It isn’t just me who is so gobsmacked by The Stupid we have to endure to participate in the national political discourse that I am left sputtering bile. Here is Charles P. Pierce having a conniption:
Now that [The] Heritage [Foundation] finds itself DeMinted and, therefore, demented, the American Enterprise Institute stands alon[e] as the “respectable” corporate-funded notions department for educated Beltway plutocrats. In reality, of course, it remains just another chop shop of the mind, reeking of grease and engine oil, with bits and pieces and hunks of purloined stupidity lying around the floor just waiting to be grafted onto the latest vehicle through which unadulterated conservative hogwash is transported into the mainstream.
It doesn’t even matter that Mr. Pierce is writing this in a particular context because it works in all contexts. Trying to have a debate with the current incarnation of the GOP is exactly like trying to explain how to get to the train station to a blithering idiot. It’s trying. It’s exhausting. And it’s pointless.
After a while, we learn to give up and just start hurling insults because these clowns share with us exactly zero values, exactly zero assumptions, and play by exactly zero of the same rules.
I think we are actually beginning to feel about the way the abolitionists felt when trying to deal with the extension of slavery into the territories.
I’ll keep talking, but I know that the unpersuadable cannot be persuaded with discourse or logic.
mocking and shunning is all i have for them.
and highlighting how different our states are from theirs. the more so since scotus has allowed their states to squalor-ize even more than they already are by not accepting healthcare & medicaid.
I wish more writers would stop trying to persuade these people and spend time working to educate the people who are persuadable: the swing voters. The crazy wants us to spend time talking to their hand because for every moment we spend trying to persuade them is a moment were are NOT trying to persuade swing voters. It’s a good strategy on their part and the left falls for it every single minute of every single day.
There are no swing voters. The “center” is uninhabited. No one shifts from one pan of the scale to the other. Elections are decided by who sits home. (Also, no one votes for their party, but only against the other.)
There are swing voters, but they swing from election to election voting against (not for, you are correct) whichever party or politician (ticket splitters) that disgusts them the most. Eventually, they hate them all so much that they quit voting at all.
Yet, voting turnout in the last few Presidential elections has increased. And the 2006 turnout was very good for a mid-term election. Unfortunately, we will be living with the consequences of the disastrous 2010 voter turnout until 2022.
Increasing turnout is evidence of increased hate. On both sides. I remember Bush leaving office in a helicopter with the crowd on the ground singing “Hey Hey Good-Bye!” While I enjoyed that, I don’t remember such disrespect for any other departing President.
At the time, that might have been the case. But given the level of vitriol that has been endured for the last five years, singing that song of celebration now seems positively quaint.
What can we expect when Obama’s chopper departs in 2017? Maybe a cross burning or two? Or how about a few Obama effigies hanging from nooses? My wildest imaginings will probably not come close the reality.
In your 7:07 post, you claimed that hate causes people NOT to vote.
Eventually, when they hate both sides enough.
When Rove sneered about the reality-based community to Ron Suskind, and talked about how the powerful craft their own reality, he was really talking about how they craft a “reality” for their followers. Which they have done quite comprehensively, to the point where there is literally no common frame of reference between America’s right and everyone else. No possibility of meaningful debate or discourse. Pretty depressing, and until Fox decides to change not fixable.
I dreaded visiting my sister down in FLA because of the crazy, but before I went we agreed not to talk about the shape of her world versus mine. There was one moment when she announced that poor people shouldn’t have birthday cakes, but mostly it was civilized.
Good grief, seriously? Poor people shouldn’t have birthday cakes? Was there any rationale for that?
Every religion, if it wishes to sustain, requires of it’s adherents the belief in the demonstratively impossible: “We love you, but if you want to hang out with us, you have to believe in an invisible flying spaghetti monster that controls everything.” Once the believer crosses that line, it requires self-destruction to go back. It’s obviously hard get someone to do that voluntarily. We can talk and talk and cajole and implore and never get anywhere. Especially when the stoopid has taken over whole families, towns, states.
Seems the only option (we don’t have the right or capacity to take each person to a Super 8 and deprogram them) is to take over their power structures and redirect them back into the realm of sanity.
Someone better get on that.
😉
As I have stated years ago, Conservatives have no basic philosophy.
In dealing with the Right, even the most articulate, and reading their most persuasive essays I’m constantly impressed with their lack of substance.
Conservatives seem to be without principles, calling what guides them a philosophy seems to be giving them far more distinction than they deserve. Rather their thought seems to be nothing more than crumbs and shards raked together from various sources– Hobbes, Locke, Smith (invisible hand leading towards utopia), Marx (economic determinism), Freud (where they get their constant urge to play on middle class fear) and numerous others — and shaped together into a formless mass which they mold to the desired situation. There is no philosophical system on the Right, rather only cynical opportunism masquerading as coherent thought, a fig leaf of virtue to hide their whoring ways.
The Right is all about obtaining power and cashing in (see Sarah Palin), and in this way they mimic the Russian Bolsheviks quest for power more than anything American, which was why referring to them as “Busheviks” fit so well.
Is it any wonder that US Intel agents sell out their country in such an atmosphere?
You can fix ignorant. Maybe.
But you can’t fix stupid. Never.
And when the two are combined, and have a megaphone, they can un-fix the rest of society if enough other stupid/ignorant people buy into the fear, hatred, and paranoia, that’s being sold.
The context of the quote taken from Pierce’s piece is also interesting. America Needs a King in Politico Mag.
Wonder if the writer of that dribble appreciates the inherent racism of his proposal and his own racism that led him to construct such a proposal. See — for over two hundred years the right and left have been okay enough with the POTUS as Head of State for all those ceremonial things not to suggest a change. Now what really flips the wigs of the rightwing isn’t so much the policies of the Kenyon, Muslim, Socialist in the WH but that he performs all those kingly functions. And the question seems not to be if we need a king but how to get one. We could borrow from 19th Century Greece and simply elect one and his descendants. Or import one as the UK did a couple of times. Not shortage of lesser nobles and pretenders wandering around the UK, Europe, and the US looking for a crown.
Then Americans could stop envying the Brits and have their own dysfunctional royals to stalk instead of every few years manufacturing some incredibly boring new ones.
There is a king — there is always a king. What has changed is that the king is no longer an individual, chosen by heredity or by more superstitious or sanguinary methods. Today the king is a faction.
Democracy is monarchy by faction. As such, it is even more vile than autarchy, because in an autarchy responsibility is clear, whereas in the rule of faction, responsibility is diffused beyond use.
The republic (small ‘r’) is something altogether different, a hypothetical and untried polity based upon the rule of law. In the republic, factions cannot arise, because factions are based on unequal status before the law.
An idle reflection is that in this time and place Republicans are democrats and Democrats are republicans.
Thanks for your comment, but it seems to me you’re stretching words beyond their meaning. Democracy is rule of the many. Monarchy is rule of one. Oligarchy is rule of the few. Saying that they’re all basically the same isn’t particularly helpful.
(Neither is saying that the republic is “a hypothetical and untried polity”. You may not like the results, but there have been many republics in the past, say, 2,500 years or so.)
Let me begin by at once apologizing for my misuse of the word “autarchy”, when “autocracy” is what I meant. A ghastly and exceedingly foolish mistake.
That said, I take monarchy to mean rule by one actor. That actor is today typically collective. “The King can do no wrong.” The King (Dictator, Leader, etc. etc. whatever) may be nominally an individual (a dispensible figurehead), but in practice it is a group or coalition of groups, who are protected by the law but not bound by it. All other members of the polity are bound by the law but not protected by it.
By these definitions, monarchy is the only model of polity that has ever existed. No local variations are significant. Equality before the law has not been attempted or seriously proposed in any time or place.
You’re off on a tangent, correct from a macro-analysis or not, that is unrelated to the referenced article.
The Head of State – independent of being a figurehead or holding real power – was the topic. The writer likes what exists in the UK and several other countries with powerless but wealthy monarchs. And apparently so too do the rubes in those countries or they would have ended this “divine right of kings” nonsense.
Too much weight put on the word ‘king’ here. There is always a sovereign — cf. Hobbes’ commonwealth in Leviathan, the sovereign of which is not required to be a monarch.
If Politico is looking for a king, here comes Jeb of the royal family of Shubbery. Because I don’t see Politico signing onto the reign of Queen Hillary I.
DeMint is trying to earn that $1 million salary at Heritage. May that bleed them dry.
John Cole, in 2009:
I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.
One of the best rants ever. JC is a master.
Sounds like Cole is talking about this guy.
Honestly, it is sometimes difficult to feel sorry for people like this.
also: they fucking hate you:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/02/05/they-fucking-hate-you/
“I’ll keep talking, but I know that the unpersuadable cannot be persuaded with discourse or logic.”
To paraphrase Lincoln, the only way they will be persuadable is if we agree with their goals and demands.
But then that would make us Republicans.
“But then that would make us
RepublicansFUCKING INSANE AND STUPID.”FIFY
My favorite paragraph among many brilliant turns of phrase by Abe in his Cooper Union speech:
“Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”
Only the Party identification has changed. That and the literally-seceding-and-taking-up-arms part. The basic rhetorical concepts have survived in today’s GOP, however.