…Don’t forget, we’re still in the extended Steve Jobs dirge-fest. Capitalists that actually design, build and provide stuff, aren’t quite as much the villain this year as they usually are; the point is easier to make now, than usual. Just imagine an alternate universe in which Steve Jobs [had been making] his fortune, for the last thirty years, the same way George Soros had been.

The Left is enjoying the benefits of a fragile success here, one that can be easily dismantled and is key to any victory that might come their way in the near future. They have convinced the “big middle,” which is people with non-existent or weak ideological affiliation, who pay little or no attention to the news day-to-day — those who want to be availed the luxury of forming passionate opinions without taking the time to learn. They’ve prevailed on this vast and important demographic to erase the line between “businessmen” who produce and “businessmen” who do not. To them, it’s all a big blob, “The One Percent” I think they call it?

And so by envisioning a big blob, they have become a big blob. One percent, ninety-nine percent. We’re back thirty-five years in time, when everyone wearing a suit and tie is to be regarded with deep suspicion and maybe a hefty garnish of hatred, but the blubbery hippie in the tie-dyed tee shirt smelling like Cheetos and grass and ass is…well…not that other guy, and that’s good enough. But my point is: Think about this uneasy alliance you have here. You have the beltway lefties like Barney Frank, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi — what exactly is it that they want? Just power. They don’t have a vision for the future. Their entire suite of goals can be summed up in five words: Congress has the final say. That captures it all. Name one thing they do that isn’t motivated by this. So yes, they’re engaged in some efforts that are straight out of Communist Manifesto, and they have friends in the unions. They’re all gung-ho on the homosexual agenda and they’re hostile to the family unit, their policies throw millions of people out of work, but these are just means toward an end. They just want power.

Your nice old Auntie and your airhead 99-percenter waitress, are motivated by entirely different things. They don’t like seeing people hurt. They’ve blossomed this into a hatred, for no reason more complicated than that hatred is easy. It comes naturally, it comes quick, and once visibly displayed it helps to establish your allegiances. Michael Corleone said “Never hate your enemies, it clouds your judgment,” and this is true. Their judgment is clouded. See, the whole problem is they know more about who they want to have as friends, than about who they want to have as enemies; they don’t really know where to direct the anger.

They have no interest in making Washington more powerful. Yes they back policy proposals that do exactly that — more taxes, more regulation. But they don’t really want anyone receiving this money and power, they just want it all taken away. They’d be just as happy seeing it all go into a big bottomless hole.

So the seam must be attacked — the seam that binds these power-hogs in Washington, to the people out in the heartland who haven’t a care in the world about what the power-hogs do. That’s where the education needs to be. Jobs got shipped overseas — why?? Why would a business do such a thing? Nearly all of the time, the answer is that there were regulations in place that made it a sensible business decision. Businesses, after all, don’t make their profits by screwing people over and throwing them out of work. They don’t even think in terms of friends-and-enemies, unlike politicians. No, a business is exactly like an electrical current moving through a circuit, or through their air to the ground in the form of a lightning bolt. It’s all about path of least resistance. Nobody ever says “stupid lightning bolt, it should have struck that tree over there instead of this one over here”; if the lightning struck, the test is completed and the question is settled, the path-of-least-resistance has been fully defined.

Businesses are seen as different, and mistakenly so, anthropomorphized into almost supernatural beings motivated by malice. This is an ideas-based victory for the left made possible by neglect on the right. It’s possible to reverse this by attacking that seam, that weak spot that unites the beltway power-goblins with the unthinking, uncaring, too-busy-for-that, wanna-do-right-by-everyone crowd that pays attention only casually. It is a weak flank. They have no love for each other, they aren’t motivated by the same things, and best of all, one side is sure to be repulsed when the mask finally slips off the other side.

That’s the way to win. The stakes are high.

All right! And to think I almost didn’t type that email!

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I agree with you s out the strength of their “victory.”. The disquiet — the suppressed panic — spreading across the country can easily lock in on the demented childishness of our current president, i.e. I suspect many otherwise oblivious folks will grow alarmed by the monster they put in the white house. This is the Left’s game, and they’ve come out into the open.
- Irish Cicero | 10/22/2011 @ 21:52

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The SeamSaturday, October 22nd, 2011

The Seam
Saturday, October 22nd, 2011