November 07, 2012
So What Now?
Well, to begin with, we must deal with what is in front of us, and it is not pleasant.
*******************************
Here is the situation:
First:
We couldn't make the case.
Romney has conceded.
The president is a shining beacon of ineptitude presiding over a dreadful economy, several scandals on a par with Watergate, at least two of which involve dead bodies. He was caught on an open mic offering our missile defense up on a silver platter to Medvedev, we are heading for a fiscal calamity and...
We couldn't make the case.
What the hell?
Now Romney is going to get blamed, but I think he did a pretty decent job. I was not happy about him getting the nomination, but his overall decency and demonstrated competence in the skills needed to get us out of this mess won me over. He did a commendable job of presenting the case. I sure don't see anyone else from the primaries doing any better.
Yet against the weakest presidential opponent we are likely to ever face we could not close the deal.
Second:
The polls were right.
I was bewildered by the assertions that Romney was going to win by 300 or more Electoral Votes, yet if the polls were as skewed as was being suggested it made sense, because of the cascade effect of the winner take all nature of the Electoral College.
Well, the polls were right. Why did so many on the right miss this? This seems like a rather glaring intelligence failure (in both senses of the word).
Third:
The non-political challenges we face are as the same as they were 20 hours ago.
The economy is heading downhill towards a cliff. When Obamacare engages next year it will put the accelerator down. In two to three years the boomer retirements will reach a sort of critical mass...this will engage the nitrox.
Economically we are heading for a disaster.
Iran is on the verge of getting nuke.
North Africa is being conquered by Islamists in large part to the huge caches of weapons that were dropped in their hands due to Obama's overthrowing Libya. This will result in a half dozen Afghanistans from which the festering cancer of Wahhabiism can train, gather resources and strike at the west.
China is in a precarious situation. This makes them likely to stop buying our debt. Also, an unstable nation with a billion point 2 people and 3000 nukes is high octane nightmare fuel.
Also in the high test nightmare category: Pakistan and its nukes.
Only fractionally lower in octane but more likely to burn us in the near future: Mexico, which the Obama administration has further destabilized and is nearing failed state status.
Europe which has served as the model for progressives everywhere is reaching its endgame just as we go all in adopting their failed policies. The EU is already in crisis, they are just plastering it over, and their collapse will have immediate ramifications here.
**********************************
So where do we go from here?
Well, Sarah Hoyt has thoughts.
Well Sarah, you've nailed the essence of American exceptionalism. The problem is..THERE IS NOWHERE TO RUN TO. Also America is worth saving...So stop that right now!
OK, we get no help from Hoyt.
What DO we do?
Well, in the recriminations department....
Regrettably we can't put Akin in a stockade and flog the prideful power craving douchenozzle with the two-digit IQ, but we must treat him like an objectivist treats a leper. His remarks were appallingly stupid and his hubristic decision to stay in was nothing short of insane. His asinine remark gave ammunition to the lefts tendentious "war on Women" meme. It's more than that. Akin was a protege' of Huckabee who gave him a lot of support. He only got the nod because the Tea Party vote was split and Huckabee stepped in to support his creationist ass. Akin and Huckabee are poison to the party. Mike Huckabee is a likeable enough character, and seems a genuinely compassionate man but his quick forgiveness of Akin's unforgivable asshattary should give everyone pause.
Furthermore continuing to turn a blind eye to the creationists in our midst only empowers the left with helpful examples to paint us all as irrational idiots.
American Conservatism is not like conservatism in countries defined by blood or land. It is adherence to the principles of the Enlightenment. There is certainly an ethical component and we strongly support Religious freedom in exactly the same way the left does not. Religion is an important part of society and often a net good.
However, the Huckabee wing of the party is wed to the notion that the first page of Genessis in two English translations of a text that was translated from Hebrew by way of Greek and German, is neither allegorical nor open to interpretation (as it is in Hebrew). They believe despite all the evidence Almighty God has presented us with that the Earth is 6000 years old.
I am a Christian. I believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ and I do my imperfect best to live by them and the 10 commandments. I am also studying to be a scientist. There is no conflict here as saying that the Earth is 6000 years old is a violation of the 8th commandment. All stop.
It bears remembering that the villain of the Scopes Trial was William Jennings Bryan and that the anti evolution branch of Christianity was the core of the progressive movement until the end of the 1970's. They do NOT share the limited government ideals of the Tea Party and indeed they historically backed the most onerous expansions of federal power. Both Huckabee and Santorum (who, though he is a Catholic, is in the Huckabee wing of the party) have said that they despise the Tea Party movement. The ONLY reason Akin got the nomination was becauseHuckabee propped him up to oppose the Tea Party.
Both Huckabee and Santorum are on the record as being are uncomfortable with the whole notion of personal freedom. At one of the later debates, Santorum gave as his definition of liberty some Orwellian word salad that sounded like something out of Mao's Little Red Book. These people are inimical to both our policy (rolling back government) and our ability to get additional votes, because they play into peoples fears about us. I say be done with them policy wise.
Make it clear that we will NOT interfere with their religious practices, (in STARK contrast to the left) but we will not let them proselytize against reason on our dime or use the power of government to impose their beliefs on others. That is the American compromise going back even before the founding to William Penn and Lord Baltimore. We need to make it clear to them that that's the way it's going to be.
While we can't offer anything in the way of Amnesty to illegals, we need to soften our tone quite a bit and treat Tancredo much like Akin. Immigrants are not the problem, anti--assimilationists are. We need to STRONGLY stress the benefits of English and the economic and social costs of balkinazation/ghettoization and how the Donks use this to pit groups against each other. We need to increase the quotas for immigration and have some path to citizenship short of amnesty for those whose only crime is wanting to be American. However this MUST be contingent upon securing the border and we MUST stress that it is the Democrats contempt for our border security andtheir using Hispanics as tools, that is holding this up rather than any Conservative enmity to Mexicans.
We need to be making overtures to libertarians too. We already are with the Tea Party. At the same time we need to make the case why their Lindberghesque foreign policy stance is unrealistic.
One thing we should be doing anyway is demanding that Nakoula Basseley be released.
Regards how many of us disbelieved the polls.
I'm afraid that social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Twitchy are facilitating an echo chamber for many of our movers and shakers. If they are indeed starting to cocoon themselves informationally like the left has been for decades then we have a real problem, because we are making assumptions as divorced from the reality of peoples concerns as the left is divorced from fiscal and strategic reality. OK...not THAT divorced as we get hit over the head with lefty bromides and worldviews all the time, so it's NOTHING like the group-think one encounters among, say, academics. However it is exceedingly detrimental on two fronts.
*It does not facilitate looking at problems from all sides, which hinders the search for solutions.
*It causes us to miss or be dismissive of the concerns of eligible voters who might be woo-able if they weren't scared of creationist raeptime.
This is a tough problem to solve as it comes as much from ostracization by the "tolerant left" as it does our own tribe/team tendencies.
At a minimum I'd recommend using a search engine besides Google. Google bubbles its users according to their search history leading to an echo chamber effect in searches. I don't know how many other search engines do not do so. Duck Duck Go explicitly does not but it can be clunky.
Also...don't spend so much time on twitchy. It seems a tad juvenile anyway.
Most of all be aware that lefties are not always wrong about problems, though their solutions are usually suboptimal or counterproductive. if they are banging the drum about something it probably means there is a concern. If it can be addressed without FREESTUFF!! then we may have a constituency.
Above I mentioned a partial list of problems facing the nation, the solving of which is the raison detre' of our efforts.
This election loss means that we have missed our window of opportunity to deal with many of them without great pain. The fiscal issue in particular is going to involve much more painful cuts in 4 years than it does now. This is going to make selling ourselves and saving the country that much harder. It will get progressively harder each election so it is imperative that we expand our base and quickly.
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So...what's the backup plan?
Well, to begin with, we must deal with what is in front of us, and it is not pleasant.
Here is the situation:
First:
We couldn't make the case.
Romney has conceded.
The president is a shining beacon of ineptitude presiding over a dreadful economy, several scandals on a par with Watergate, at least two of which involve dead bodies. He was caught on an open mic offering our missile defense up on a silver platter to Medvedev, we are heading for a fiscal calamity and...
We couldn't make the case.
What the hell?
Now Romney is going to get blamed, but I think he did a pretty decent job. I was not happy about him getting the nomination, but his overall decency and demonstrated competence in the skills needed to get us out of this mess won me over. He did a commendable job of presenting the case. I sure don't see anyone else from the primaries doing any better.
Yet against the weakest presidential opponent we are likely to ever face we could not close the deal.
Second:
The polls were right.
I was bewildered by the assertions that Romney was going to win by 300 or more Electoral Votes, yet if the polls were as skewed as was being suggested it made sense, because of the cascade effect of the winner take all nature of the Electoral College.
Well, the polls were right. Why did so many on the right miss this? This seems like a rather glaring intelligence failure (in both senses of the word).
Third:
The non-political challenges we face are as the same as they were 20 hours ago.
The economy is heading downhill towards a cliff. When Obamacare engages next year it will put the accelerator down. In two to three years the boomer retirements will reach a sort of critical mass...this will engage the nitrox.
Economically we are heading for a disaster.
Iran is on the verge of getting nuke.
North Africa is being conquered by Islamists in large part to the huge caches of weapons that were dropped in their hands due to Obama's overthrowing Libya. This will result in a half dozen Afghanistans from which the festering cancer of Wahhabiism can train, gather resources and strike at the west.
China is in a precarious situation. This makes them likely to stop buying our debt. Also, an unstable nation with a billion point 2 people and 3000 nukes is high octane nightmare fuel.
Also in the high test nightmare category: Pakistan and its nukes.
Only fractionally lower in octane but more likely to burn us in the near future: Mexico, which the Obama administration has further destabilized and is nearing failed state status.
Europe which has served as the model for progressives everywhere is reaching its endgame just as we go all in adopting their failed policies. The EU is already in crisis, they are just plastering it over, and their collapse will have immediate ramifications here.
So where do we go from here?
Well, Sarah Hoyt has thoughts.
I HAVE QUESTIONS: We’re not a country of land or blood. We’re a country of beliefs. If we’ve lost that, who are we? Who am I? And where do I go?
Well Sarah, you've nailed the essence of American exceptionalism. The problem is..THERE IS NOWHERE TO RUN TO. Also America is worth saving...So stop that right now!
OK, we get no help from Hoyt.
What DO we do?
Well, in the recriminations department....
Regrettably we can't put Akin in a stockade and flog the prideful power craving douchenozzle with the two-digit IQ, but we must treat him like an objectivist treats a leper. His remarks were appallingly stupid and his hubristic decision to stay in was nothing short of insane. His asinine remark gave ammunition to the lefts tendentious "war on Women" meme. It's more than that. Akin was a protege' of Huckabee who gave him a lot of support. He only got the nod because the Tea Party vote was split and Huckabee stepped in to support his creationist ass. Akin and Huckabee are poison to the party. Mike Huckabee is a likeable enough character, and seems a genuinely compassionate man but his quick forgiveness of Akin's unforgivable asshattary should give everyone pause.
Furthermore continuing to turn a blind eye to the creationists in our midst only empowers the left with helpful examples to paint us all as irrational idiots.
American Conservatism is not like conservatism in countries defined by blood or land. It is adherence to the principles of the Enlightenment. There is certainly an ethical component and we strongly support Religious freedom in exactly the same way the left does not. Religion is an important part of society and often a net good.
However, the Huckabee wing of the party is wed to the notion that the first page of Genessis in two English translations of a text that was translated from Hebrew by way of Greek and German, is neither allegorical nor open to interpretation (as it is in Hebrew). They believe despite all the evidence Almighty God has presented us with that the Earth is 6000 years old.
I am a Christian. I believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ and I do my imperfect best to live by them and the 10 commandments. I am also studying to be a scientist. There is no conflict here as saying that the Earth is 6000 years old is a violation of the 8th commandment. All stop.
It bears remembering that the villain of the Scopes Trial was William Jennings Bryan and that the anti evolution branch of Christianity was the core of the progressive movement until the end of the 1970's. They do NOT share the limited government ideals of the Tea Party and indeed they historically backed the most onerous expansions of federal power. Both Huckabee and Santorum (who, though he is a Catholic, is in the Huckabee wing of the party) have said that they despise the Tea Party movement. The ONLY reason Akin got the nomination was becauseHuckabee propped him up to oppose the Tea Party.
Both Huckabee and Santorum are on the record as being are uncomfortable with the whole notion of personal freedom. At one of the later debates, Santorum gave as his definition of liberty some Orwellian word salad that sounded like something out of Mao's Little Red Book. These people are inimical to both our policy (rolling back government) and our ability to get additional votes, because they play into peoples fears about us. I say be done with them policy wise.
Make it clear that we will NOT interfere with their religious practices, (in STARK contrast to the left) but we will not let them proselytize against reason on our dime or use the power of government to impose their beliefs on others. That is the American compromise going back even before the founding to William Penn and Lord Baltimore. We need to make it clear to them that that's the way it's going to be.
While we can't offer anything in the way of Amnesty to illegals, we need to soften our tone quite a bit and treat Tancredo much like Akin. Immigrants are not the problem, anti--assimilationists are. We need to STRONGLY stress the benefits of English and the economic and social costs of balkinazation/ghettoization and how the Donks use this to pit groups against each other. We need to increase the quotas for immigration and have some path to citizenship short of amnesty for those whose only crime is wanting to be American. However this MUST be contingent upon securing the border and we MUST stress that it is the Democrats contempt for our border security andtheir using Hispanics as tools, that is holding this up rather than any Conservative enmity to Mexicans.
We need to be making overtures to libertarians too. We already are with the Tea Party. At the same time we need to make the case why their Lindberghesque foreign policy stance is unrealistic.
One thing we should be doing anyway is demanding that Nakoula Basseley be released.
Regards how many of us disbelieved the polls.
I'm afraid that social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Twitchy are facilitating an echo chamber for many of our movers and shakers. If they are indeed starting to cocoon themselves informationally like the left has been for decades then we have a real problem, because we are making assumptions as divorced from the reality of peoples concerns as the left is divorced from fiscal and strategic reality. OK...not THAT divorced as we get hit over the head with lefty bromides and worldviews all the time, so it's NOTHING like the group-think one encounters among, say, academics. However it is exceedingly detrimental on two fronts.
*It does not facilitate looking at problems from all sides, which hinders the search for solutions.
*It causes us to miss or be dismissive of the concerns of eligible voters who might be woo-able if they weren't scared of creationist raeptime.
This is a tough problem to solve as it comes as much from ostracization by the "tolerant left" as it does our own tribe/team tendencies.
At a minimum I'd recommend using a search engine besides Google. Google bubbles its users according to their search history leading to an echo chamber effect in searches. I don't know how many other search engines do not do so. Duck Duck Go explicitly does not but it can be clunky.
Also...don't spend so much time on twitchy. It seems a tad juvenile anyway.
Most of all be aware that lefties are not always wrong about problems, though their solutions are usually suboptimal or counterproductive. if they are banging the drum about something it probably means there is a concern. If it can be addressed without FREESTUFF!! then we may have a constituency.
Above I mentioned a partial list of problems facing the nation, the solving of which is the raison detre' of our efforts.
This election loss means that we have missed our window of opportunity to deal with many of them without great pain. The fiscal issue in particular is going to involve much more painful cuts in 4 years than it does now. This is going to make selling ourselves and saving the country that much harder. It will get progressively harder each election so it is imperative that we expand our base and quickly.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
06:04 AM
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Post contains 1750 words, total size 12 kb.
1
Well said.
The big problem with the Democratic government over the past four years has been that they haven't owned or even properly addressed any of the serious underlying problems they've been facing. Everything has been laid at the door of the previous administration, with the tacit assumption that now that the Republicans were out of power, the problems would be solved by fiat.
How to approach this over the next four years (as a conservative or libertarian) is tricky. Getting liberals to admit that they have a problem and need to find a solution (really, many problems, and many solutions) is essential, but when people are invested in something, it becomes very difficult to get them to admit they made a mistake. They will often back up their mistake with increasingly irrational responses rather than admit that the original decision was wrong.
The big problem with the Democratic government over the past four years has been that they haven't owned or even properly addressed any of the serious underlying problems they've been facing. Everything has been laid at the door of the previous administration, with the tacit assumption that now that the Republicans were out of power, the problems would be solved by fiat.
How to approach this over the next four years (as a conservative or libertarian) is tricky. Getting liberals to admit that they have a problem and need to find a solution (really, many problems, and many solutions) is essential, but when people are invested in something, it becomes very difficult to get them to admit they made a mistake. They will often back up their mistake with increasingly irrational responses rather than admit that the original decision was wrong.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wed Nov 7 06:38:37 2012 (PiXy!)
2
Bricky, you make some very good points, but you're too optomistic. I and a number of people said the same thing regarding the social conservatives four years ago -- they were poison to our cause. We tried to make a (third-party) go of it then, but failed due to lack of money, leadership, focus, and everything else needed to succeed. Oh, and the minor matter of a schism -- by the social conservatives. We never recovered, and I can tell you -- the liberals can't tell the them from the Tea Parties, and nobody can tell either from the "false flag" operations mounted by the GOP.
In four years, it won't be "difficult"; it will be impossible. The EU will fall into chaos by then, and I expect Europe to start falling under the sway of fascists in fact if not name, with war to follow. Greece is already heading there. We'll be suffering from a broken economy, China will be in a succession crises and looking for a diversion, and Mexico is a mess.
What to do now? We can't "close the deal" when half the country thinks the "deal" is being taken care of the other half's productivity. The voters will (continue to) flock to whomever promises them food and security.
I'm too old and decrepit to tilt at windmills any more. My plan is to hunker down in a ringside seat with a drink and try to survive watching the fall of Western Civilization. The end is beer.
This assumes I'm not in the equivalent of a re-education camp somewhere for wrongspeak.
Oh wait, been there, done that. It was called "diversity training."
In four years, it won't be "difficult"; it will be impossible. The EU will fall into chaos by then, and I expect Europe to start falling under the sway of fascists in fact if not name, with war to follow. Greece is already heading there. We'll be suffering from a broken economy, China will be in a succession crises and looking for a diversion, and Mexico is a mess.
What to do now? We can't "close the deal" when half the country thinks the "deal" is being taken care of the other half's productivity. The voters will (continue to) flock to whomever promises them food and security.
I'm too old and decrepit to tilt at windmills any more. My plan is to hunker down in a ringside seat with a drink and try to survive watching the fall of Western Civilization. The end is beer.
This assumes I'm not in the equivalent of a re-education camp somewhere for wrongspeak.
Oh wait, been there, done that. It was called "diversity training."
Posted by: ubu at Wed Nov 7 13:29:26 2012 (SlLGE)
3
Ubu: I'm most assuredly not optimistic.
I'm a history buff. The road we are on is well traveled, but only in one direction.
Still, despair is a sin, and we simply must turn this around, because civilization is precious and there is nowhere to run.
I'm a history buff. The road we are on is well traveled, but only in one direction.
Still, despair is a sin, and we simply must turn this around, because civilization is precious and there is nowhere to run.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Nov 7 15:20:44 2012 (e9h6K)
4
1. The NEA has raised a couple generations of American students to expect the government to give them what they want, and that there is no need to actually go out and earn it themselves. Most of the young voters I have talked to have never been exposed an alternative political argument, and in fact have been conditioned to tune out any opposing viewpoints because they are, by definition, racist/sexist/Fascist/etc.
2. The majority of the members of the supposed Fourth Estate were educated as "journalists", which means they feel their purpose is to advance a social agenda, and not report facts . In other words, they are political propagandists. Even as a growing number of voters turn away from traditional sources such as newspapers, magazines, and TV/radio news programs, most are still being spoon-fed one political viewpoint disguised as "news".
3. The majority of the entertainment industry is also committed to pushing leftist agendas, just so long as they are exempted with special tax breaks, etc.
Right now, I just don't see any prospects to turning things around in my lifetime...
2. The majority of the members of the supposed Fourth Estate were educated as "journalists", which means they feel their purpose is to advance a social agenda, and not report facts . In other words, they are political propagandists. Even as a growing number of voters turn away from traditional sources such as newspapers, magazines, and TV/radio news programs, most are still being spoon-fed one political viewpoint disguised as "news".
3. The majority of the entertainment industry is also committed to pushing leftist agendas, just so long as they are exempted with special tax breaks, etc.
Right now, I just don't see any prospects to turning things around in my lifetime...
Posted by: Siergen at Wed Nov 7 19:23:21 2012 (Ao4Kw)
5
Eh... not all the glories of Rome were in the era of the Republic.
The one bright ray of sunshine, if you can call it that, is that though we are beset by problems, it's worse almost everywhere else. Things are exceedingly unlikely to go wrong here first, and the worse off it is elsewhere, the more we benefit in terms of relative competitiveness. Already it's one of the prime enablers of our spending spree - the treasury bonds keep coming in because if the US goes under, there's no other safe harbor for the money anyway.
And if things go bad everywhere? Well, not to put it too bluntly, but in a savage world of tooth and claw, nobody has fangs to match ours. In point of fact, nobody is even in the same class, excepting the broad class of "countries who have nuclear weapons", and of those none other have anything even remotely like our ability to project power abroad. You could even go so far to say that the current system of international trade and commerce exists entirely at the whim of the US - were we determined to stop it, not a single tanker would reach port, nor a single pipeline continue to pump gas. It's not good to make too big a deal of it, and obviously it would be PREFERABLE not to have to go down that road, but if the shit hits the fan...
The one bright ray of sunshine, if you can call it that, is that though we are beset by problems, it's worse almost everywhere else. Things are exceedingly unlikely to go wrong here first, and the worse off it is elsewhere, the more we benefit in terms of relative competitiveness. Already it's one of the prime enablers of our spending spree - the treasury bonds keep coming in because if the US goes under, there's no other safe harbor for the money anyway.
And if things go bad everywhere? Well, not to put it too bluntly, but in a savage world of tooth and claw, nobody has fangs to match ours. In point of fact, nobody is even in the same class, excepting the broad class of "countries who have nuclear weapons", and of those none other have anything even remotely like our ability to project power abroad. You could even go so far to say that the current system of international trade and commerce exists entirely at the whim of the US - were we determined to stop it, not a single tanker would reach port, nor a single pipeline continue to pump gas. It's not good to make too big a deal of it, and obviously it would be PREFERABLE not to have to go down that road, but if the shit hits the fan...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Wed Nov 7 22:56:07 2012 (pWQz4)
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