Quote:
Originally Posted by Johny Joe Hold
When things look the darkest is the sun breaks through.
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That's not how either optics or meteorology works, but anyway:
(Deep breath)
All political coalitions have a
conflict within them.
At stake: who should get what they want? The
hard-core loyalists, or the
squishy people we have to bribe for support?
If you are easily winning your political battles, you get to give your base what it wants. If you lose political struggles, your base has to go on a diet while everything is focused on bribing and pandering to potential allies.
Of course, the hard-core don't want to share and pander, so in cases of defeat they come up with distractions to waste time until people move on and forget the defeat.
One favorite distraction involves proving the election undemocratic. This
IS a distraction, because it doesn't matter if the power struggle is democratic or not - the same political rules apply*. Winning good, losing bad. Losing means you have to change.
If the distracters succeed, the the coalition fails to bribe and pander and it keeps on losing.
This is as true if you're in
the smoke-filled backrooms of North Korea, or in a
Shining Beacon Of Democracy, whatever that is.*
Politics is all about putting together a basket of bribes.
Too small a basket, and you lose elections. Too big of a basket, and you're spending more than you need to - making compromises that you don't need to make.
One advantage conservatives have is their understanding of the pricing mechanism. Some things are more important than other things. The way to find out what's important is to look at what people are willing to pay for it. If you think the
Soul Of The Nation is at stake, why aren't you paying more? We can only conclude that the
Soul Of America seems to be a very inexpensive commodity.
The other answer is that nobody is making sacrifices to save America because the soul of the nation isn't at stake at all. It's just con-artists/politicians using over-hype to sell their product.
But let's assume that it's not all hype, and that conservatives really are willing to make sacrifices to save America, if only someone had a plan that would actually work.
Well the plan is simple: you put together a bigger basket of bribes, targeted to whatever democrats look the most likely to switch sides.
A climate change plan could go in the basket. Focus on nuclear power - only baby-boomers are still afraid of it, younger democrats are for it. So there you have a
big, beautiful gold-plated wedge to drive into the Democrat party....And you refuse to use it. You talk about sacrificing your life to save America, yet you won't sacrifice the few minutes it takes to learn about nuclear-focused climate-change plans.
If that's to sciency for you, you could substitute it's place in the basket for some other bribe. How about a more permanent anti-war position? Liberals get that there's a certain amount of war weariness,
Since 1965 we've spent more time in unwinnable quagmire wars that not.
But once the war-weariness wears off, can liberals trust you not to fall for the next chest-thumping con-artist who wants to spend trillions of dollars on nothing? Can they trust you to avoid a war with China?
Judging by how well the
Second Civil War went, you don't have a good record when it comes to predicting the outcome of wars. If you guys try to do the same thing to China, there's going to be far worse than felony-riot convictions at stake.
Nobody is going to trust you until you have found a solution to your gullibility problem.
You could secularize your politics and/or de-politicize your religion. That can get you young voters and smart activists, which your coalition obviously needs.
Now, you might say that nobody changes their minds, that the only way to win elections is to be better at whipping your voters into a frenzy. Stupid wins. Perhaps, but parties don't just compete for sheer numbers of voters. They also have to compete for talent - a coalition needs to have smart people, or else it gets outsmarted by it's opponent.
So, in order to get stupid people on your side, first you need smart people. You used to have smart people leading the party, but they were fleecing you. How could they NOT fleece you, what could be more irresistible to a con-artists than a large mass of organized stupid people?
The only answer to your predicament is for you to stop being ignorant. You need to learn about how to separate fact from fiction. How to separate a good source of information from a crappy one. How to separate con-artists from serious intelligent allies, if you even have any of those. That's not easy - it's unflattering, first of all. You have to admit that you got things wrong. You have to be able to change your mind. And you have to listen to nerds.
Go watch that Coup footage again. Do you think the nerd-to-meathead ratio in your party is ideal? Or a bit lopsided?
*In case anyone disagrees with my thesis that politics is actually very simple:
Why do you need me to tell you this? Why didn't you hear it from the democrats first?
Well, the democrats have their own sin. While the republican rank-and-file are gullible idiots, the Democrat rank-and-file are gullible hateful snobs.
Democrats have pity for stupid people, therefore they cannot think of republicans as stupid. They have to "
other" republicans, they have to imagine that republicans have no humanity.
Therefore, in the democrat mind, republicans are not gullible idiots being fleeced by con-artists. No, in the democrat brain, republicans are vile gutter trash, motivated by incomprehensible demonic forces. To even talk to a republican is to become infected by these forces. To to try to understand them is even worse - that's like doing evangelism by joining a witches' coven.
To a democrat, politics is not about forming coalitions and making deals. It's about fighting witches, banning their magic words and occult incantations.
If Democrats wanted to increase the size of their coalition, they would need a big bribe-basket, and they would need to put in it...Well, nothing much really, they would just need to stop hating.
While republicans get fleeced because they are stupid and lazy, liberals get fleeced because they are cowardly and lazy. Republicans need to find people with brains, liberals need to find people with balls. Has such a coalition ever existed before?
Serious liberals ask themselves what happened to the New Deal Coalition, but let's face it, that coalition was completely contradictory and only survived because the fear of Totalitarianism turned former enemies into allies. We had to unite or die.
Well, is it so different today?
When the wokesters put you on the electric chair for your problematic thoughts, are you going to care if the electricity came from coal or not?