Conservatives and Liberals experience the world differently

When someone reacts to something conservatives say by asking what universe they exist in, the question may make sense beyond just being snark. Science is beginning to determine that liberals and conservatives really do live in different universes. This is a quick report from Wired.

Research has already shown that, compared to liberals, conservatives display heightened responses to threatening images. Michael Dodd of the University of Nebraska wanted to explore this in finer detail: He showed 46 left- or right-leaning Nebraskans a series of images alternately disgusting (spiders on faces, open wounds) and appealing (smiling children, cute rabbits.) Dodd's team found that conservatives reacted most strongly to negative images, and liberals most strongly to positive photographs.

Then he showed them pictures of well-known politicians. The same patterns held: Conservatives displayed more distaste than liberals for politicians they disliked, while liberals felt more positive than conservatives about politicians they liked. Given these and other findings, wrote Dodd's team, "those on the political right and those on the political left may simply experience the world differently."

That sounds pessimistic, but it doesn't have to be. It can be a healthy reminder that people with whom we disagree aren't stupid or irrational; they just have different perspectives.

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Image: Each graph depicts the arousal response of conservatives (triangle dots) and liberals (square dots) to images that are disgusting or appealing (left set) and pictures of opposing politicians (right set). (Dodd et al./Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B)

Citation: "The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences." By Michael D. Dodd, Amanda Balzer, Carly M. Jacobs, Michael W. Gruszczynski, Kevin B. Smith and John R. Hibbing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Vol. 367 No. 1589, March 5, 2012.

The Political Power of Narrative Trumps that of Fact

I've been looking at the social power of narratives for a while, and you seen to get the idea over quite well. Here is a Scientific American Mind article which supports the power of storytelling: The Secrets of Storytelling: Why we Love a Good Yarn.

Politically a good narrative trumps a lot of powerful facts because that is the way the human mind works. That's true even when the story being told is blatantly fiction.

Since one of the major focuses of a liberal education is to overcome the desire for a good story when the facts demonstrate that it is false, we liberals are trained to downgrade the importance of narrative. But the major religions are all transmitted through narratives. So is the American conservative movement - certainly it has been since Reagan started telling the Welfare Queen story.

Another example is Ayn Rand's book "The Fountainhead" which is the narrative soul of Libertarianism in America today. Fact? Not a bit, but any facts that are presented to demonstrate its falsity literally bounce off of the narrative power of that book. Try arguing with a committed libertarian and you will see that there is no rationality in their position.

Tribalism is passed on through narrative, not through any form of science or reliable truth. For a modern example of such tribalism Michael Wolraich points out (in his TPM Cafe essay How a Story Seduced the Right Wing) that the conservative movement is a tribal group held together through a series of narratives.

When I started trying to understand the nature of narrative I was referred to an essay "Notes on the Origins and Life of Narrative" in Reynolds Price's excellent book "A Palpable God." It is the best discussion of narrative I have ever found. The rest of the book is Price's translations of various books of the Old Testament which he presented as outstanding example of narratives. The desert religions are based on the tribalism carried in those stories. I found the same narrative power in an excellent book called "The Teachings of Buddha" by Paul Carus. Again the stories were told and refined by storytellers (because of their narrative power) for centuries before ever being written down.

These days many of the best narratives in America are crafted by advertisers and PR people. The conservatives have adopted narratives as ways of communicating and attracting others to join their tribe. Rush Limbaugh crafts narratives and tries them out on his audience, then modifies them to improve the power to get people to do what he wants.

It's going to be difficult for liberals to fight the political battle based on mere facts and science. The human mind prefers narratives to determine how to behave - or to vote.

[I haven't read it yet, but Michale Wolraich recently published a book on this subject entitled Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual.]

Why the right can't win in the blogosphere

I've been reading several places where the guys over at RedState think that the Liberals have the effective on-line infrastructure and for some reason the Conservatives don't. Atrios reported it again today. So I thought I'd offer my explanation.

The right wing is inherently authoritarian. Their media exists to get the message out to the faithful That what their kind of political ideology is. So they tell the readers what to believe and provide vignettes to support those beliefs. It's clearly a top down model. (In fact it is very much like a significant part of organized religion.) If someone questions the message, then their questions are to be suppressed as dissident and rebellious. It really doesn't matter if others see facts that don't match the pronouncements from the authority. Both TV and talk radio are well suited to this model. You can say whatever you want, and if someone questions it, then they are either screened out before getting on the are or they are easily cut off before going very far, after which they are ridiculed by the host. The ridicule enforces the appropriate socially expected behavior of people who want to belong to that group. This is especially effective in groups that also portray their members as an embattled minority constantly under attack. Such individuals do not have another group to join other than the oppressors, who they expect will reject them.

The left wing consists of people who want to know "Why?" But then they go beyond that and search for exceptions, generally to poke holes in what is being said. The intent is to improve the explanation given.

In short, the conservatives have a model in which "The Answers" are broadcast and in which questioning is repressed. The liberals have a model in which an identified situation or problem is identified and tentative solutions are thrown out for discussion. Then if the original message is not adequate, it is expected to be improved on - assuming it was not just wrong in the first place. The conservatives see all the various questions and objections as being dissident, rebellious and disrespectful of the authority.

When conservatives attempt to question a message or idea on a liberal blog, they resort to the ideology which they know to be true. If it runs counter to well-discussed liberal ideas which have been proven in both discussion and in tests against reality to be true, then the conservatives catch a lot of flack for what they present. They generally view this as being rejected. If someone attempts to offer explanations of why the conservative dogma does not work, if the individual will analyze the explanation and respond to it in a analytical manner and identify where the flaws are in their own ideas as well as those presented, then they can fit in on liberal blogs and such. But if as is most usual, they simply respond by repeating conservative dogma with no effort compare and contrast realistically, then they actually will be rejected. The term for that is usually "troll."

The liberal blogosphere is set up to encourage debate and to reject time-wasters who are there simply to sell their dogma. For people who are looking for workable solutions to novel problems, the ideas and debate are necessary. The trolls are time wasters.

My previous post about the reaction to the 2005 presentation by Economist Raghuram Rajan is a case in point. He was rather roundly rejected for not being sufficiently deferential to the economic genius to whom the meeting at the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium was dedicated - Alan Greenspan. The economy was chugging along and growing reasonably well and Wall Street was making a mint because of the brilliant leadership of the free market guru Allan Greenspan. There was no room for dissent to the prevailing wisdom.

Yeah, right. And here were are now in the Recession that officially started in December 2007, and Alan Greenspan has admitted that his views on the self-correcting nature of the unrestricted and unregulated financial markets were wrong.

So what brought the economic party to a screeching halt? And more important, what do we do about it now? It's clear from the chaotic decisions made by Henry Paulson, Sec. of Treasury, and the less chaotic but no better informed decisions of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, no one really knows right now. One thing is clear, though. The answers to those questions will not be first filtered through the free market fundamentalist ideology and work. Those ideologically pure "answers" are largely what caused the current mess.

What I haven't seen on the right wing is any effort to actually dig into the problem and to propose solutions that might work. At best they offer prepackaged ideologically approved "solutions" with no convincing reasoning behind them. The liberal blogosphere doesn't have the answer yet, either, but they are getting to explanations of what caused the problem. From that workable (not perfect) solutions will ultimately be developed.

This is just one example. The top down authoritarian Internet media will give canned ideological responses and attack anyone who does not conform to the ideology. The liberal groups are searching for explanations and solutions and are open to things that are new because the current economic situation is quite unusually and according to the orthodox and free market fundamentalist ideas simply could not happen.

Is it any wonder that the left wing blogosphere is a lot more lively and active than the propaganda strewn right wing blogosphere? It offers puzzles with the possibility of real solutions that can be applied in real situations, not just frequently repeated canned and unquestioned conservative dogma, attacks on liberals and whining about how victimized conservatives are.

Neuroscience: conservative brains and liberal brains work differently

A clear, simple experiment at New York University and UCLA demonstrates that conservatives quickly learn routine reactions to a stimulus, but that when the situation changes to make the routine reaction wrong, their brains do not function to override the learned routine easily. When the situation changes and makes the routine response wrong, liberals are 4.9 times more likely to show activity in the portions of the brain that deals with conflicting incoming data and 2.2 times more likely to get the correct answers.

The article published in the LA Times today went on to say:

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

It appears to me that this study is demonstrating that conservatives are more oriented towards focusing on making routine processes more efficient, while liberals are more capable of quickly adapting to a changing environment.

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I suspect that this relates to the differences between Authoritarian personalities and non-authoritarian personalities. A person who is trying to focus on a specific task wants someone else to bring up the supplies, take away the results and prevent distractions from interfering with the task to be performed. This isn't just because it makes someone's job easier. It is a direct result of the limited nature of every human being, described by Herbert Simon's concept of Bounded Rationality.

A person with such attitudes belongs belongs deep inside an organization, and most organizations cannot function efficiently without such people. But there does have to be someone else who keeps track of those distractions which can interfere with the performance of individual tasks. Sometimes the entire set of tasks need to be stopped and replaced because no one wants the output. Failure to make changes like that are what killed the steam locomotive manufacturers. It took entirely new companies to produce diesel-electric locomotives. Someone has to recognize the need for changes and to implement the new ideas which might deal with those changes.

Consider reading John Dean's Conservatives without Conscience and Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians.

Also, an excellent measure of the distinction should be Tolerance for Ambiguity. Conservatives will have a low tolerance for ambiguity, while liberals will have a greater one. This research demonstrates the cognitive processes that lie behind the behavioral differences.

Theories vs. ideology; Which provides better government?

Conservatives and Liberals both try to take the lessons of the past, learn from them, and use them to predict future events. That ability to see reality as being past, present and future is unique to human beings. This plays out in (among many other things) the ways government functions.

Government is always a group experiment in trying to do those things today that provide the best outcomes tomorrow. A good government is one that gathers evidence, develops theories or ideologies of cause and effect and tries to govern from those theories or ideologies.

The difference between a theory and an ideology is (1) how perfect decision-makers expect the ideas of cause-and-effect that make it up are expected to be and (2) how the decision-makers act when it fails. Governing is deciding how to allocate resources and act today so as to achieve a better-predicted future. So let's look at the process of predicting the future and acting today in order to achieve a preferred tomorrow.

That process involves gathering data on events that have occurred in the past, learning which events appear to cause others to occur, and seeing the resulting outcomes. We then choose to take actions in the near future which will be more likely to result is the ultimate futures we prefer. The discipline of General Semantics calls this time-binding and defines it as "the distinctive human ability to build on the accumulated knowledge of others." Every human being does this.

The knowledge that some events cause other events to happen is called a theory. The more often we see that one event, "A", appears to cause another event, "B", to happen, the more certain we are of the theory that event "A" will cause event "B." We use such theories to guess what is the best action to take today to result in the future outcome we most desire. But "theories" come in a wide variety of strength or reliability. Some are pure guesses; some are almost certainties.

Physicists and chemists have developed some very strong theories about the causes and effects in their intellectual realms. Theories in history and the social sciences never approach the degree of certainty that is possible in the physical sciences. Strong theories in the physical sciences result from isolating cause "A" and result "B" from all other confounding possible causes for result "B", then measuring all the objects and forces that remain within the isolated system. Advances in the physical sciences have come from isolating the items studied, identifying every object within the isolated set of items, measuring the forces within that set and then manipulating the forces to a measured degree and measuring the result.

The process of isolating the system, identifying and measuring the objects and forces inside it, and repeatedly testing measured changes in that system to prove cause-and-effect has proven very successful, although it still hasn't worked to give reliable weather predictions.

If theories in weather prediction are not yet perfect, then those in history and social systems are extremely weak. The subjects studied in history and the social sciences are complex systems that do not allow chains of cause-and-effect to be isolated from unexpected outside events. In addition, history does not really repeat itself in detail. On top of that, historical data is, for the most part, whatever is accidentally recorded at the time of an event. Measurements of what event historical event "A" caused another historical event "B" are extremely rough in the best of cases.

Government, however, is an institution designed to do those things today that provide improved outcomes tomorrow, so it sits squarely in the middle of history and the social sciences. Theories of government, history and the social sciences tend to be based on estimates of which guess is better than the others, and cause-and-effect relationships based on such data are rarely very accurate and never precise.

But even with the very best of data, human beings have very limited ability to analyze data and make predictions if the data comes from complex systems. Humans can observe that one event will usually lead to another event as long as nothing from the outside those events interferes, but in human social systems there is always a set of interfering events, too many to take account of. The result is that human beings can predict simple things reasonably well, but cannot identify cause-and-effect in systems very well.

But we are human beings. It is a characteristic of the human being to try to predict what will happen in the future and to cause a better future. Politicians build their careers on providing ideas that if we do something, "A", it will cause event "B" to occur in the future. Or the opposite - if we don't do "A" then "B" will NOT occur. Politicians fight other politicians to apply social resources to their preferred action "A" rather than the alternative "A-prime" proposed by another politician, or to prevent event "X" so that event "Y" will not occur.

Both Conservatives and Liberals play this prediction game. Each takes advantage of the accumulated knowledge from the past on which to base the theories of cause-and-effect they try to sell the voting public. Let's skip the part that describes how the theories determine which facts from history are considered more important than others and go straight to what happens when the theory is used to determine which actions should be taken today fails to achieve the desired future outcomes.

Theories of future outcomes are guesses made with greater or lesser ranges of uncertainty. They are not and cannot be certainties. Performing and action "A" today to cause a result "B" tomorrow is always an experiment. So what happens when the outcomes of an action do not match the results the theory the action was based on? What does the decision maker do when the experiment fails? Here is the difference between conservatives and liberals.

Liberals take the results that don't match those predicted by the theory and go back to revise the theory for future use. Check the measurements. See if all the objects and forces in the theory were accounted for and if any new ones appeared in the experiment. Find out what changed from what was expected, and take the changes into account before using the theory again in the future.

Conservatives reject the evidence that the theory failed. Instead of revising the theory, they defend it. Here are the conservative's defense measures:

• First they attempt to simply ignore the evidence of failure. The first line of defense is to hide the evidence or lie about it. [The Bush administration has sometimes even stopped providing reports that previously were regularly prepared and published in such areas as environmental science and economics.] If others keep bringing it up, they attack those people bringing up the evidence.
• Second is the excuse that the action has not been allowed enough time to succeed. This is usually accompanied by tactical changes in the application of the effort, each of which must be given more time to succeed. [This is the source of the famed "Friedman Unit.' "A slight change and it will be working in six more months!"]
• The next line of defense is to blame those who bring the evidence of the failure and suggest a conspiracy to damage the conservatives for political reasons. Rather than discuss the theory and the evidence for its success or failure, conservatives move the issue to one of who has power and who wants to take it away.
• The final line of defense for conservatives is to blame those who implemented the action for its failure. Conservative ideology is perfect. If the attempt to apply conservative ideology failed to achieve the outcome conservatives expected, then those who applied Conservative ideology must not be "True" conservatives. Any failed outcomes prove that the perfect ideology was not applied or was not given enough effort.

The 'theory' of cause-and-effect that conservatives used has been elevated to the level of an 'ideology.'

The difference is that an ideology is perfect, where a theory is not. The result of this thinking is that while a theory can be revised, an ideology must be defended.

So the blame for the failures of an ideology always lies outside the ideology itself, and anyone who takes responsibility for a failure is proven NOT to be a conservative. The problem is that an ideology will always fail. It is based on the same imperfect information sources as any other tentative and fallible theory. An ideology is just a theory, even after it has been given sacrosanct status as "Perfect, not open to challenge or revision."

Since social systems are too complicated for any theory to work perfectly, people operating from an ideology will always be forced back on the Conservative's defense methods described above.

When the conservative ideology fails, government by conservatives will always be redirected from governing according to the needs of the people governed to defending and enforcing the ideology as it fails. Since the ideology cannot be changed, as it continues to fail the efforts to prop it up become more radical and extreme.

This caused the collapse of the Communist ideology driven government in the Soviet Union. It is causing the collapse of the conservative ideology as the guiding ideology in the United States. It will cause the collapse of any theocracy in the Middle East or anywhere else.

Government is always an experiment in determining cause and effect and attempting to actually achieve the preferred outcome. Ultimately every government depends on being recognized as legitimate by the people governed. When government begins to defend a failed ideology instead of providing the outcomes the people expect they will replace it.

The USSR fought that off for a generation by preventing their population for learning what outside governments were providing for their populations. American conservatives will not be able to keep Americans ignorant and enslaved to their ideology for nearly that long.

Oh, and why do conservatives elevate their theories of government to the level of ideologies?

I have a theory about that. The mass of voting conservatives have a low tolerance for ambiguity. Their leaders play to that by promising certainty. But this is a theory. It is open to revision given better information.

Hoagland's fear of change and loss of his news gatekeeper status

Yesterday from Jim Hoagland we got another defensive meme from the conservative Republicans who lost power in the elections last November. He buried the meme deeply behind a warning that in spite of the many, many scandals in professional sports this summer, cynicism is not the answer. Things change, and rules change. People who use such changes to attack 'serious people' and take pleasure at the destruction of individual reputations and careers need to be avoided. Those who do that, like Bloggers, are just trying to build their own reputations on the gravestones they use to bury the currently established leaders and representatives of the status quo. Here is the core of his lament:

The most vindictive bloggers and many others eager to push the mainstream media, established politicians or other remnants of the status quo off a stage that they want to occupy smash reputations with abandon to call attention to themselves. What do they have to lose in the unpoliced badlands of the ether? They contribute to a general deepening of cynicism in the land at no perceived cost to themselves.

But deeply polarized nations that devote an inordinate amount of their time and energy to hunting and prosecuting both real villains and convenient scapegoats -- at the expense of failing to recognize and respect heroes and helpers of the common good -- do pay an enormous collective price. Such nations descend into easily manipulated despair and resentment that inevitably lead to ever greater destruction. Americans would do well to ponder that in a summer of doubt and division.

His concern seems to be that if we destroy all the negative elements of the status quo, we will also be destroying the things that maintain stability in our nation. He says "nations," but I see no indication that he looks outside the U.S. borders.

Well, if he is trying to defend the existing mainstream corporate owned media and pundits such as himself as valued defenders of the status quo, how much defending of the "status quo" (example: "America does not conduct unnecessary preemptive wars") was he dong when he was uncritically feeding the NeoCon line to the public to urge the War in Iraq? Hoagland himself was a stenographer for the NeoCon Iranian agent Ahmed Chalabi, publishing disinformation directly from Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. At the time he was publishing their propaganda, the CIA and the Department of State had already refused to deal with Chalabi. Hoagland, like so many pundits being published in the Washington Post, remains a cheerleader for the status quo - even though the status quo is presently the most radical regime America has ever suffered under.

Hoagland is warning us against an orgy of investigations and destroyed reputations and careers because it could be destructive of the status quo. Yeah, that idea worked so well (for the Republicans) after both the Nixon debacle. The Nixon Pardon by Ford was to prevent loss of public acceptance of the legitimacy of the government. The Pardon for Nixon was to prevent social disruption - and prevent the public from learning how bad the Nixon regime really was. The lack of full investigation into the Nixon administration allowed the conservative cancer to continue growing on the American body politics. Because they were not exposed the same idiots like Lee Atwater kept coming back like the undead without stakes in their hearts. The same excuse was used after Iran Contra. Pardon the worst, ignore the rest, and stop the damned investigations that would destroy careers and reputations. The cancer kept growing until we got Bush 43, Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld. Hoagland wants to avoid anything that will keep the conservatives from being recognized as the greatest danger to American values since the Confederate States of America revolted. If they aren't investigated and exposed, they will be back again. This time we need to put a stake through the heart of conservatism. That will require that what they really have done be exposed, and that will destroy some careers and reputations of those who have been trying to destroy the American Constitution.

The solution this time requires in-depth investigations and truth commissions that expose what has happened to America in the last 50 years. It will require that kind of effort to get to the truth at the bottom of the nightmare the American conservatives have brought to America. That kind of effort WILL destroy reputations. But it will do so in the interest of trying to bring America back to some form of consensus as to what America is and how it should be governed, not for the personal gain of those who expose the evil-doers.

This solution, honest open exposure of the illegal actions of the current radical regime, is not the one that Jim Hoagland recommends. Instead he suggests that we protect those currently in power with good reputations as an effort to protect American stability. He blames "...vindictive bloggers and many others eager to push the mainstream media, established politicians or other remnants of the status quo off a stage that they want to occupy smash reputations with abandon to call attention to themselves."

He personalizes the destruction of the status quo, looking for someone to blame ("vindictive bloggers and others") and glorifies a non-existent status quo. The first part of his article, in fact, makes a point that the status quo in sports is no longer any form of stability. I would suggest to him that he reread the economist Joseph Schumpeter's description of Creative destruction.

His own newspaper industry is a great example of creative destruction. Newspapers are dying because of competition from radio, Television, as well as the shift from downtown department stores that advertised to attract customers to WalMarts, Targets and K-Marts that place stores closer to the customers and compete on low prices instead of advertisements. More recently, the Internet offers news that dispenses with the newspaper gatekeeper-on-the-news function. Gatekeepers protect the status quo, good or bad. Individual choices as facilitated by the Internet are more likely to lead to a generally acceptable consensus than hidebound gatekeepers. Is it any surprised that the Washington D.C. news gate-keepers are screaming like stuck pigs as they are displaced and disrespected? But let's look at this "status quo" that we have to protect if we are to maintain "stability."

Currently the so-called status quo consists of two American world-view competing for political domination of America. One set fears the future and wants to be protected from it. They are out to gain control of the military, police and judicial powers of government to stop the changes they fear and hate. The other set is apprehensive about the future, but does not believe that we can be protected from it, so they want to know about it and be able to take advantage of whatever elements there are to take advantage of.

Jim Hoagland fears the future, but it is coming right at us anyway. It is dangerous and highly unpredictable, but it is coming at us whether we like it or not. Our choice is to either let the old-line news gate-keepers hide the facts from us and feed us a feeling of normality and safety, or to open up the news channels and let each of us get ready for the inevitable as best we can.

Such preparations will require a great deal of government planning and organization. Government can't stop the future from happening, but it can prepare us to deal with it. The government couldn't prevent Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but there was a lot that could have been done to limit the damage they did and help people recover.

The recognition of the total failure of refusing to prepare for the inevitable future will include a lot of destroyed reputations and careers. Tough. There are a lot more Michael Browns and yes, Jim Hoaglands, who need to be exposed and disposed with. Failures ion both government and the media need to be dealt with, including dealing with the responsible people. The old-line news gate-keepers need to recognize the elements of creative destruction and try to get out of the way while the rest of us start living in tomorrow.

Oh, and why do I call Hoagland's meme a Republican one? Because they are the ones who want to hide from the future and deputize the military to defend themselves from it. That is what Cheney and the NeoCons (including Hoagland) were trying to do in Iraq. It didn't work and couldn't work. As Hoagland's article points out, the future is showing up in sports all over this Summer. It is also showing up in prices at the gas pump, in the transfer of high-paying jobs from the U.S. to India and China, and in the dangerous foods entering the world market from China.

The future starts one-second from now and can't be stopped. Only our adaptation to the new future can be prevented. It is stopping that adaptation that is the core of American conservatism, as if by some magic (or miracle if you are fundamentalist) by hiding from the evidence of future and refusing to adapt to it, it can be somehow stopped.

The fall-out for the Republican Party failure is now showing up in the election booths. They lost control of Congress in November 2006, where they were trying to cram their failed solutions down the throat of America using votes of 50% plus one vote and totally removing any opposition from power. They really think that they will regain power because the only possible solution they can see is to ignore the future, refuse to prepare for it, and use the military to keep the rest of the world under their control.

Since they expect to return to power, they are now pushing the media to demand that Democrats and vindictive bloggers avoid destroying the careers and reputations of people whose only sin is to protect the status quo. Another media meme that the Republicans are pushing is that 'serious people' should act in a bipartisan manner, giving equal respect to conservatives. Both of these memes, if listened to, will have the effect of leaving the conservatives with some power to prevent preparations for the inevitable changing and very frightening future.

Both of those memes should get the trash-can treatment they deserve. To the extent that either is adopted, it will be as dangerous to America as the War in Iraq has been and remains. Neither has any value. If the conservatives want to get on the band wagon to the future, they have to do as an addict does. they have to recognize that they have reached rock-bottom and decide themselves to change and adapt. They should not expect the rest of us to be protective of their insanity.