Good point. Someone sent me this article yesterday quoting James Carville:

"Carville said that the party's concern about interest groups had resulted in 'litanies, not a narrative.'"

"'The party needs a narrative,' he said. adding later that one possibility would to become 'an aggressively reform, anti-Washington, anti-business-as-usual party.'"

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35224-2004Nov8.html

The thing is they should have cooked up more crack-cocaine to give to democrat voters in exchange for them to register under a bunch of names like "Mary Poppins". A few more pounds of that white stuff and who knows? The dems might have been able to steal this one.

But it went to the right man. And it's not just "the south" as that sore loser's rant "fuckthesouth.com" suggests. If he would have taken a look at the election map by county, not by state, he would have saw that the whole country is practically red.

And to think... they even said there were more young people voting for Kerry - more young people came out than in any other time in history. Thanks to pistol-waving P-ditty and guys like that. Can you imagine if there was no such thing as MTV's "rock the vote"? No such thing as slutty Madonna and her whining leftwing lunacy? No such thing as Fahrenheit 911? Wow - Bush's landslide would have been ever greater.

Oh well. I understand the anger. I hear a lot of democrats in Florida have been seeking psychological help.

Ellis wishing Ashcroft a nicely written good-bye. Very heartwarming and tolerant, mind you. Yes. Those lefties are so compassionate, aren't they?

Oh and by the way, to the folks at sorryeverybody.com ... Osama bin Laden says he accepts your apology.

While Hillary, Daschle, Gephardt, Kerry, Edwards, and the rest of them figure out how to salvage their nearly destroyed party, the GOP will be busy working on making this country even greater... Protecting marriage is going to be one of them. Hey, it won ... 11 states to 0. I think the people have spoken.

Ahhh... "Four more years"... it's now a reality.

No hard feelings.

God bless America.

Abe,

I'm not so sure that there's a left view of an unmutable reality. If anything, there's too much lip service given in the media (the Liberal media, as many will tell you) to views that have absolutely no factual or scientific backing. Some views sound interesting, but that doesn't mean they should be given equal footing with views that actually have a basis in reality. I like to think of myself as an individual that can draw from a variety of source and evaluate facts to determine my beliefs. I can take it when the whole spectrum of views is represented, but most people just don't have the time, the patience, or the knowledge to filter this drivel. The news sources that are doing the filtering (Fox News?) are doing so in this Rove neu-reality.

I thought this article was pretty relevant:
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/6/mooney-science.asp

What you're driving at is what I was trying to argue in an article for _Bad Subjects_ shortly after the US invaded Iraq. The Republicans have mastered a politics of affect -- faith being one of the prime ways to affect voters (although I no longer am sure who is driving who: religion and "baby fascisms" are quite intertwined at this point; one is no longer, if it ever was, in service of the other). If there is a "left based reality politic" it is that of, at least in print, Noam Chomsky. But Chomsky in person is an affective --and thus effective-- speaker who generates "faith" in his followers. So I'm no longer so sure. I made the same generalizations you did to make the argument at a tactical level, but I'm not sure I would extend it as far as you have.

So like Mike, I'm not sure there is such a reality-based consensus on reality. Perhaps what you're getting at is that the (American) left has no idea how to tactically deal with religion?

I mean, Nietzsche just dumped it outright.. but today it's all trying to prove who is _more_ Catholic, it seems.

What's your take on that? Do the Dems try to appeal to moderate religions, or point out that religion quite possibly _is_ the problem?

tV

What you're driving at is what I was trying to argue in an article for _Bad Subjects_ shortly after the US invaded Iraq. The Republicans have mastered a politics of affect -- faith being one of the prime ways to affect voters (although I no longer am sure who is driving who: religion and "baby fascisms" are quite intertwined at this point; one is no longer, if it ever was, in service of the other). If there is a "left based reality politic" it is that of, at least in print, Noam Chomsky. But Chomsky in person is an affective --and thus effective-- speaker who generates "faith" in his followers. So I'm no longer so sure. I made the same generalizations you did to make the argument at a tactical level, but I'm not sure I would extend it as far as you have.

So like Mike, I'm not sure there is such a reality-based consensus on reality. Perhaps what you're getting at is that the (American) left has no idea how to tactically deal with religion?

I mean, Nietzsche just dumped it outright.. but today it's all trying to prove who is _more_ Catholic, it seems.

What's your take on that? Do the Dems try to appeal to moderate religions, or point out that religion quite possibly _is_ the problem?

tV

I don't think the issue really stops just at religion, rather its an issue that has traditionally been dealt with via religion, but over the past century or so has somewhat bifurcated. There is now a large set of people who place their faith not in organized religion but in constructs of science and the enlightenment. And the real problem arises in that ironically it is the religious right that now understands that their world view is in large part mediated by faith, while the obstinately reasonable refuse to accept the extent that world can be shaped by quirky passages of the human mind.

So here we have a left out to destroy/understand the world, while the right is out to construct a world more to their liking. Is it any wonder a substantial number of voters choose the later?

Its important to realize the mechanisms of science and enlightenment empiricism are for a large part violent and destructive. A constant challenging and testing that chips away at everything it can until only that resembling the concrete remains. A highly effective method, proven over the centuries, but still one riddled with its own flaws. On one side you have those that take the discoveries as law, and vest them with a deep, but often unacknowledged, faith akin to the religious. And on another side you have an unstable process capable of far more destruction then construction. This is in many ways my problem with certain uses of deconstruction and critical theory, they weight far to heavily on the negative side, and fail to contribute towards the construction of a better reality. This is not a dismissal of these techniques and beliefs, they are important, powerful and useful. But when used with a broad, blunt indiscriminance they become a shear negative force, and strangely enough many humans it seems prefer a more balanced or positively weighed worldview.

As it all adds up, the American right is now in the business of selling a way of thinking that is far more palatable to many Americans. The left on the other hand has no clue they are selling anything, but in fact are selling something that lies closer to the concrete, but also far deeper into the disturbing. And what many in the cities and outside America fail to realize is that the suburbs and rural are presently so far from the concrete reality that it holds little gravity. Ripe space for a Rovean conquest..

mike, unfortunately I'd have to classify your response as being a clear symptom of the problem I'm out to transform. You are placing excessive faith in the immutability of "facts" and "science". What Rove and company realize is that by using FoxNews and its ilk to transform the "news" they are capable of also transforming the concrete. The left just doesn't get how moldable reality truly is. This brings us right back to the original quote. The right is out there creating reality and the left perpetually lags behind, unable to realize that they too have the ability to create a reality more to their taste. Instead by relying upon the negative attracted tools of scientific method they wind up creating a reality that is not to their taste at all, while simultaneously lagging behind the right.

also its important to note that the left was not always beholden to the "reality-based" position its stuck itself into. If you can get your hands on the latest issue of Arthur ( http://www.arthurmag.com/store/index.php?ID=19 ) I highly recommend it. The cover story goes deeply into one example of a radically different approach the left used quite effectively in the 50-70's to essentially shatter the cultural paradigm of the time. And I don't think its a coincidence that Rove, Cheney and company are children of the 60's, albeit coming from a more conservative side of things.

Quote:
/So here we have a left out to destroy/understand the world, while the right is out to construct a world more to their liking. Is it any wonder a substantial number of voters choose the later?/

Some interesting points in here, but I am not understanding the above. This statement begs the question, "The right, in their quest construct a world to their liking, is not destroying the world as well?"

i think the mechanisms of faith of religion are equally destructive if not more so. Crusades, Inquisitions, Holocausts, and Genocides. Given, the religious destroyers are always using instruments of science to do their killing, it seems to be your distinction isn't grey enough.

Not really making any real historical claims here Peter. Nor I believe, did I say anything about the right not being destructive in their own right, they certainly are.

The person that wrote and operates "Fuckthesouth" appears to be Nick Jehlen according to Rick Bradley. Curiously, the info about Nick is no longer on Rick's site but it can't escape the long arm of Google's cache.
Nick used a pseudonym on his whois.com registration.

Registrar: DOTSTER
Domain Name: FUCKTHESOUTH.COM
Created on: 04-NOV-04
Expires on: 04-NOV-05
Last Updated on: 10-NOV-04

Administrative, Technical Contact:
Swift, Jonathan admin@fuckthesouth.com
1 Main St
Madison, WI 53703
US
608-257-4131 (Now disconnected, I wonder why...?)

Ironically, Nick lives in Wisconsin which Kerry won by the slimmest of margins at just 11,813 votes (1,488,935 to 1,477,122).

It also appears that many of Nick's fellow state citizens don't share his ideology in Dane County where he rents an apartment in the Madison Technical College District. He undoubtedly voted for Kerry who won handily by 181,032 to 90,356 which may have led to his misguided and "misunderestimation" of the nation's shift to conservatism.

Worthy of note is that in 1848, Wisconsin became the 30th state to be accepted into the Union, well *after* the majority of southern states entrance.