But yes, he remained a socialist anyway because the dream dies hard

— neo

Also because market economics and capitalism rub human beings wrong at a visceral level. They work, but they don’t feel right to caveman, hunter-gatherer instincts. So socialism rises again over and over, as Kipling observed in The Gods of Copybook Headings.

Plus the fact that a lot of what we call market economics is actually an increasingly corrupt and exclusive oligarchy/oligopoly, which lets the socialists mix in a certain amount of damning truth to the rhetoric. Adding 20% truth to a lie makes it 100% more convincing to a naif.

In politics, the electorate is NEVER wrong.

What I mean by that is that you never ever attack the voters, whether it’s calling them stupid or lazy or whatever, because you are either the prosecution or the defense, and they are the judge and the jury.

Imagine a trial where one counsel says aloud that the jurors are idiots if they don’t agree with him. Even if it’s objectively true, it’s still stupid to call the jurors stupid.

A movie maker who insults the audience for not liking the movie he made sets himself up for future failure, because people have a long memory for that kind of thing. Just ask LucasFilm under Kathleen Kennedy.

The Left has taken repeated hits over the years because they have trouble hiding the condescension and contempt for ordinary people. We don’t want to fall into the same habits.

The movie comparison works on another level. It’s not the responsibility of the audience to like and pay to see a filmmaker’s movie. It’s the filmmaker’s job to make a movie the audience will pay to see. If the movie flops, it is by definition the failure of the moviemaker, or sometimes some external factor like covid shutdowns, never the failure of the audience.

Electoral politics is like that. No matter how angry or disappointed or scared a player in that game is, you still don’t get to disrespect the voters. All tgat does is strengthen the other side.

Two years ago on this site, many people were mistaking one election for a permanent realignment, and talking about how deep a hole the Dems were in. Go back and look if you doubt me.

Now some of us are acting as if we’re doomed and how stupid the voters are and we haven’t even seen the result yet.

Maybe it will be a disaster for us, maybe not. Either way, both sides start preparing for 2028 tomorrow. Either way, blaming the voters is futile and worse than futile, because the voters who pass judgement today will still be the ones we have to convince for 2028.

1. On July 12, Assault Guards—government policemen—and others on the left killed Jose Calvo Sotelo, perhaps the Right’s most prominent member in Parliament. Government police killing an opposition member of Parliament was unprecedented in Western Europe. Many on the Right concluded, in a paraphrase of historian Stanley Payne, that it was safer to revolt than to not revolt.

2. Within weeks of the outbreak of the war, Anarchists and others on the left killed about a quarter of Spain’s clerics. These killings increased middle-class support for Franco.

IO,

You should see how they view us! To themselves, they are the epitome of intelligence and righteous compassion. I don’t think it has to do with intelligent; many of the leftys I know are not stupid. It comes down to a mindset that substitutes their political belief for religion and how they then view their own self worth.

Well . . . “stupid is as stupid does.”

And there are also many stupid voters on the right

Not as many as on the left. Not, I should think, by several orders of magnitude.