There's a Michael Goodwin piece out today about how the Dems are doing their usual blame game to explain why things are going wrong: Big Grocery, the "supply chain." Or even ordinary Dem voters, per Paul Begala:
“I think the problem for the Democrats right now is not that they have bad leaders. They have bad followers, OK?”
Of course, as I point out, that is the way that the primitive mind works. There must be a fault, and most likely it isn't me, but that guy over there behind the tree.
But I had an Aha moment over the last couple of days, with the Biden administration announcing it was going to have to change the "messaging."
They really do believe their agenda. They really do believe that the planet is going to fry unless we cover the world with solar panels. They really do believe that systemic racism is the worst thing since sliced bread.
That's the way to understand the White House decision to change the "messaging." The program isn't the problem; the problem is just that "we" haven't communicated it properly to the American people.
The crazy leaders aren't the problem; the doubting followers are the problem, as Paul Begala tells us.
As in: Napoleon's crazy idea to invade Russia wasn't the problem. It's the soldiers that didn't fight hard enough at the Battle of Borodino.
Let's concede that Joe Biden is an average pol that doesn't have an idea in his head. But he knows enough to wish that he had been a civil-rights campaigner and to develop the wish into an actual fantasy of being there. He knows enough to know what the other people around him believe and to imagine that he believes it too. He knows how to recite the responses.
So, the rubbish that the three liberal justices were talking when the Supreme Court was deciding on vaccine mandates: really, those liberal justices really believe!
Justice Sotomayor's reported meltdown over facemasks: yes, she really believes the lies and rubbish that has been coming from government experts for the last two years.
And you would believe too if your only media was regime media and your only friends were liberal friends and your only teachers were liberal teachers.
Now, of course, if you are in politics you naturally embrace ideas that call for bold leadership, that call for you to lead the people to the Promised Land. And, of course, you are tempted to believe in traitors or bad "messaging" when things go wrong.
And so the "march through the institutions" and the canceling of opponents. Because we are right, and they are wrong. And people are going to die if the racist-sexist-homophobe opponents get to set the agenda. So, the only solution is that people like us need to lead all the institutions in society. To save it from disaster.
That is what they believe, and that is what their friends believe, and that is what regime media teaches them to believe.
The Zman has a piece up today on how "the experts who run the country have become one of these fixed things that everyone accepts." And the way the system works is that, when the people get fed up they can exchange the in-party's experts for the out-party's experts.
But, people like me ask, what if the whole idea of government by experts is a crock? What if, according to the latest science, top-down expertism is folly, because the way the world works is through the emergence of new ideas and new people that just happen to have the right answer? I've just started a fairly accessible book, The Self-Creating Universe by J.J. Clarke, that is sifting all the ideas of the last two centuries to say that the creativity of self-emergence is the way the world works. It will be interesting to see how it deals with politics and the welfare state. After all, the book is written by a guy, a former philosophy professor that doubtless experiences himself as an expert.
Yes, of course the rulers cheat; yes of course they beat up on the opposition. And of course we hold them up to ridicule when they cheat and when they screw up.
But, I think, it is vital to remember that, besides all the cheating and oppression, they still believe. As political and religious leaders have always believed, down the ages. And don't think that Napoleon on St. Helena didn't still believe.
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