Posted on 08/01/2013 7:09:17 AM PDT by Kaslin
Rush Limbaugh fielded a phone call the other day that even he couldn't answer.
"What's happened to the country I live in?" asked the frustrated woman. "And what do we do now?"
The Great Rushbo was understandably flustered.
Coming up with a cure for what ails America after five years of Barack Obama and decades of bigger and stupider and meaner Big Government in D.C. is not something you can do off the top of your head.
The woman's question reminded me of a question Newt Gingrich posed to me about five years ago.
"Mike," he said, "how is it that our side can elect great conservatives like your father and Margaret Thatcher but then after we win those elections everything seems to fall apart?"
What Newt said about conservatives squandering their biggest victories is true. My father's glorious conservative revolution of 1980 is largely undone today, washed away by 30 years of higher taxes, more regulations and a weak-kneed foreign policy.
Even Newt himself is an example of the problem conservatives have had in not being able to take full advantage of their greatest victories.
He was able to foment his own mini-revolution in Congress in 1994. For a while, as Republicans took control of the House for the first time since the Korean War, it looked like half a century of executive power and federal over-reach were finally going to be checked, if not rolled back.
But then Newt's historic and inspiring conservative resurrection fizzled.
The 54 new Republican rebels who helped Newt "take over" the House, as the liberal media liked to say, forced Clinton to reform welfare and kept federal spending in check -- at least until Congress let Bush II and Obama open the floodgates and drown us and our grandchildren's grandchildren in debt.
I think I've figured out what the problem with conservatives is. We don't understand the rules of the political power game. We think after we win big elections or defeat the Soviet Union, we can go home and savor our victories.
We think after we win our big fights, it's the end of the game. Welfare reform passes -- game over. Berlin Wall falls -- game over. We won, you lost -- game over.
But liberals and progressives understand the power game. They know it never really ends. What conservatives see as a victorious ending -- the takeover of the House or the election of George W. Bush -- liberals and progressives see as just the beginning.
The other side never stops fighting. When Scott Brown won that special U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy's seat in 2010, conservatives were dancing in the streets because they had won their 60th vote to stop Obamacare.
Conservatives thought Brown's shocking win was the end and went home. The liberals knew it was just the beginning of a tough fight. What did we get in the end? Obamacare. Plus U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
If we conservatives want to win the day and prevent liberals and progressives from undermining our way of life, sinking us in a sea of debt and turning us into a socialist Banana Republic, we have to never stop fighting.
Evil never sleeps. Nor do its practitioners in Washington and in our state capitals. If we want good to triumph over evil in the long run, we have to learn to see our big victories not as the end of the fight but the beginning of the rest of the battle.
yep...our daily Bible reading is currently in the Book of Romans..( noticed your tag line)...and it describes the NOW here in America to a T!!!
Be prepared AMERICA!! It’s coming!!
Mandatory term limits are an unachievable pipe dream. First of all, there will never be agreement on how many terms will be allowed and what, if any, exceptions would be permitted.
Secondly, no rational congress-schmuck would ever vote to end his own job.
What MIGHT work is a scenario where a political party cultivates enough viable candidates such that each one could run explicitly for ONE term, bringing back the foundational concept of a citizen-legislator.
Fallen.
The problem is, Conservatism is about dealing with the consequences of reality, while Liberalism is about avoiding these consequences.
Carter created a situation were you had no option but to deal with the consequences of his immense incompetence. It was either confront the bad of reality, or people were going to start dropping dead from starvation in a few years. When the choice came between continuing on in Liberal Dippyland, and pretending there was no need to be responsible, or actually being responsible with Reagan, people choose Reagan because they had to.
The bad thing was responsibility produced success, and this allowed the population the ability to embrace Liberal Dippyland again without confronting reality immediately. As a result the choice was between Dukakis the uber-Liberal, and the “responsible” candidate was the elder Bush, who still was doing all sorts of retarded things, because we are still in dippyland. We began the decline again, simply because we could, and it is in our nature to do so. Eventually it became so bad we got Clinton, whose first term was a disaster by any measure, and so that opened to door to Newt.
Newt fixed things enough that we could go dippy again, and we have, for no better reason than we could.
Basically the problem is Conservatives produce success, and this allows the less responsible to devolve into idiots, and they screw things up until it is so bad Conservatism returns.
I talk about r/K Selection a lot, and it is the underlying mechanism which produced all of this. But what it produced is a population in which a substantial portion is designed to go hedonistic, if resources are freely available (or if they just look like it), as a reproductive strategy. Eat, mate, abandon others, and avoid risk, to quickly produce as many offspring as you can while the resources are free. You see it in nature, where rabbits epitomize the r-selected reproductive strategy, and you see it in humans, where Liberals and leftist emerge, when any society succeeds and resources are free.
We will also go Conservative, once resources are again scarce, and the population is forced, by reality, to do so. Due to the idiocy of the r-strategists, this point in the cycle is an inevitable reality
It is coming.
Said it here before: Dems want to annihilate us and Republicans just want to win the next election. The Republican leadership view the Democrat leadership like the Dems view terrorism and communism.
The other thing we need to learn is that a RINO is no better than a Democrat, and, in many cases a lot worse as they block decent alternatives from coming forward.
Thank you.
Will the same mistake be made, as it was in 2006 when they took the House and Pelosi became Speaker of the House?
God help this country if he is successful
And, when LIEberals get 3% of what they want, they come right back for the rest.
3% here, 3% there. Pretty soon they have 100%, and then push for still more!
It is a never ending story, and conservatives have no ready or effective response, particularly given the almost 100% opposition to Constitutional government by the LIEberal mainstream press.
LIEberal concessions ALWAYS come at the expense of the conservatives; it never works the other way.
Conservatives have yet to figure out that James Carvile gave us the answer many years ago: THIS HEAR IS WAH!
He told us what the LIEberals were waging, and we never took it to heart.
We’d best find out an effective way to wage WAH against the LIEberals, folks, or we will go the way of the Dodo bird.
Detroit is coming to the rest of America unless we get our stuff together in 2014.
Taxman Bravo Zulu!
A most excellent analysis, one I had not considered.
Lotta food for thought in your essay, and therein may lie the beginning of a solution to America’s LIEberal problem.
Thank you.
I hear you. Thoughts: the off year election is usually pretty bad for the incumbent president. Bill Clinton was the exception is 1998 but only marginally. The Zedia (zombie media) will be in Obama's pocket but only if the big O has issue(s) to run on, even manufactured issues. He does not have a pot to pee in right now, economy, scandals. His efforts to energize the base, ala Trayvon Martin, are falling flat. And, yes there is always voter fraud. Alas, there are 1000 news cycles from here to the election. But, like you said, if the Dems were to take the House in 2014, one word, amnesty.
Personally, I prefer 'dirty rotten stinking lying anti-American communist bastards'. But that's just me ...
Which will lead to CW2.
Thank you. I love hearing from fellow Conservatives who see what I am saying. I write a lot about the amygdala, a brain structure which flags bad things, and bothers us until we fix the bad thing, and make it go away. The bad feeling it creates is often likened to panic. In brain scans of ideologues, Liberals actually have less developed amygdalae, probably due to avoiding bad things, rather than confronting them, and learning how to surmount them to develop the structure, ie. turn the bad feeling into productive action to addess the problem.
My website expands this into how in nature, evolution evolves two psychologies, one designed to confront the realities of resource scarcity, and cope within them (called a K-selected reproductive strategy). This psychology is identical to conservatism, favoring competitiveness/aggression/protectiveness, monogamy, two parent, family rearing, later sexualization of young, and loyalty to in-group. You see it in species which have to compete to survive, such as wolves. The other psychology is designed to avoid danger and exploit resource gluts, and is known as an r-selected Reproductive Strategy, commonly seen is such species as rabbits, who can always find grass somewhere, and thus don’t need to compete to survive. I bring this up, because a guy on my site asked me about Bruce Charlton’s recent post on Liberals reprogramming their own minds to lie to themselves, which can be found here.
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.ch/2013/07/dishonesty-reduces-applied-intelligence.html
My response was relevant to this discussion, so I’ll post it below, in case you are interested.
One of the main components of Rabbitism is all about avoiding consequence. In the r-environment, this is adaptive. I walk into your field of grass, you tell me, “Get out of my field, or I’ll beat your ass!,” and I run to avoid the consequence. I land in another field of grass, since resources are everywhere, and I get my food, and avoid the risk of getting injured while fighting you. I actually get rewarded for avoiding consequences.
So long as things are “r,” and avoiding consequences yields amygdala relief, consequence-avoidant behavior can become conditioning. You see a consequence, your amygdala makes you uncomfortable, you avoid it, you get relief. In the future, the sight of any consequence (conflict, aggression, implied violence), precipitates avoidance to get an expected relief, and eventually the Liberal becomes reflexively avoidant and joins the perpetually smiling, glassy-eye’d Heaven’s Gate Cultists on ABC’s Good Morning America.
The problem arises as things turn K, and consequences can’t be avoided, under any circumstances, (which is also the only cure for this). Liberals are not designed to see a consequence and be unable to avoid/deny it. When a consequence presents itself, and they feel like they can’t flee, it is like a programming bug in their head. Their amygdala fires, and makes them want to flee even more, they can’t, their amygdala get’s more active, they panic more, and want to flee more, they can’t, and so on. It is a panic death spiral.
When consequences can’t be avoided (like the angry Conservative who is going to firebomb your house in the middle of the night, and then shoot you as you run out the front door), then those who are adaptable will at some point reach a place where their level of amygdala stimulation while trying to avoid an unavoidable consequence is high enough while avoiding, that simply confronting the consequence, and adapting to it (like, by not supporting so much government oppression) will actually produce a relief that is preferable than continuing the freak-out death-spiral of amygdala panic. Suddenly, the Conservative isn’t coming to kill you, and your amygdala shuts off, and you have been retrained.
Diehard, irredeemable Liberals however, may never reach that point, and as their amygdala drives them crazy, they will do anything, and resort to any false reality to shut it off. That can be suicide, it can be creating death camps, it can be anything.
From the quote in Vox’s article: “Thus, in modern intellectual life, honesty is punished and dishonesty is rewarded; honest brain pathways decay, dishonest brain pathways enlarge.”
That will only happen so long as Conservatives are not pulling triggers, which will only occur so long as things are “r.” If resources snap back, and people begin dying, r-selection ends, and you better get your shit together fast. If scarcity makes Conservative tempers grow as short as those of our Founders, to the point blood starts to spill, lying will have a consequence Liberals will be motivated to avoid, and suddenly, they will be cured of their reality-avoidant brain mechanisms, by a reality which can not be avoided, and which will punish them in some form for each time they try to avoid it. (I just saw an article on solar activity which said one government study concluded that if the electronic organization behind food distribution went down, like from a massive coronal mass ejection taking down the power grid, 90% of the population would be dead within a year. The survivors wouldn’t be politically-correct, reality-avoidant, deluded Liberal cult members.)
What Vox has begun to see is the false reality of the Narcissist, which I discussed in the post on the fractured amygdala, and which I maintain is a part of the Liberal’s fundamental malady. If your amygdala/ACC is really fucked up, there will be a point where just an uncomfortable truth (like your own innate cowardice, weakness, disloyalty, and patheity) can be so panicking/horrifying, that you will actually construct an entire fantasy world in which any assertion of it is ridiculous, and this fantasy will give you relief from the panic.
I never realized the extent to which this would happen, until after two events. A Narc basically told me something I watched him do the previous day never happened, and he clearly believed himself. And second, I thought a guy had a stroke while I was amygdala hijacking him, only to discover it wasn’t a stroke, but rather just a portion of his brain had fired so aggressively as he freaked out, that it shut part of his brain down, due to what I assume was an uncontrollable over-consumption of oxygen or glucose. I mean, this guy couldn’t see, he couldn’t walk straight, and I thought he was going to die before we got to the hospital. A day in the hospital, he was recovered, and his doctor pronounced it an unsolvable mystery. Believe me, some people who are outwardly normal are so mis-wired inside it is amazing.
If you are normal, is is tough to imagine, unless you look very closely at the people around you. You also must have the ability to visualize an intolerable level of panic, fear, stress, horror, and physical manifestations of such responses as able to be expressed many times as strongly as you could possibly feel them, and imagine them able to be turned on by stuff which wouldn’t turn it on in you.
But Bruce Charlton is right. Libs are being conditioned to this, just as society is seeing Narcissism rise. The final piece of the puzzle is that it is resource availability which sets the stage for this conditioning. Pull the resources, and reality will return, bringing sanity with it out of necessity. History indicates resources will always be pulled at some point, and the longer they have been free, the hairy’er it will get after they are pulled.
[I should add, I use the term amygdala liberally here, on this blog, because it is what people know, and a lot of Cognitive Neurosci says the amygdala is what does this panic response. However technically, there is significant evidence that the amygdala is triggering the ACC’s production of panic/aversive stimulus.]
We have to realize that the left is not a majority, but smart leftists have positioned themselves in places where they have disproportionate influence and power.
They are very good with propaganda; their tactic has never been to sell leftism, but to discredit anyone promoting conservative ideas. Not being able to win a contest of ideas, they have to discourage people from showing up to vote in the first place.
The left has also become more brutal since they have lost the monopoly on the media. Their goal has always been complete power and control, and they see their loss of monopoly as a threat to ultimate power. Therefore, they now pull no punches. They are out to win at any cost.
On our side, we have Republicans who are afraid to stand up to the left for fear of being called mean-spirited. We need them to realize that the leftist media will *never* be nice or fair, and to act accordingly. As long as they are afraid of standing up to the left—as long as they allow the left to define the argument—we will continue to lose ground.
Rush was the honorary President of the Class of ‘94 House Republicans. He told them to never make nice with the DC press because they would eviscerate them.
Those CongressCritters who did, were eviscerated!
The LIEberals love RINOs! As long as they toe the LIEberal line!
My theory is that LIEberals have never been knocked on their ass!
Somehow, they have managed to avoid having to assume responsibility for their words and their actions.
Words and actions, in the Real World, have consequences, and if one NEVER is punished for obscene language or behavior, for example (Ophonybama, Ted Kennedy, Slick & Hitlery, Weiner, Filner, Pelosi, Feinstein, Schumer, etc. etc.), one never learns that polite society doesn’t particularly reward said behavior.
HST, since the LIEberals have pretty much co-opted our culture, they do not have to suffer the consequences of their words or actions.
YET!
They have already stepped on the Real Conservative’s last nerve. Payback is coming, and it may not be pretty!
How about ‘dirty rotten stinking lying anti-American LIEberal communist bastards’?
“My theory is that LIEberals have never been knocked on their ass!”
That is exactly what it is. The only other thing is, the state of affairs which facilitates this will only exist as long as resources are everywhere, which they will not be very shortly.
This is why great, productive, motivated, winning societies emerge out of chaos. It is also why having succeeded, the very copious resource availability produced by their success alows the population to degrade in quality, become more Liebral, and ultimately tear it all down.
I couch it from a technical, scientific perspective in the hopes of producing an inarguable case that Liberals are, beyond any doubt, our mortal enemies, and should be approached, and dealt with, as such.
Also, couching it from the technical perspective is vastly more traumatizing to Liberals. For some reason the practical psycholgies of Conservatism will innately rise to embrace your description, yet it won’t bother Liberals.
Although Conservatives are slower to take my argument, it is immensely tramatizing to Liberals to see themselves portrayed (accurately) as the less capable rabbit people, in a society of wolves who could easily destroy them on a whim. I am still working on trying to find a way to fuse the two approaches, so for your input, I thank you.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.