5 responses to “Love’s Legal Limits.”

1. 

   BoiFromTroy

   March 5, 2006

   First off, we’re now called “The Gays” and second, you sound like the President when he says, “we’re all God’s children…”

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2. 

   Wad

   February 27, 2006

   JZY wrote:
   “Many who have come to support the GOP over the past decades (and those special few who helped to tip the balance to their victory) are those who believe they have come around to value “substance” than hot air.”

   The description of this is “post-modern politics.” If you are familiar with post-modern philosophy, and I must warn you that avoid coming into contact with it if you want your sanity to be intact, the po-mos’ world view is a contradictory one that says that there really is no substance and that what we accept as knowledge and understanding is all just an abstract construct that we just create so that we don’t get bored.

   Politics, as we know it, is post-modern in the sense that there really is nothing to be found in it. It’s like a chocolate Easter rabbit. You’d bite into one and look inside and realize that it’s hollow. Politics is the same way. Ideology is just a theatrical construct, just something there to work the crowd. The reality is that you have two parties that both are accustomed to privilege and they use different narratives to serve a class of people that do not lose anything when a party’s fortunes changed.

   “They were fooled, of course, but had been disppointed by the New Left.”
   The New Left had been “led” by an intellectual cadre that liked to quibble, but romanticized an ideal without realizing the ugly reality of politics. When any movement seeks to install institutions and laws, toppling the old order is one thing, but you must defend the new institutions against reactionaries and competing institutions, violently if necessary. The Soviet Union was brutal and repressive out of necessity, not because brutality was communist canon.

   The New Left knew this, and had opportunites to react to political crises, but didn’t. The leaders were too busy quibbling, and the leaders distrusted one another because they didn’t want to be led. In government language, this is called “paralysis by analysis.”

   “Feeling assaulted and their well-being compromised by the New Left over the past decades, these non-traditional GOP supporters naturally need their political empowerment advocate. Unfortunately, the message of fear and divide filled in the gap.”

   It did because George Wallace had the most successful independent presidential candidacy in American history. He ran a hardscabble segregationist platform that was largely a provincial matter, but he tapped into the sentiments of whites across the country. The Republicans hitched their fortunes to white resentment, and are on their way to one-party domination thanks to the Southern Strategy.

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3. 

   JZY

   February 22, 2006

   WAD-
   May I add:
   Many who have come to support the GOP over the past decades (and those special few who helped to tip the balance to their victory) are those who believe they have come around to value “substance” than hot air. They were fooled, of course, but had been disppointed by the New Left. Seeking ‘justice’ or ‘restoration’ for a ‘golde age’ of America (which of course never existed), where “abnormals”, discontent, foreign, not wholesome must be contained and corrected, many are actually peeking out of the liberal closet of “tolerance”, anticipating the moment of Armaggedon (their equivalent to an atheist proletarian revolution). Feeling assaulted and their well-being compromised by the New Left over the past decades, these non-traditional GOP supporters naturally need their political empowerment advocate. Unfortunately, the message of fear and divide filled in the gap. The genius of that manipulation is that the appeal is also secularian, feeding upon distrust and burning jealousy but with a bonus touch of “God’s blessing” at the end.

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4. 

   Andrew

   February 22, 2006

   Wad-
   Yes the “Red Menace” has disappeared only to be replaced by the “Terror Menace” which is even more amorphous and hidden. In fact, the terrorists will ALWAYS be with us, which is great news for the GOP or anyone who needs an excuse to be in perpetual war.

   While we fight needless wars, our own society goes down, down, down……

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5. 

   Wad

   February 22, 2006

   Great entry about gay adoption, Andrew. But the issue is beyond ordinary civil liberties, gay rights or even tolerance.

   It’s the politics of power, and who has it.

   The Republican party is the largest, best financed and strongest hate group in the world.

   It gains political advantage through the aggregation of collective hatred.

   In other words, it wins elections because it’s really good at getting its voters to vote their fears and preudices.

   The problem is, people who descibe themselves as “liberals,” “enlightened” or anything else wrongly assumes that everybody is as smart as them, or everybody responds to reason.

   They don’t, and this is why the Democrats are losing elections and are beyond any hope of reform.

   The Republicans know that they can’t win on economic reasons alone; hell, if anyone really sat down and looked, they’d know the economy performs better when a Democrat is occupying the White House. Instead, they base a program that’s a combination of Southern Strategy tub-thumping and carefully crafted manipulation of mass communication.

   Most of us know what the Southern Strategy is. And that strategy has been paying dividends since the great political realignment of the late 1960s. But the Republicans realize something George Wallace found out in his campaign: his redneck appeals resonated with whites all across the country, even though it was largely a regional matter. The Republicans then correctly assumed that if a firebrand racist was so successful, subtle racism would work far better.

   There are people who agree with Wallace on principle but don’t like the way he said what he stood for. They’d feel guilty voting for him. The GOP correctly understood the implications of mass media and mass psychology and learned how to use it as a tool of social control.

   Here’s what the GOP gets right:
   1. Images are more important than substance. Since nobody really has the time or the mental inclination to look at details, it’s more important to be seen as a fiscal conservative than to actually be one. See: McCain, John.
   2. It’s the party’s responsibility to determine what voters should vote for; not vice versa. Do you think the average Billy Bob Bumpkin woke up and realized that the world’s problems can be solved by banning gay marriage or making people drink from separate water fountains? No. He got the idea from AM radio, Fox News or his tightly knit community where everyone knows everyone else’s business and they know that intellect is a social liability.
   3. The party, like a sociopath, knows it should say what it says and do what it does to fulfill its end but not cross the line and believe its own message. Spain and Germany both had fascist governments but they were different in that the Nazis bought into their own propaganda, acted on it and were dispatched within one generation. Spain, on the other hand, had a more enduring fascism, one whose accoplishments and memories some older Spaniards recall with fondness.
   4. It is easier to unite in the face of an enemy than it is to unite in a common ideal. Anticommunism was the most successful propaganda tool in history. Republicans knew that by scaring people with the Red Menace, the c-word could be used as a cudgel against opponents who could now easily be cowed. And, going on the principle that if one enemy worked this well, several more enemies would make for a more loyal base. GOP’s enemies: liberals, gays, communists, terrorists, secularists, etc. By carefully crafting a message to have Manichean appeals (good versus bad, the psychological development of a child) they can bait their opponents and disarm them in any debate.

   You should now have some idea of how the Republicans work. You should also know that the high ground is the worst place to be in a time of war.

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