Re: Campaign 2016 - I'm Biden my time till I doctor the hearing.
Kep, I really do admire your devotion to Sanders even though I have fun with it on occasion,
The funny thing is I'm not all that devoted. He
is probably the closest aligned to me of any presidential candidate with a non-zero chance of winning that I will see in my lifetime. But it isn't as if I am working for his campaign. His value to me is his restoration of a genuine left dialog in a country where the Overton window has been pushed so far to the right it's dangling off the edge of the building.
Bernie matters to me to the extent that his themes will be back in 2020 and, as importantly, 2018. If we keep having to choose between center-right and far-right candidates, the country will continue to fail the vast majority of its citizens for the benefit of a vanishingly small but overwhelmingly powerful minority -- the perennial internal threat to democracy that we must eternally beat back.
but where we disagree is in the idea that a logical based appeal to these people who feel society has left them behind will work. Being a conservative nowadays isn't like being one 40 years ago, which are the people from the past that Sanders might appeal to. Being conservative is a state of mind, not an ideology anymore. That's how you get people to vote on things based on emotion, and for things that go against their interests, or at the very least have nothing to do with their interests. IMHO you recall the conservatives of your youth and project that onto the current crop, when I believe the cons of your youth or either dead or left the GOP awhile ago.
I've said this a million times before but I'll say it again: Conservatism is far, far more than its dominant voices in any generation, and Conservatism's underlying values are very much the same as Liberalism's: a working balance between the
freedoms to and the
freedoms from. A healthy society needs a constant tension between both forces to remain flexible and stay out of the ditches the the left (stifling bureaucracy) and the right (predatory plutocracy). Two roads diverged in a wood: one towards serfdom to the state and the other towards serfdom to the wealthy. It is the paradox of Conservativism and Liberalism that each is only healthy as a restraint against the other, and left unopposed the cure becomes the disease. Thus is Platonic Conservatism a necessary and laudable project.
The voices representing the project, on the other hand, are diverse and range all over the familiar 2x2 matrix of good/evil vs informed/ignorant. At any given time one of the quadrants dominates. During the 70s-80s influential conservatives tended to cluster in the good-ignorant quadrant. During the Dubya Debacle they were firmly in the evil-informed quadrant. Come 2016, it looks as though they have crossed the line into evil-ignorant. But despite the distribution, there are still particular voices in each quadrant. Examples:
good-informed: David Frum, Glenn Reynolds, Matt Welch
good-ignorant: ? Ben Carson maybe? No idea.
evil-informed: Ted Cruz, Antonin Scalia, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, 90% of the Neocons
evil-ignorant: Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Mark Levin, 90% of the Fox Newsies, much of the GOP presidential field
