Posted on 02/07/2013 8:01:11 AM PST by CharlesMartelsGhost
Defeats are never easy to take and yet every defeat is a necessary learning experience. Reading the memoirs of the greatest athletes and generals, you discover that they learned more from their defeats than from their victories because their victories only taught them their strengths while their defeats forced them to confront their weaknesses.
The Republican defeat in 2012 was a difficult blow, especially coming after the victories of 2010, and its lessons are still being argued and absorbed. Different schools of thought have emerged and different conclusions are being drawn from what took place several months ago. These necessary debates confront us with our weaknesses and prepare us to claim the victories to come.
Last month, Bruce Thornton wrote an article for Front Page Magazine containing his diagnosis of the defeat. That article, “It’s Not the Message, It’s Not the Messenger, It’s the Voter,” argued that the conservative message had been properly polished and had reached its intended audience, but that the average voter was not receptive to that message because he was unwilling to give up the comforts of the social safety net and the welfare state.
“Only the stupid or willfully inattentive haven’t heard that we face a financial abyss waiting at the end of our entitlement road, that entitlements need to be reformed, that we have an exploding debt and deficit crisis, that a ‘tax the rich’ policy only produces chump-change for solving that problem, that Obama’s economic policies have bloated the federal government at the expense of jobs and growth, and that Obama himself is the most left-wing, duplicitous, partisan, and incompetent president in modern history,” Thornton wrote.
In a Front Page follow-up article to that, “Messengers, Messages, and Voters, Part 2,” Thornton expanded his theme using historical references to Ancient Greece and the Founding Fathers to depict the universal franchise as an aberration that would always lead people to place their own private good above that of the national good.
“So unless one believes that human nature has evolved beyond passion and self-interest so that today a critical mass of voters will consider principle and the good of the whole even at the cost of their own interests,” Thornton wrote, “we still face the same problem that troubled earlier critics of democracy.”
In response to that first piece, David Horowitz took a different position. In his article, “It’s the Message and Yes the Messengers — NOT the Voters,” he argued that there was indeed a messaging problem at the heart of the defeat. He linked this problem to a continuing underestimation of the left and their tactics, as well as a lack of sufficient aggressiveness on the part of conservative campaigners.
Horowitz contrasts the Democratic Party’s willingness to play the heroes protecting minority groups from the ravages of the Republican Party with the lack of moral outrage and offensive momentum from the Republican Party in pushing back against these dishonest slanders.
“Republicans didn’t lay a finger on Obama and the Democrats for their wars against women, minorities and the middle class. They hardly mentioned the suffering of these groups under Obama’s policies,” he wrote.
This theme is further elaborated on in his new pamphlet in an article that appeared on powerlineblog.com called “Go For the Heart: How Republicans Can Win.” There he writes, “The only way to confront the emotional campaign that Democrats wage in every election is through an equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive; that attacks them in the same moral language, identifying them as the bad guys.”
Horowitz argues that the primary organ is not the head, but the heart, and that rational arguments go nowhere unless they connect to emotional narratives. While the reasoning person may be expected to rationally process and accept a message of small government, low taxes and personal freedom, this message will not connect unless it goes for the heart, rather than the head.
Americans are not a nation of takers, Horowitz says, they are coping with uncertain and difficult times without a clear sense of direction. They have been misled by the left’s false narratives and the ineptness of the right in challenging those narratives.
“When Democrats tell their underdog story it is not an abstraction but a powerful, polarizing, emotionally charged attack on their Republican adversaries. In the Democratic narrative, Republicans are cast as oppressors,” Horowitz warns. “How can you win a war when the other side is using bazookas and your side is using fly swatters?”
Both Horowitz and Thornton agree that the people are not perfect or ideal, but Horowitz argues that this requires a change of tactics. Rather than dismissing the possibility of winning the argument, the Republican Party must instead learn how to make the arguments that bypass the head and go for the heart.
While Thornton focuses on the head as the primary aspect of man, a reasoning creature who thinks and only then acts, and whose actions spring from rational or rationalized motives, Horowitz argues that man should be viewed as less rational and more emotional, as a heart rather than a head. Man thinks less and feels more. It is these feelings that drive him and move him, activating his moral senses and his sense of self-interest.
“The weapons of political campaigns are hope and fear,” Horowitz writes. “Obama won the presidency in 2008 on a campaign of hope; he won re-election in 2012 on a campaign of fear.”
2012 was not an election of thinkers or takers, in Horowitz’s view, but an election that was won on the ability of the left to manipulate emotions, to banish hope and inspire fear. And his advice to conservatives who want to win is to focus less on the rational argument and more on the emotional argument. To tell the story, rather than display the pie chart. To worry less about the head and more about the heart.
“The weapons of political campaigns are hope and fear.” “Obama won the presidency in 2008 on a campaign of hope; he won re-election in 2012 on a campaign of fear.”- David Horowitz
America, land of the free(loader).
What a legacy from Dear Leader.
The answer lies somewhere in between. The R’s have had their stones removed and are deathly afraid to tell the truth about bam and the left out of fear for offending someone. If they actually started doing that unashamedly it would help.
On the other hand, too many people are low information or willfully ignorant and do only care about getting their check. These people can be brought to a harsh reality. At least many of them.
Yep.
One set of messages for rational thinkers and another set of emotional ones (consistent with conservative principles, but beating the k|~ @ |) out of 'rats).
The freeloaders are very easy to spot, at least at Walmart.
For the first thing, you only see them after say 10 or 11 AM. It upsets them to wake up before then. Secondly, they are virtually the only ones that are lugging around two full cartloads of snacks, cheese doodles, chips, sodas, crackers, ready-to-microwave meals, hamburger, bacon and more bacon, ho hos, mac’n’cheese, hot dogs, shredded taco cheese and on and on and on and on......
You have to be careful getting behind them because when they try to buy more than their little stressed EBT card can handle they get upset.....
Hard to choose between an R candidate that fleeces the middle class for the rich and a D candidate that fleeces the middle class for the poor.
Why would anyone expect a different result than what happened?
Especially when our nominee was a two-faced liar, who supported both the Gay Agenda and Abortion for Rape, Incest, Life and HEALTH of the Mother, and who lied about being a conservative.
Tell me, why would you expect any other outcome when your base, conservatives, actually have a brain and principles?
He did his best to alienate the GOP base to get the votes of moderates.
We can cry in our beer, so to speak, about how unfair the media and the Democrats are, and that there was massive cheating, but even with those facts, it still does not remove the fact that our guy, was a defective product.
Obama&Co won both ‘08 and ‘12 through effective community organizing. He may be an incompetent president. But Obama&Co are clearly very competent at community organizing.
Our mistake is in ceding community organizing to them.
Like a gun or knife or any tool, the community organizing tool possesses no inherent morality. The morality is in how it is used. But our side has labeled the tool immoral.
Thus we fight unarmed.
It also didn’t help that Romney and his campaign staff lied about each of his opponents in the primary in order to win.
By his own actions, he did his best to demoralize the base.
And then had the temerity to expect us to vote for him.
That’s what every new salesman learns the first day in sales training: “People buy on emotion and justify with fact.” It’s true and the astute campaigner who aims for the heart instead of the head will probably win.
Republicans find it difficult to speak harshly towards or critically of Democrats, because they want to be like Democrats. But, when it comes to Republicans attacking other Republicans, the gloves are off, because Republicans don’t want to be like other Republicans, and they want the world to know it. This isn’t anything new, despite the town criers who want us to believe that the war within the ranks has just started. It’s an old, bloody war with the same nuanced debates, ad nauseam. Goldwater despised the religious right, saw them as the bane of conservative success. Reagan and Newt understood the religious right, and motivated them, to the deep displeasure of the GOP establishment. The South could have been turned to the Republican Party long before Reagan and before the 94 elections, if only the Republican Party had embraced the conservatives there. We might have avoided 40 years of Democrat rule in Congress. Demographics have changed, but the foolishness stays the same, the Tea Party having replaced the despised religious right at the bargaining table.
Never really thought of it that way, but you are absolutely correct. And many people are regretting that purchase, but stubbornly refuse to admit they never should have bought it!
“...it still does not remove the fact that our guy, was a defective product.”
you forgot to mention the fact that Romney was a mormon: the real reason you and others here on FR posted so many negative comments about the GOP’s nominee. well you got what you were hoping for, R2 lost, and now we’re stuck with 4 more years of BO’s deconstruction of America.
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