The proper study of Mankind is Man. – Alexander Pope
It’s all one subject, really. There’s never been another. Not economics, nor moral theory, nor even politics itself.
It’s in the nature of Man that one who’s been brutalized will react with a kind of affection toward an enemy who displays a degree of sympathy toward him. The reaction seems subconscious, automatic. It’s not quite what’s meant by Stockholm Syndrome, but the underlying mechanism is common to them. The police use it routinely, as do wartime interrogation specialists.
This morning, with regard to the ongoing quest for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, Kurt Schlichter points this out:
[Hawaiian Congresswoman] Tulsi [Gabbard] gets Strange New Conservative Respect for several reasons, but the primary one is that she doesn’t seem to hate our guts. She is what an opponent should be – an opponent, not an enemy. Let’s face it – the mainstream Democrat Party hates our guts, and given its malignant druthers it would strip us of our First, Second, and probably Third Amendment rights in order to make sure that we never, ever have a say in our own governance again. Then, with us silenced and disarmed, it would take our money, corrupt our children and generally oppress us in ways that make today’s punitive straw bans look tame. If you don’t believe that a scary number of mainstream lefties want us Normals enslaved or dead, well, you’re either in denial or not on social media.
Miss Gabbard might actually be a decent human being, though she’s quite as much a leftist as anyone else on the debate stage. And we in the Right have taken so much abuse from the Left these past fifty years that the appearance of a political opponent who doesn’t openly call for our beheading excites our hopes. We might be able to reason with her! Besides, she looks great in yoga pants.
(It has been said, and truly, that there are only three things in this world that are always truthful: drunks, very small children, and yoga pants. Hold onto that thought; it might come in handy later on in your life.)
What the Right seeks in a political opponent is indeed one who can be reasoned with. Such a person might be persuasible about the most fundamental of all epistemological principles:
The Left as it stands is a religious cult that believes itself incapable of error. Therefore, even the well-meaning ones – i.e., the ones who aren’t in it for the power, prestige, and perquisites – cannot recognize mistakes. Any unfortunate developments must be the work of enemies of the People! Once we have rooted them out and stood them against the wall, all will be well!
A Leftist who speaks courteously even to us in the Right holds out the possibility that he can be persuaded to look at the outputs. That is, we hope he might accept that the consequences of the policies he advocates, when they’ve been applied to other countries, would be replicated here. Miss Gabbard’s personal attractions reinforce the hope. Yet that hope is founded entirely on her surface appeal.
We’ve taken a lot of shit. We’ll take a lot more before the renascent socialism of the contemporary Democrat Party is laid in its grave. Perhaps the day is not far off when a return to a Democrat Party in the style of John F. Kennedy will be upon us. But it’s not here yet, and to repose even a particle of hope in an attractive, well-spoken woman who doesn’t appear to hate us for differing with her is to bet against the odds.
Indeed, as I wrote the previous paragraph, it occurred to me that we should be grateful that there aren’t more Tulsi Gabbards in the Democrat Party. They’d make it too tempting to believe that we could risk allowing them a hand on the tiller of the Omnipotent State. Far better for us if all Democrats were in the Kamala Harris / Cory Booker vein: openly contemptuous of – and ready to condemn – anyone who disagrees with even one of their socialist nostrums. The reaction to that sort of self-exalting contempt is quite as automatic as the sympathetic reaction many in the Right have had to Tulsi Gabbard. It’s also a much stouter defense of the rights that remain to us, here in the Land of the Formerly Free.
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