Our Current Political Reality: Where we are now. How we got here. And where it's taking us...

"Bobos" stands for "Bourgeois-Bohemians". People from Ivy-league schools, with capitalist incomes and hippy values, who are the current political class dominating our politics. From the Atlantic Monthly:

HOW THE BOBOS BROKE AMERICA
The creative class was supposed to foster progressive values and economic growth. Instead we got resentment, alienation, and endless political dysfunction.

[...] The class structure of Western society has gotten scrambled over the past few decades. It used to be straightforward: You had the rich, who joined country clubs and voted Republican; the working class, who toiled in the factories and voted Democratic; and, in between, the mass suburban middle class. We had a clear idea of what class conflict, when it came, would look like—members of the working classes would align with progressive intellectuals to take on the capitalist elite.

But somehow when the class conflict came, in 2015 and 2016, it didn’t look anything like that. Suddenly, conservative parties across the West—the former champions of the landed aristocracy—portrayed themselves as the warriors for the working class. And left-wing parties—once vehicles for proletarian revolt—were attacked as captives of the super-educated urban elite. These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is. Because of this, the U.S. has polarized into two separate class hierarchies—one red and one blue. Classes struggle not only up and down, against the richer and poorer groups on their own ladder, but against their partisan opposite across the ideological divide. [...]

This explains a lot. It doesn't bode well for the country, as we turn on eachother, weakening us and giving our enemies outside, opportunities to exploit.

Read the whole thing. We have to find a better way forward. We have to find common ground again.

Quickly.

     

The Lost Arts of Empathy and Conversation. We need to revive them, and not let the extremists among us dominate our political conversation.

From The Atlantic monthly:

How We Got Trump Voters to Change Their Mind

[...] Typically, when volunteers engage in a canvassing campaign, the effort basically amounts to verbal leafleting. They make a one- to two-minute targeted pitch for a candidate or a ballot initiative, and then they leave or hang up the phone.

[...]

In a deep canvass, we want to have a real conversation. To get people to open up, we start by asking the basics: How are you doing? How are you holding up in this global pandemic? We respond not with canned answers, but with more questions: Oh, you’re watching football? Who is your team? How is your family doing? We’re really asking, and we really listen. Eventually, a true back-and-forth begins, one where we exchange stories about our lives and what is at stake for ourselves and for our communities in this election. Usually, by the end, what emerges is some kind of internal conflict—why the person is frustrated, why she can’t decide who to vote for, or why she is skeptical of Biden.

[...]

Research has shown time and again that people vote from an emotional place. It’s not so much that facts don’t matter. It’s that facts and talking points do not change minds. And arguing opinions at the start of a conversation about politics causes the interview subject to keep his defensive, partisan walls up and prevents him from connecting with the canvasser.

We don't try to directly persuade people to change their minds on a candidate or an issue. Rather, we create intimacy, in the faith that people have an ability to reexamine their politics, and their long-term worldview, if given the right context. We’ve found that when people start to see the dissonance between what they believe and what they actually want, their views change—many of them come around to a more progressive perspective. For example, if a woman says she believes that immigrants are the main problem in our society, but reveals that her top personal concern is health care, then we talk about whether immigrants have anything to do with that worry. When a man says he wants to feel safe, we ask questions about what, in particular, makes him feel unsafe. If he answers COVID-19, then we talk about which candidate might be better suited to handle the pandemic.

Throughout our effort, I’ve been struck by how willing people are to be vulnerable with our canvassers. Amazingly, more than 85 percent of those we engage in an actual conversation have shared something with which they are deeply struggling. In these personal exchanges, we are embracing empathy for people who are sometimes wildly different from ourselves, and empathy, it turns out, is an extremely effective conversion tool.

[...]

Such discussions are not transformative just for the people on whose doors we’re knocking (or whose phones we’re on the other end of)—they are also transformative for the canvassers. In our podcast, To See Each Other, about rural communities that are often described as Trump country, our organizer Caitlin Homrich-Knieling shared her experience of having deep-canvass conversations about immigration in rural Michigan. We’re strangers, she said, “starting out with a blank slate, and in that conversation, we’re showing them so much care and empathy about their own hard times and asking so many questions about their own life. We really honor their story and their wisdom and their dignity.”

The connections she made while knocking on doors made her see that she was not bringing that same spirit—of listening and radical empathy—to her relationships back home, in the state’s upper peninsula, where she and family and friends didn’t always see eye to eye. That realization has changed her relationship with her mother, her aunt, and her childhood best friend. Now, when they talk about politics, race in America, or immigration, they approach their talks with a willingness to learn and listen.

Overall, our conversations have not modeled the broader narrative of division that this election tells. They show that on the individual level, we all want to understand one another—how we have come to see the world, what we are up against—and we all want to be heard. [...]

I really liked the part where the canvasser realized that if she can find empathy with strangers she disagrees with politically, then why can't she, why isn't she doing that, with friends and family? Can't we ALL be doing that more?

The art of conversation requires the ability to listen. It seems to be a lost art. Perhaps it's time to revive it? The full article gives examples of what it's talking about, and has embedded links. It's worth reading the whole thing.

I don't strictly belive in either the Republican Party or the Democrat Party; they are both flawed and imperfect, and anyway are supposed to be political vehicles for people to use to form alliances around, not ideologies in and of themselves. I do believe in our two-party system, and the balance of power. When either party becomes too powerful, we tend to get their lunatic fringe and worst ideas trying to rule everything.

The current polarity in our politics, has eliminated conversation. Too often, it's like one side is wanting to destroy the other. It's insane, to vilify one half of the country's population. I live in a rural area that is very conservative, and have a business in town, where the politics are more liberal. Politically they are worlds apart. But I live in both of them. I have friends in both, and have to function in both. I don't attack people in either, and I don't want to see one destroying the other.

In a civilized world, people can agree to disagree, and work together to find compromises based on concensus. If we can't get back to that, I fear we will not survive. Nor will we deserve to.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. Nature does not favor the weak. We have enemies, who would like to see BOTH sides destroyed. What is it going to take, to wake us up, before it's too late?

     

Jordan Peterson, on Liberals and Conservatives

And why we need them both:

Jordan Peterson (Trump vs Biden 2020 Election)

A plane needs both a left wing and a right wing to fly.  Sometimes, to fly without crashing, it needs to lean more to the left, or more to the right.

It's insanity for one side in our political system to try to destroy the other.   Vilifying half the people in the country, will solve nothing.  A house divided against itself, cannot stand.  We, as a nation, need to straighen up and fly right.   We need to find common ground, and work together to solve our problems.

Or we will crash and burn. 

 The Root of Our Partisan Divide

Christopher Caldwell gets it right, in this analysis.  It's what has polarized our politics so severely.  Unfortunately, he doesn't have a solution.   I don't know that anyone does.

Liberalism's long and winding road

How the Western world went from genuine Classical Liberalism to the corrupt Big Government Thugery that oppresses us today:

The Decline of Liberalism

AMERICAN LIBERALISM, synonymous today with big government, the exact opposite of the liberalism of Edmund Burke and other British champions of individual liberty, arose essentially from the use of the state to alleviate the most severe economic inequalities in society. In Great Britain this began in the competition between the Liberal and Conservative leaders, William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, between 1865 and 1880, and among major European powers with the quest for an unthreatening working class with the founder and first chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck. Britain had a great battle over pensions under the chancellor of the exchequer just before the First World War, David Lloyd George. [...]

It goes on for quite a bit, detailing the history of Classical Liberalism, as it goes through many twists and turns, and eventually becomes something else altogether. History buffs will find it interesting. It explains a lot. It concludes:

[...] Liberalism saved America and led it to its greatest days under Roosevelt and Truman. And it essentially continued under Eisenhower, a nonpartisan war hero who pretended to be above politics. Under Kennedy and Johnson and their inept Democratic successors, liberalism ceased to be perceived as helping the deserving and instead became taking money from those who had earned it and giving it to those who hadn't in exchange for their votes. Nixon saved the country from the Kennedy-Johnson failure to redefine liberalism successfully, but freakishly squandered the political credit for doing so. Reagan won the battle for the conservatives against the liberals, and the Democrats have only won since when they ran an ostensibly moderate candidate against a very weak Republican. (Bob Dole and John McCain, whatever their merits as senators, were hopeless blunderbusses as presidential nominees.)

Liberalism will revive, as conservatism did, when it redefines itself as something that is new, looks likely to succeed, favors economic growth, and is no longer tainted by envy, hypocrisy, and the mere bribery of voting blocs. This will take a leader of the stature of a Roosevelt or Reagan. No such person is now visible, in either party, but neither were they seen in that light before they were elected and became candidates for Mount Rushmore.

Amen.
     

Bipartisianship? Not without genuine liberals

Gerard Alexander: Why are liberals so condescending?

Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

[...]

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

[...]

Indeed, when the president met with House Republicans in Baltimore recently, he assured them that he considers their ideas, but he then rejected their motives in virtually the same breath.

"There may be other ideas that you guys have," Obama said. "I am happy to look at them, and I'm happy to embrace them. . . . But the question I think we're going to have to ask ourselves is, as we move forward, are we going to be examining each of these issues based on what's good for the country, what the evidence tells us, or are we going to be trying to position ourselves so that come November, we're able to say, 'The other party, it's their fault'?" [...]

I'm tired of this grandstanding. The article goes into great detail, with many examples, of how the left refuses to listen to anything the right has to say. Yet it also acknowleges some similar resistance on the right, though it claims it's less prevelant.

Liberal isn't a dirty word to me, so I hate the way the word is used in this article. But it gets used like this, because so many people who are calling themselves liberal are really anything but.

A genuine liberal is easygoing, open-minded, and is flexible; not rigidly ideological. I think that description fits a lot of independents and people near the political center: conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. Their voices need to be heard more, because it is they who can bring about genuine bipartisan consensus where it's desperately needed.

All the rest of it is too much fiddling, while Rome burns. Enough already.
     

The Republican culture war continues: Carrie Prejean's sex tape V.S. Meghan McCain's boobs

Carrie Prejean Sextape Video: Meghan McCain "Unnerved" by "Hypocrisy"

NEW YORK (CBS) Meghan McCain, the daughter of 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, has taken to task fallen beauty queen Carrie Prejean and opponents of same-sex marriage, in the wake of news that the former Miss California USA has filmed a sex tape.

Meghan McCain, who calls herself both a Republican and a strong supporter of same-sex marriage, said that she is "unnerved" by the hypocrisy shown by Prejean, the 22-year-old "anti-gay marriage champion," and politicians who use gay-marriage as a moral "trump card in any situation" while sex scandals, normally abhorrent to conservative moral codes, don't seem to bother them a bit.

"Making a sex tape is never acceptable," McCain wrote in an editorial posted on the news website The Daily Beast . "I find it even more disturbing that as long as you oppose gay marriage, filming yourself having sex is taken more lightly."

"Does anyone else see the hypocrisy in this kind of thinking? And hypocrisy is something the Republican Party can’t afford to have right now as the GOP struggles to find its identity," McCain wrote in the piece posted Monday.

[...]

McCain, who was in a photo flap herself recently for "tweeting" a busty picture of herself to her followers on Twitter, wrote "If you’re a Republican, is it better to be in favor of gay marriage or to make a sex tape?"

"It seems that as long as you are against gay marriage, any scandal in your life can be overlooked or overcome. When you are in favor of it, however—and I have been very vocal about my support—that position defines you," said McCain.

"Many believe that it was Carrie Prejean’s anti-gay marriage views that cost her the Miss USA California title earlier this year. My question is: When it comes to Republicans, is your position on gay marriage what determines your fate within the party?" [...]

All the more reason not to make social issues the spearhead of the Republican Party platform. With George W. we had eight years of social conservatism at the forefront of the party, at the expense of fiscal conservatism, and look where it's gotten us.

I don't say abandon social issues. I say, put at the forefront of the party, as the spearhead, issues like fiscal conservatism, economic growth and job creation, issues that a majority of voters can agree on. The culture wars should occur primarily in the culture, not the GOP.

Not all Republicans agree on the definition of conservative. Not all Republicans are social conservatives. We need to emphasis in our party the things we do agree on: balanced budgets, a strong defense, free markets, and hopefully, individual sovereignty and the freedom to make our own choices.

Under such a platform, social issues would benefit indirectly, because INDIVIDUALS would have the freedom to make their own choices, and be free to fight the culture wars. If we instead fight each other and succumb to a politically correct socialist nanny state, you can kiss it ALL goodbye. 2010 is the last call. The GOP needs to get their Big Tent set up, and quickly.

Follow the link above for photos (Prejean, Meghan's boobs)


Also see:

The GOP: a Political Vehicle, or an Ideology?
 
   

Sharia Law now legal in Great Britain?

Unbelievable. From A. Millar at the Brussels Journal:

From Magna Carta to Sharia Law – Britain’s Decline

[...] It is almost unbelievable that this should occur in a modern, democratic, Western country, and, moreover, under a government that claims to be liberal, and to care about the right of women and homosexuals among others. But, tracing the actions of the pro-Islamic Labour Party, and of modern liberalism more generally, it should have been predictable. Modern liberalism is not a force for human rights and equality (though it still uses these terms where they can be of use in breaking down British tradition); it is a selfish urge for freedom for one’s own self – others be damned. Multiculturalism frees the liberal from the demands of ‘culture.’ Mass immigration frees him from the need to know his history. Invoking the Inquisition of three hundred years ago frees him from having to confront the reality of Islamic fundamentalism. The establishment of sharia law no doubt frees him from holding any position whatsoever.

I have pointed out before, that the Labour government has colluded with extremist Muslims, even employing a Holocaust denier as an advisor on Muslim affairs. Ken Livingstone, the former Left-wing Mayor of London, has also openly embraced Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a man who believes that wives can be beaten into submission, that homosexuals should be executed, and pregnant Israeli women should be murdered. The UK’s Left-wing Respect Coalition Party asserts that opposition to radical Islam is “the new racism,” and this dangerous sentiment is now received wisdom among those closer to the center of the political spectrum. But Islam is neither a race nor ethnicity, but a religion, and one that has Asian, Black, and White followers. A 2006 UK government report entitled ‘Young Muslims and Extremism,’ notes that a significant number of White Britons were being drawn into Islamic terrorism, and we have seen a few example of White Muslim jihadis since then.

The sharia courts operating in Britain, will hear and pass legally binding judgment on cases involving divorce, financial disputes, and even domestic violence. But, it will not end there. According to the Daily Mail, sharia court officials have said, that they hope, “[…] to take over growing numbers of 'smaller' criminal cases in future,” and extremist clerics have already asserted their aims to establish sharia law for everyone in Britain.[...]

The Left has never been interested in the rights of women, gays, or other minorities. They simply foment and exploit discontent wherever they can find it, and use it as a weapon to fight the status quo. They will dump support for the rights of women and gays, the moment it becomes expedient for them to do so.

[...] Conservatives and Christians have criticized the so-called “gay lifestyle,” and liberals have always furiously denounced those conservatives and Christians for saying this. But liberals are those who have remained utterly silent when extremist Muslim clerics have called for the execution of homosexuals or the beating of women. The liberal establishment generally, and the Labour government in particular, has betrayed their professed belief in human rights and equality, and are ushering in extremism and intolerance. [...]

(bold emphasis mine) As if this isn't bad enough, there is a bill pending passage that would give religious minorities additional rights, possibly reinforcing sharia. I recommend reading the whole thing for the details.

Here is a link to a post I did a while back, about the alliance of Western Leftists with Islamic Extremists:

Socialism in Islamic hands: a tool to make the present world order unworkable

Socialism has plenty of dangers inherent to it in it's own right. But what if it were infiltrated and used by a third party, one with no interest in using Socialism as a stepping stone to Communism, but as a stepping stone to an Islamic Sharia-law state? Recent election results in European countries indicate this may be happening on a larger scale than anyone imagined, as Socialist parties there make large gains by running Muslim candidates to gain Islamic votes. [...]

Their plan seems to be working. This is not the first time this tactic has been used. The ayatollah Khomeini was swept to power in Iran on a wave of Leftist power and support. He promised to institute a secular, socialist state. Instead, he instituted a theocratic sharia law state. The Leftist leaders were killed or driven out, and their followers subjugated. There is a lesson in that for the European socialist elites, but they seem blind to it.


Related Links:

The truth about Sharia based societies

Is Islam compatible with a free society?

Islam Fails Muslims by Impeding Democracy and Economic Development

"Honor" killings of Muslim women in Europe

Do we need a "Star Wars" strategy for Islam?

Sharia Law in Minnesota?

     

When you can't debate, restrict your opponent

This is what the left does all the time. They can't advance their ideas through debate because they won't hold up to scrutiny. So they try to control the terms of the debate, to prevent their opponent from actually debating. Rich Lowry at Townhall.com gives us a perfect example of this, with Obama's campaign:

The Obama Rules

[...] After his blowout win in North Carolina last week, Obama turned to framing the rules of the general election ahead, warning in his victory speech of "efforts to distract us." The chief distracter happens to be the man standing between Obama and the White House, John McCain, who will "use the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election."

[...]

Forget "bitter"; Obama must believe that most Americans suffer from an attention-deficit disorder so crippling that they can't concentrate on their own interests or values.

Obama has an acute self-interest in so diagnosing the American electorate. His campaign knows he's vulnerable to the charge of being an elitist liberal. Unable to argue the facts, it wants to argue the law -- defining his weaknesses as off-limits.

The campaign can succeed in imposing these rules on the race only if the news media cooperate.

[...]

Here are the Obama rules in detail: He can't be called a "liberal" ("the same names and labels they pin on everyone," as Obama puts it); his toughness on the war on terror can't be questioned ("attempts to play on our fears"); his extreme positions on social issues can't be exposed ("the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives" and "turn us against each other"); and his Chicago background too is off-limits ("pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy"). Besides that, it should be a freewheeling and spirited campaign.

Democrats always want cultural issues not to matter because they are on the least-popular side of many of them, and want patriotic symbols like the Pledge of Allegiance and flag pins to be irrelevant when they can't manage to nominate presidential candidates who wholeheartedly embrace them (which shouldn't be that difficult). As for "fear" and "division," they are vaporous pejoratives that can be applied to any warning of negative consequences of a given policy or any political position that doesn't command 100 percent assent. In his North Carolina speech, Obama said the Iraq War "has not made us safer," and that McCain's ideas are "out of touch" with "American values." How fearfully divisive. [...]

Lowry goes on to say that we could take these rules by Obama in good faith, if Obama also applied them to the way the talks about John McCain. But does Obama follow his own rules? Or do they only apply to John McCain and Republicans? Read the whole thing and find out.