Trent: You know what you are? You're like a big bear with claws and with fangs.
Sue: Big f_cking teeth, man.
Trent: Yeah. Big f_ckin' teeth on ya. And she's just like this little bunny, who's just kinda cowering in the corner.
Sue: Shivering.
Trent: Yeah, man just kinda... you know, you got these claws and you're staring at these claws and your thinking to yourself, and with these claws you're thinking, "How am I supposed to kill this bunny, how am I supposed to kill this bunny?"
Sue: And you're poking at it, you're poking at it.
Trent: Yeah, you're not hurting it. You're just kinda gently batting the bunny around, you know what I mean? And the bunny's scared Mike, the bunny's scared of you, shivering.
Sue: And you got these f_cking claws and these fangs.
Trent: And you got these f_cking claws and these fangs, man! And you're looking at your claws and you're looking at your fangs. And you're thinking to yourself, you don't know what to do, man. "I don't know how to kill the bunny." With *this* you don't know how to kill the bunny, do you know what I mean?
Swingers (1996)
If you haven't seen the movie Swingers, do yourself a favor and check it out. It's an often hilarious story about a guy who is his own worst enemy when it comes to getting women. He's got the tools, he's got the ability -- but he's paralyzed by doubt and fear.
Remind anyone of a certain political party?
On the heels of the recent election, I find myself in continued disbelief at the Democrat's apologetic, self-destructive messaging position (Nancy Pelosi aside, bless her). Take it away, Mr. Obama (from yesterday):
I neglected some things that matter a lot to people, and rightly so [such as] maintaining a bipartisan tone in Washington...
Bipartisanship! You teasing, vexing minx. Let's set aside the fact that nobody actually cares about bipartisanship, and that the people he thinks care about it actually just want leadership. That's a problem of perception, and before it can be addressed, an underlying problem of psychology needs to be resolved.
I'm not saying I can do it via this diary, but hopefully it begins a productive conversation.
As we here must realize by now, the complexity of Democratic leadership woes gets down to the structural -- and, for individuals, this means the psychological. The patterns are all too obvious and seemingly inexorable -- no matter how much we try to reason with and persuade our leaders to act like leaders, we find ourselves having the same fight, not long after.
Here we have Obama, a Democratic president who is intellectual, who engages in self-critique, and who cares about his own moral status -- who takes responsibility for every one of the Democratic Party's infuriatingly middling policy enactments over the past two years. He is also as kind and compassionate as any of us could ever be to oppositional voters who would see our country off of a cliff, and who earnestly believe he wants to destroy them (or some such nonsense).
And we have him on the heels of Bush II, a dunce of a president, who was incapable of genuine introspection, who couldn't care less about his moral image, and who refused to take responsibility for his very destructive policy enactments. A man and a party that continues to take delight in sneeringly insulting, on the record, the opposition's leaders and like-minded voters.
Yet Bush managed to win elections for himself and his party (before the destructive results of his and his party's policies became undeniably obvious to even the least thoughtful among us).
As far as competing propositions go, it seems much easier to fix the Democratic Party than to fix irrational voters. A premise: The group dynamics that many of us have observed time and again suggest that irrational voters will always exist in similar proportions to what we see today. Just like there will always be high-achievement kids in high school, there will be the kids who resent them and thus form their own standards of what it means to achieve (football, fashion, whatever). And there will be the kids who react to those competitive dynamics by mostly opting out of the social landscape. The very existence of one group informs and causes the existence of the others.
A theory: Barring dramatic cultural shifts, as long as some proportion of the electorate is informed, a fairly consistent proportion will be uninformed. And so forth for any other category of voter you may wish to think up.
On some level, Republicans know this and have effectively exploited it. It leads to a quantitative electoral calculus, as opposed to a qualitative one. Republicans don't care if their voters are intelligent or informed or ethnically diverse or morally good. 50%+1 is all they're after. They can write off San Fransisco and California and Massachusetts by turning their very utterance into slurs and code words; they don't want San Fransisco's votes, and they know they'll have a heck of a time trying to win California or Massachusetts in a federal election.
Perhaps more importantly, understanding the consistency of these dynamics over time allows for the birth of a meta-strategic mindset, the efficacy of which does not expire. You don't have to come up with a new core strategy each cycle, if you know that the dynamics each year are, on some fundamental level, very similar.
I don't know exactly what that consistent meta-strategy looks like for Democrats. But I know exactly what it looks like for Republicans. Republicans go after the most easily manipulated portions of our electorate -- the ignorant, the prejudiced, the mindlessly religious. They message to that number. They create institutions for that number, like news outlets and programs, "universities," "think tanks," media firms, etc. They get that number to vote against their own interests in the name of vague principle sets like "capitalism" and "Christianity," and against equally vague principle sets like "liberalism" and "socialism." Meanwhile, they relentlessly attack and co-opt the media they have not yet fully replaced.
Again, I don't know exactly what that consistent meta-strategy looks like for Democrats. But I know that it cannot possibly hurt for Democrats to stand strong -- not just in little tiny moments, but consistently, over time. I know that personal trumps the political (Exhibit A: Satan's lieutenant Dick Cheney's non-committal stance on gay rights due to lesbian daughter Liz), so it cannot hurt Democrats to produce policies that benefit most citizens' lives (and that go into effect NOW), even if they are labeled "extreme" by the other side. It can't hurt Democrats to give up on certain segments of the population, and to create a culture war of their own that values intelligence, public good, and economic stability.
Any other ideas? I'm all ears. At least one thing is for certain -- our leaders need to will themselves beyond the psychological hang-ups that have created the dynamic we now face, in which Dems apologize for being good and Republicans boast about and benefit from being evil. The twists and turns of this dynamic become more gut-wrenching by the day, and it drains our resources to have to wage this internal fight, every step of the way.