This is no Way to Organize Chaos.

This is an introduction to a strategy. My insterest is singular: discrediting the American conservative movement's worldview and displacing them as the dominant party. I desire this not to be vicious but to assist humanity in ascending towards the future instead of regressing into the past. If recent events have shown America divided almost evenly along political lines, we must determine what the nature of the schism is. It is convenient and reasonably accurate to label the division as between conservatives and progressives. Conservatives resist all social change unless it is regressive to some point in the real or imaginary social past. Progressives, for better or worse, accept social change as a positive force. With these basic definitions we can take any issue of the day and see that in fact the only issues prevalent are wedge issues designed to cleave individuals neatly into two mutually dependent opinion camps that cannot accede ideologically to the other position. I have discussed this before in my "State of the American Political Landscape" series. At the end of that piece I suggested how progressives might win. They did not follow my advice, or that of any number of more well-known, respected, or learned individuals and consequently they lost elections. This series shall discuss in more detail how progressives can dissolve conservative dominance by offering a competing worldview: a worldview that might appear inflexible but is based on fact, not faith. Does my admission of inflexibility make me just as bad as them? It does not. I am adopting the rhetorical techniques conservatives have been honing since 1964 and adapting them for use in a progressive worldview. By implication, disagreement with this worldview is tantamount to disagreement with facts. This allows debate to ensue, which at this point is all but a lost art. Herein lies my hidden agenda: once the incentive for rational debate has been re-discovered, worldviews which do not rely upon reason cannot compete. This brings us to our first obstacle in reclaiming political discourse: just because the conservative worldview isn't based on reason doesn't mean that it can't be packaged to sound logical. Untangling fact from fiction and dissecting the conservative message is our first task. But first, let me expand upon what I call the fundamentals: the fundamentals behind the state of the American political landscape.

Propaganda is a tool of power, regardless if power originates in an authoritarian or democratic regime. This concept is tremendously important and not very well understood. One could also call this the "It can't happen here" argument. For most of us, our experience (learned or lived) with propaganda originated in the authoritarian regimes of the past, particularly the totalitarian regimes. Propaganda conjures up coercion in the mind and with coercion, force. We imagine Nazi rallies or Stalin's Russia and deduce that their power is derived from keeping people in fear through threat of force or in line through lies and jingoism. When we try to apply those ideas to a democracy we can't envision it. The only reason for this is that it HASN'T HAPPENED YET. Most of us think the opposite: that it will never--in fact--can't happen in a democracy. Such thinking seems reasonable but it does not demonstrate much knowledge about the dynamics at play in propaganda. Propaganda is designed to make lies into reality for the advancement of some powerful agenda, usually the state's. We anticipate that rational or even moral people would be opposed to this but because the state is authoritarian they are unable to speak out against it. In a democracy this could not occur, the argument goes, because we have the right to speak out against propaganda. Unfortunately this does not give enough credit to the propaganda itself. If it is sophisticated enough, how will you know you are being misled? The slow introduction of concepts into the public discourse won't be interpreted as radical but rather the free exchange of ideas. Democracy lives on, philosophically impervious to the aims of propagandists. Thus, true propaganda is independent of the style of political regime. The style does, however, betray one crucual concept we shall return to later: propaganda is used by regimes whose ideas would not stand the scrutiny of rational or moral examination if they were not first packaged in a more appealing fashion. The sophisticated, professional, propagandist is the ultimate salesmen.

The Democrats must discard the notion that they are somehow the the natural majority party and instead focus on being the opposition, with an alternative, fact-based worldview to support it. Complacent is a word often used to describe the Democratic party and to an extent, its true. The Democrats held a majority for about 40 years, from the New Deal to the Great Society. Their decline since has been slow and apparently few of them understand the forces responsible for it. Presidential victories have come either by historical circumstances (Carter, the outsider, challenging the corruption of Nixon, the Republican) or short-term strategy (Clinton, the DLC, ditching the poor, embracing corporate America and moving rightward) in the past 30 years. And now, with Democrats hemhorraging legislative seats, the conservative project of dominance is reaching its goal. And yet congressional Democrats act as if this is temporary. It is not. It was engineered by conservatives to transpire this way. The closest any high-profile Democrat has come to publically describing it was as a "vast, right-wing conspiracy." To be blunt with Sen. Clinton, it is irrelevant whether this is a conspiracy or not (I would argue it is not). What is relevant is that it exists and acknowledging it is merely the first step. Much work must be done. I have not put faith in the Democratic party up to this point so it may surprise the reader when I say this: they are the only chance for the progressive worldview to reach fruition.

The conservative movement does not desire co-existance with progressives. Their worldview is exclusive. The conservative movement desires outright elimination of progressives and the government institutions they have built. I think this concept is easy to observe from a ideologically-free perpective. Ask yourself this: is it the Democrats who have moved consistently rightward over the past 30 years or the Republicans who have moved consistently leftward? Who is accomodating whom? This is why Democrats have been a failure. They have abandonned what used to be a coalition of interests that formed a liberal worldview and instead emulated Republican talking points. This makes them sound insincere (they are) and fuels innumerable stereotypes that only strenghten the conservative worldview. The Republican trajectory is clearly towards a one-party state as they repeatedly discredit all things liberal. Once the Democrats and their institutions have been eliminated or reduced to insignificance, climbing back to legitimacy will be near impossible. This third fundamental is related the second in that it explains something the Democrats apparently do not understand: conservatives do not wish to work with you. They are not willing to accomodate your ideas. When Dick Cheney tells you go fuck yourself on the floor of the Senate, you better believe he's speaking on behalf of the conservative movement, not merely out of frustration. The third fundamental is important because it describes the consequences of ignoring the second fundamental.

I have left a number of questions unanswered. They shall be addressed in later writings. I would like to take a moment to elaborate on one potentially disturbing aspect of my goals, and that is the replacement of one worldview with another. I have described these worldviews as "inflexible" and "exclusive" as if there is no way to bridge the gap. Recall that our schism is based on wedge issues: issues that have no gray area, no middle ground. The focus needs to change to non-wedge issues in order to foster an environment where compromises can be reached. My goal is not to replace a right-wing dominant party with a left-wing dominant party in the interest of power acquisition. Specifically, the progressive worldview has to be serious contender for dominant worldview not so it can enforce it's will upon the American people but so it can foster an environment of debate based on fact. The danger, obviously, lies in that old saying in which absolute power corrupts absolutely. How is the progressive worldview supposed to avoid this universal human predicament? The answer lies again in the environment this vision is supposed to create. Should corruption find its way in, then the progressive worldview deserves to be challenged. In future writings we shall discuss the details of the progressive worldview and how it contrasts with the conservative.