“Think back on the utterances from the Republicans. Can you easily distinguish them from what a 14 year old would say?”
At last, an understanding of the Republican adventure of the past decade has come together for me.
I watched the Rovian politics; listen to Sarah Palin; listened to calls of “He’s a Muslim; he’s not American; kill him” from their crowds. Watched Republicans simply make up things; outright lie to their audiences; saw doctors being murdered … and now I’m watching their party disintegrate, as more and more people flee. Only about 25% remain, and the vast majority of them are on the extreme fringe.
Bohner’s 30 page US Budget; Cheney’s incessant pounding on the fear card… talking heads taking things out of context, and using them to go on irrational rants.
What on earth is going on? And finally it struck me. Carl Rove (and no doubt others in the party) figured this out long before I did, I am ashamed to admit. It’s very simple.
That 25%? They are the 25% of the population that self-admittedly “don’t like to think,” so: they don’t. They are intellectually at about the same level as 14-year olds, with the same level of understanding as your average immature teenager.
Don’t brush me off here – I’m not being allegorical… I’m dead serious. These are the Jay Leno sidewalk interview folks; the ones who cannot find Canada on a map. The ones who find life much easier if someone will just tell them what to do and when to do it.
Think back on the utterances from the Republicans. Can you easily distinguish them from what a 14 year old would say?
For far too long, the rest of us have been embarrassed to say this openly, but the simple reality is 1 out of 4 of us simply do not think.
And they are the delight of advertisers: they buy “faux” pearls because they think that means “French.” They buy a car because there’s an American flag decal on it. They are the infomercial targets. Life is -very- simple for them: they listen to simple explanations, because more nuanced ones are far beyond them. They do and believe as they are told. For them, “fetus” equals “baby” equals “child”, so ipso fact, “abortion” equals “killing children.” The mother never even enters their thoughts to begin with, much less to be considered.
And because they (often with great pride) don’t think “too much” they truly believe that “Democrats want the terrorists to win” without even the ability to realize that means that 3 out of every four people they pass in the street must therefore be traitors, a patently insane and childish conjecture.
These people are mentally children, and all it takes is an authority figure to tell them what to do.
Cheney and Rove know this… and know that the votes of these people count just as much as the votes of people who learned the skill of thinking, and grew beyond a 14 year-old’s thought patterns.
This 25% are the votes that the Republicans can count on. The Limbaugh’s, O’Reilly’s, Cheney’s and Rove’s of this world found a simple, easy, and in fact -lazy- way to “rouse the rabble” and did so to great effect and many votes.
And that easy, childish bullying works… and worked for years prior. But now the problem has come home to roost: the adults have taken over, and the school-yard bullies can’t figure out how to deal with a voter who isn’t 14.
For years, like all children, reality was something you made up in your head. Simple stories. And when reality clashed with those childish stories of our youth, we’d cry or swear that our parents just didn’t understand… and we’d go back to living our fantasy world.
Bush/Cheney/Rove/Palin never outgrew the belief that reality was something you moulded, and “just wishing” was enough to make it so.
The Republican party is devoid of ideas now because serious and real problems need people who can think; people who can recognize reality; people who know that the stories are remnants of childhood.
There are no ideas from them because you have to be mature and thinking in order to be introspective enough to see your real current state, and work with it.
It’s not that there are no mature Republicans, of course. It’s that the leaders have for so long had the luxury of feeding childish stories to their base, that they are now struggling to come to grips with the changed reality: most of the public (thank God) are actually capable of thinking… and are asking for rational things to consider.
The Republican Right’s line has for too long been too easy, and they have fallen into believing as their target 25% do: that their childish stories are descriptive of reality.
That 25% who proudly don’t think, and proudly love to be lead – they will be around forever. No amount of adult talk will ever work with those children, precisely because they are still children. And children don’t listen to adults.
Will the Republican party make a comeback? Only when they start talking like, and to, the adults in their midst, and give up wooing the children.