Brin: The Transparent Society revisited

[Ronn! Blankenship]

At 02:19 PM Monday 5/26/2008, David Brin wrote:
>Seems to have been a fairly well-written 
>article, though the concepts seem bizarrely 
>difficult for people to grasp, even now.
>
>Of course the existence of a "10th anniversary 
>panel", in itself, was quite an honor.  It is 
>one of the few public policy books from the 20th 
>Century that is not only still in print but 
>sparking lively discussion, as the issues become more pressing every day.
>
>As for the 2008 presidential campaign, well, 
>although the lady has yet to sing the song we 
>want to hear, it is nevertheless time, to resume 
>looking at the big picture, and start rehearsing 
>what we’ll say in the General Election.  And so, 
>yet again, I urge that folks consider the 
>Ostrich Gambit... each of us taking 
>responsibility for three or four “decent 
>republicans” who aren’t troglodytes or aristos 
>or racists or vicious, but instead sincerely 
>delusional and in denial over what has happened 
>to the conservative movement in America.
>
>Do not underestimate the stubbornness of such 
>people, or their ability to follow Fox-generated 
>rationalizations all the way over a 
>lemming-cliff!  Still, if you can move just one, 
>you’ll be part of a revolution.  I have supplied 
>the ammo!  Only, remember, do NOT get caught up 
>in a typical party-line fight!  The trick that 
>works is to show that the Republican Party has 
>betrayed decent conservative values far more 
>than the democrats ever could, while re-defining 
>those values in directions that should make even 
>Barry Goldwater spin in his grave.
>http://davidbrin.com/ostrich2a.html



As someone who it was suggested a couple of weeks 
ago may be the most conservative person remaining 
on this list (I'm not necessarily sure that's 
correct, but I suppose I am more conservative 
than many) although I am not and never have been 
a member of the Republican party or any political 
party, and who lives in a part of the country 
which is considered conservative by the standards 
of other parts of the country and as a result 
many of the people I associate with and hear from 
are conservative (and many of them quite clearly 
think I'm too liberal when it comes to some 
things ;)), perhaps I can offer some insight into 
what those "decent republicans" are 
thinking.  Note that this is a combination of 
things I have picked up from various sources, not 
necessarily a statement of what I personally 
believe.  And in the interest of avoiding L3 or 
L4 or worse length I am going to try to be brief 
right now and am willing to expand on parts later.

When Ronald Reagan changed parties in 1962, he 
said "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The 
party left me." Many of the people I know who 
feel exactly the same way:  their positions on 
social and economic issues haven't changed, but 
they perceived that with increasing taxes and 
more interference in their everyday lives the 
Democrats were leaving them behind.  Now, the 
problem most folks perceive with the neocons is 
that they are spending our money hand over fist 
in Iraq and decreasing our freedoms:  IOW exactly 
what the Democrats did earlier.  They have no 
perception that the Democrats have reversed 
themselves and moved back closer to their 
positions (some of them saw themselves as the 
subject of Obama's remark about "bitter" people 
"clinging to guns and religion") and now they see 
the national Republican party as going the same 
way the national Democrat party did 30-odd years 
or so earlier.  So they don't see the Democrats 
as any sort of option to the Republican neocons, 
this year or any time.  Such conservatives want a 
national party/candidates who agree with and are 
willing to work for their values, not two 
parties/candidates who stand for one or more 
things which they find in direct opposition to 
what is important to them.  However, since the 
way things seem to work there is no chance at all 
of a so-called "third party" candidate being 
elected President, they keep voting for the 
Republican candidate because until recently the 
positions of the Republican party were closer to 
theirs, at least in the claims made in their 
platform, even if their actions once in office 
did not always live up to that.  Many of them 
still see the Democrats as further away from 
their positions, even when they don't as in the 
Obama comment seem to have active contempt for 
their positions, so even if they are disappointed 
in the current crop of Republicans many of them 
would rather stay home rather than vote for a 
Democrat.  What they want is for someone to offer 
them a viable choice:  someone they can support 
and vote *for* rather than holding their nose and 
checking because they perceive the other one 
major party's candidate as even worse, and at the 
same time they know that a vote for anyone but 
the Democratic or Republican party nominee for 
President is throwing away their vote and likely 
if anything to help elect the one of those two 
they feel is the worse choice.  So in short to 
get a "decent" conservative to vote anything but 
Republican you need to make a strong case that 
the nominee of the Democratic party is actually 
going to stand for and implement policies they 
consider more "decent" than the Republicans are likely to.

To address _one_ comment from the article at 
<http://davidbrin.com/ostrich2a.html  >, specifically:

Try asking "What happened to the moral outrage 
that you once fulminated towards Bill Clinton?"

one answer is that many of the above 
conservatives remember the 1992 campaign when 
"Billary" campaigned on the promise that Hillary 
would be a "co-president" and by electing Bill 
the country would get "two for the price of one," 
and fear that if Hillary becomes POTUS they would 
again get "two for the price of one" in 
"Hillbilly*" and so would get four or eight more 
years of the same stuff they got during the first 
Clinton presidency which led to the 
aforementioned "moral outrage."  Even if her 
supporters say that such fears are unrealistic 
and unreasonable, they need to do something to 
convince people that there is nothing for them to 
fear, rather than just dismissing it and them 
with something like, "You are wrong.  Get over it."


So in short, many "decent" conservatives who may 
be dissatisfied with neocons are dissatisfied 
with them because they see the neocons as having 
adopted the policies and practices which the 
Democrats adopted earlier which drove the 
conservatives to the Republican party, not 
necessarily because they have their heads in the 
sand and are fooled by them.  They support the 
Republican party because there's no other choice 
and they hope if they hold on long enough they 
will outlast the neocon glitch and the Republican 
party will sometime get back to being the party 
of conservatives, because they see that as at 
least possible, unlike the apparently 
impossibility of the Democrats reversing the 
course of the past half-century or so and 
becoming more conservative anytime soon (in their lifetimes, anyway).


_____
*<http://www.jumbojoke.com/president_hillary_clinton_1628.html?awt_l=HgQDx&awt_m=1d68SY7qX7Onkr>


. . . ronn!  :-\

"There isn't a dime's worth of difference between the two major parties."

— George C. Wallace (1919-1998), 4-term Alabama 
governor* and 4-time Presidential candidate

(*4-1/2 if you count Lurleen's partial term.)