With respect to abortion, there are varying schools of thought among pro-lifers – and I consider myself one – about how to connect means to ends.

First, no sugar coating – what happened on Tuesday was a catastrophe for the pro-life cause. Liberals will almost certainly take over the Supreme Court (spare some prayers every night for the health of the Conservative justices, particularly Kennedy and Scalia, both 76 years old). And that means there is no foretelling how radical abortion rights will get. We may even see abortion restrictions at the state level challenged before a compliant liberal court, and stricken down as inconsistent with Roe and Casey or whatever, justified on grounds of failing to meet a compelling state interest.

I’d bet on it. Gay marriage, too, is coming soon to a Bill of Rights near you. Not federalist gay marriage, but gay marriage as something intended by the Founders and the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment. Gay marriage as something it is unconstitutional to oppose. And after all of this, the REAL goal will be within reach, namely, knuckling the church under the iron fist of the state and stamping out religious freedom.

And I haven’t even mentioned gun rights and freedom of speech.

It is not too much to say that of all the disasters implicit in the re-election of Obama, the loss of the Supreme Court will prove to be the worst. It will essentially become the legal rubber stamp for liberal fascism. We’ve seen what liberal justices can get done in the minority on the Court. Just imagine what they will do when they at last achieve their majority.

Once they get working in earnest, the debt bomb blowing up will be a mere epitaph, destroying a country no longer worth preserving anyway. I’m not saying I welcome such a denouement; but it is what it is. The thought is horrible, and it causes me to lose sleep at night.

So what to do until then? Don’t listen to people who tell you to shut up (conservatives especially). My only advice is for the pro-life PR team to be sure to get a party line down on rape and incest, learn it by heart, and communicate as clearly as possible to every potential candidate that they not deviate from it. Akin, and to a lesser extent Murdoch, were disasters for pro-lifers, setting the cause back God knows how many years or decades.

Now pro-lifers have to clear away a mountain of rubbish just to begin talking. Yes, the people are so far gone that you have to soothe their childish little excuses for minds by explaining to them that you don’t condone rape. This is the Brave New World we’ve entered. Being assertively pro-life now signifies to people – even people who might be inclined to call themselves pro-life, for the most part – that you’re really just some 1950’s hangover who uses rhetoric about babies to justify male power over women, up to and including forcible intercourse and grouping them together and cramming them into binders.

Never did I think people would buy this crap. Well, never came, and they bought the hell out of it, and are now all in.

This quandary is at least clear to thinking pro-lifers. Libertarians are still blissfully unaware of the fact that they are in the exact same position. Sure, they can talk with the canaille on “social issues,” but as soon as they start talking about charity as a substitute for government programs and private initiative and letting companies go bankrupt and unfettered free trade and open borders and reducing the military to twenty Predator drones and a fat man with a joystick eating Doritos off of his pot belly – they’ll see that we’re all in the same boat.

I don’t have any answers. We may be fighting on behalf of causes that have already lost. So be it. My two cents is just to keep fighting and be smart about it.

Wouldn’t hurt either if future Republican candidates were adept at forcefeeding future Democrat candidates’ words back to them (I’m thinking of Obama saying he didn’t want his daughters “punished” by a having an unplanned baby).

I completely agree about not watering down the message. I’d rather die standing up than on my knees supplicating and begging. Never, ever do we grovel.

So I hope it’s clear that that’s NO part of what I recommend. I recommend being Machiavellian, and exploiting whatever advantages are to hand. In this case, it’s image, style, packaging. That’s it. Messengers on the ground have to be willing and able to speak in the tongues of the tribes, to sound “authentic” to them.

Beyond that, I do not go. If conservatism has to become socialism Plan B to survive, then better to just go down with ship and our honor, clinging to our lost cause. My eternal sleep will be unperturbed.

There are so many elements of what went wrong for Romney, starting with the brutal competition between a ridiculous number of candidates in the Republican primary. Obama never had to contend with that; it was the worst kind of political party self-sabotage.

If we are to avoid this debacle of an election again, if there’s any hope for us in 2016, we have to look at all the aspects of the failure. And it wouldn’t hurt to look at what made 2010 so different from 2012 too.

After reading all the thoughts in this thread and being extremely impressed at the wisdom herein, I’ve come to a few conclusions.

I agree with Occam’s Beard regarding the need to go on the offensive when it comes to exposing Democrats for who they are. Mitt Romney (and Sarah Palin, and for that matter Dan Quayle too) is a tragic and avoidable lesson in what happens when we allow Democrats to define our candidates. Once they paint the picture, once they establish the image in the minds of voters, nothing can be done to counter it. We need to be as aggressive if not more so than they are. But while it won’t be pretty, nor pleasant, it doesn’t have to be vile.

I also agree with the insight offered here, particularly from kolnai, about ethnic minorities, Americanization, and conservatism. The next Republican presidential candidate simply must be someone who comes from their “tribe.”

However, I do not believe that shifting the nature of conservatism, watering it down as it were, to make it more palatable to those who found Romney “not one of us” is the answer.

I can’t become less of a conservative. I just can’t. To walk away from my position on abortion would be a betrayal of who I am at the core as a human being. If I have to pretend abortion doesn’t matter to me, and back a socially liberal yet economically conservative candidate who is totally pro-choice in order to get him or her into the White House, I’ve become what I detest.

I refuse to let my economic interests completely dictate my politics. What price is an election worth to me? Is it worth my soul (Mark 8:36)?

I raised 5 kids in the public school system, 4 of them girls. There was no such thing as using the public school bus, as it was a daily wilding. Read some of Robin of Berkeley’s posts about being bussed in her teen’s.

The public school system refuses to mete out punishment for anything but the most grievous offense. The white kids figure this out real fast.

If you could mend this one evil, you would be halfway to fixing public schools.

Well said, and I agree. I read Haidt very carefully, and The Righteous Mind should become mandatory reading in the conservative canon, sort of like our Lakoff, except rigorous and accurate. (and notwithstanding that Haidt isn’t a conservative).

Indeed, one way of framing what has happened to a critical mass of the voting populace is what I called “moral amputation” after reading Haidt. I’ve been referring to something called “Americanization” and “un-Americanization,” and in Haidt’s scheme, this would translate into a mind open to the full gamut of moral signals versus a mind reduced to the liberal couplet. Thus, “un-Americanization” can be referred to as a process of moral amputation.

This tracks well with my sense of events thus far. It seems as though when we conservatives speak to the populace, to target groups, to anyone who doesn’t already agree with us, we’re not just arguing but not even being understood. Haidt lucidly demonstrated exactly that. Morally amputated liberals do not understand conservatives, for they do not have the moral multi-dimensionality required to do so.

Our task is to regenerate those limbs, and we have to believe it is possible (else we may as well just give up). Tapping into emotions is the best and maybe the only way to do it.

Occam’s Beard had suggestions that I think should be sent express email to the big whigs in the GOP. How they react would go a long way to revealing how serious they are about reclaiming this country. Neo also linked to Bookworm who listed a bunch of suggestions from his readers, many of them excellent. Not pie in the sky stuff. The only question I have is WHY did we not do any of this after 2008? (I did suggest similar things back then, and then just dropped it, because I don’t have any money and can’t do any of this stuff myself). Oh well.

Hopefully our stupidity and apathy has finally found its remedy.

… we need to prepare people emotionally to LISTEN to us. And that means destroying Democrats and Democrat institutions.
…
The Democrat myths must be destroyed, such as the one about the Dems being the minorities’ only help and salvation. It should be made very clear, for example, that Dems dragged their feet on civil rights for decades, and that it was Republicans that advanced the cause. Communication IS crucial, and conservatives have not found the concepts and the language to wake up the blind followers of the LEFT. Forget the professional left, they’re not persuadable. But we should systematically construct obstacles to the furthering of their propaganda.

Read Jonathan Haidt. I believe it was neo who provided a link to his article, and to his book, “The Righteous Mind”. It gives a window into the moral framework of the liberal, plus another into the moral references of the conservative. His work makes sense to me, and could be used to develop effective means of communicating our ideas and policies.

If we can’t tap into emotions, we can’t win elections. We need to learn how.

But at least I got one smile out of it — a smile at my own incredible stupidity.

I’ve been reading the comments of Occam’s Beard now for a number of years, and they are indeed intelligent and insightful remarks, but I did not until just a moment ago “get” his moniker!

Duh!

🙂

Jamie Irons

When the sexual allegations came out against Cain everyone seemed to think the impetus came from one of the other Republican candidates. I have always had a gut feeling it was the Obama camp, for the reasons I explain in that post. I think the left is very afraid of the power black Republicans could have to turn a not insignificant number of black voters to the Republican camp.

Understood. I have just grown sick of watching conservatives tilt at windmills trying to appeal to the innate conservatism of these groups.

There was a very interesting documentary film recently released, the name of which I just can’t recall at the moment, about blacks and conservatives. One section of the film focused on Ken Mehlman’s effort to “sell” conservatism to blacks by going around to their communities, apologizing, and spreading the gospel about shared values and economic freedom.

A catastrophic failure, tax dollars flushed down a drain. Mehlman is a dorky pasty-white politico who looks and sounds like he’s never been in the same room with a black person in his life. A good man, but that’s irrelevant. I know this is taboo or whatever, but it is a fact that we must confront: blacks are, by and large, racists. We all know this. Every conservative politician knows it. Hell, even social science has shown it with hard data (cf. “Black Pride and Black Prejudice,” by Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, both liberals, FWIW). Blacks themselves know it (they just think it’s appropriate, like all racists do – and thus they don’t call it “racism”).

I’m not kidding. We cannot underestimate this or wish it away. To take just one example: 25% of blacks believe that AIDS was invented by white doctors to target blacks – ONE IN FOUR! And we sit around thinking that telling them of the glories of Hayek and Friedman will do the trick.

Now I ask you, I ask everyone: Is sending Ken Mehlman into a room full of racist black Democrats to talk about capitalism and Christianity likely to have any chance of doing anything, except confirming to these people the stereotypes they have about Republicans (i.e., “real” white people)? They don’t give a damn what the Mehlman’s of the world have to say. Just look at him. Just listen to how he talks. What a croc-of-you-know-what. What a salesman. Boy, these whites are crafty.

I grew up among these people in San Jose before I moved to Florida. Me and my brother were the only white kids in our neighborhood, and I can confidently relay this to my conservative brethren (those who don’t already know): 99% of Republicans/conservatives have NOTHING in common with them. We simply do not understand how different the cultures are. When they speak English and we speak English, it only seems like it’s the same language we’re speaking. It isn’t. Their English, as it were, comes from a culture of extreme amorality, promiscuous sex as a completely ordinary fact of life, misogyny, paranoia and conspiracy mongering, racial solidarity in (what they think of) as a shared history of glory and subsequent oppression dating back to prehistoric times, and unity in opposition to The Great Oppressor (namely, us).

That culture is behind every word they speak, just under the surface. Again, we know this. It’s why we are very careful to watch what we say around even middle class blacks. One slip up, and all too many of them feel the need to “let the ghetto come out” of them, even if they’ve never been within ten miles of a ghetto.

I am generalizing, and I’m sorry about that. But these minority groups generalize themselves by acting, thinking, and believing tribally. 93% of blacks voted for Obama. Slightly above par for the course for the Democratic black vote, in fact. The Democratic party represents one thing and one thing only for them: the conduit by which blacks can fleece whitey for historical rectification, sticking it to the man and gaining power OVER him. Not working with the man, not joining him as a fellow citizen. But gaining power over him.

I won’t go further with this because I sense I’m getting myself in trouble, and I probably sound racist myself. In my defense I’d say that Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, I’m pretty sure, would agree with what I’ve said. Again – I’m not a racist. I simply think we must stop pretending as though racism isn’t a huge, integral, essential part of black identity, as conceived by (a majority of) blacks themselves.

THAT is what we are up against. The bare minimum – the absolute essential prerequisite – to any attempt to make inroads to these groups – who are, again and again, largely racists/tribalists – is to send messengers that are members of their tribe. Messengers who have been in a room full of black people before, and look and sound like it.

Is that likely to work? Hell no. Nothing will “work,” if by “work” we mean “Getting a majority of minority group X into the Republican party.” It won’t happen, and if it does it will be because of an unforeseen event out of our control. The best we can do is the best we can do, and for now that means sending the right messengers to carry our message, while showing them publicly that their tribe is a part of our “tribe.”

After that – then we’ll talk about how to hook more of them. Right now, there’s no mystery:

NO MORE KEN MEHLMANS IN COMPTON.

Republicans can really be embarrassingly stupid.