I rant about this conspiracy theory of mine every few months, whenever something new comes out that makes it appear a little less crazy. Kos's data-driven post, (The obstructionist's dilemna)about how objectively counterproductive this Republican doubling down really seems to be, seeing that this approach got them roundly defeated at the polls, is my latest opening.
Politicians doing something stupid is hardly an occurrence so rare that it makes you wonder what the REAL reason is behind this only seemingly stupid move of theirs. Granted. The systems that policy and politics seek to control are so complicated, so many wheels within wheels, that even small differences in reality-testing algorithms can yield 180 deg opposite courses of action. They can look quite crazy to us if you judge them by the courses of action they adopt.
But you sort of expect politicians to respond qucikly to the best evidence available, empirical data that overrides any theories about the political universe that set them on their initial course, what works with the electorate. Politicians are notoriously timid about crossing public opinion, and tend to respond to the slightest feedback from the electorate. Which is why it is unusual, does raise questions about what is really behind the outward appearances, when a whole party doubles down on an approach that has been rebuked two election cycles running.
The Shoot the Moon theory explains this odd behavior using an analogy from the game of Hearts. The object of that game is to avoid taking hearts, and the Queen of Spades. You gain one point, when the object is, as in golf, to have a low score, for any heart, and 13 points for the Queen of Spades, that you have won after all the cards have been played. So normal play has all the players trying desperately to not win hearts, and defintiely not the Queen of Spades. But there is a special provision that winning all the hearts, and the Queen of Spades, gives all of your opponents the 26 points involved, and you take on none. This is called Shooting the Moon, and doing this successfuly even once yields more than many hands of the most skilful play at the more conventional approach of minimizing your heart and QoS winnings.
Obviously, the game of electoral politics has its similarities to conventional Hearts play. You try to do fewer stupid things that anger the electorate, and fail in real-world terms as policy, than your opponents. But is there anything in politics like Shooting the Moon, where going all in with stupid inverts the usual scoring, and stupid wins big? The Republicans are acting as if there is. Are they just being stupid, or are they on to something?
If they are on to something, if there is a mechanism in politics that converts stupid to electoral gold, that would be the politics of fear. People aren't going to be afraid until and unless there are really bad real-world consequences occurring and recurring on a regular basis. You can wait around for them to drop into your lap, like 9/11, or you can make disaster happen. Yes, yes, the latter has its risks, namely that you, instead of al Qaeda or whatever the scapegoat du jour might be, will be blamed, but the advantage is that you don't have to wait on Dame Fortune, whore that she is, for your initial event. And, as the sad example of BushCo shows us, even if you get lucky and have a slam-bang highly exploitable disaster fall into your lap, if you don't take disaster creation into your own hands, but leave it to Fate, you'll never get the disasters timed and sized just right to maintain the needed terror in the electorate.
Yes, there is the problem, when you set forth to do stupid in order to create disaster, that people will blame the disaster on the stupid, which won't make them eager to have you in charge of the Free World. But policy seeks control in such a complex, even chaotic, system, that assignment of blame is not clear or easy even to folks who are paying careful attention and aren't easily swayed by erroneous BS. Precisely when things are in crisis, people are most susceptible to grossly simplifying explanations that give them the comfort of at least simplicity, and the definitve assignment of blame for the disaster to someone else.
Is this a realistic possiblity if the economy really tanks? Could the Rs get a majority of the electorate to blame it on the Dems in general; or gays, or illegal immigrants, or "big government", or whatever the scapegoat du jour might be, in particular?
You bet they could. They almost managed it in FDR's day. We could easily have ended up with fascism as a response to the Great Depression. They're much better organized now than the folks behind Father Coughlin, or the Huey Long phenomenon. That was scattershot, independent efforts, often working at cross-purposes, and not sanctioned by any central organization such as they have now.
Why wouldn't a Shoot the Moon strategy work for them if the economy really takes the big dive for which it seems already to have left the diving platform? People will be in a panic of anxiety over meeting basic needs for themselves and their families. Who are they going to believe, the party that says, quite reasonably and accurately, that much of the crisis is due to the people the electorate voted for twice, but is otherwise appropriately careful in its assesments of the situation and its proposed courses of action, or the party that offers them red meat simple explanations, that carefully avoids blaming the electorate for its large share in creating the crisis, and prescribes "easy" solutions, painless except to the scapegoats du jour? The other side will be more unscrupulous, have better message discipline, and, most impoortantly, have a higher level of motivation do to do or die, since if the electorate isn't swayed by their BS and votes for reality anyway after their further antics with the economy, a lot of them will end up in jail. Which party would fare better in a constitutional crisis? If all else fails in such a crisis, and we fall into actual violence in our politics, which party is better placed with the folks who have the guns?
If your answer to those questions is that Republicans do better the worse the crisis, can you really be confident that their better natures will keep them from arranging for there to be a deeper crisis? Why shouldn't they try to Shoot the Moon? What else are they going to do?
The presidency must be destroyed.
by gtomkins on Saturday, February 14, 2009 5:25:42 PM
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