Hey, angry right-winger, calm down. You’re making us look bad.

by Eileen | 12:28 am, November 15, 2012 | Comments Off

OK right-wing people, you need to calm down, too, if for no other reason than the overwhelming counterproductivity of all that hysteria.

Let’s get rational about this. We can neither combat the national turn to collectivism in the public square nor deliver sound analysis so long as we choose to yowl and huff and bay at the moon over our misfortune. Politics is a trade where the successful practitioner sells emotion to get votes but doesn’t long wallow in it herself.

I am not telling everyone to snap back to brutal neutrality at once. What we are in for over the next four years makes the blood run cold with good reason. Losses hurt. The gloating of the Left is, by design, extending and deepening the life of that wound. But if that wound, to continue the metaphor, becomes infected, it will be because we did it to ourselves.

The level and flavor of keening misery I’m seeing in the last several days is worrying. It’s so severe and so needlessly publicized that we’re making it too easy for Obama’s adoring base to write off the entire center-right as unbalanced and even childish.

There’s also not enough solid argument piercing the veil of tears (yes, that’s an intentional homonym – no need to write in and correct me). If you are going to hold that everything in terrible, then you need to be prepared to explain exactly how.

A right-leaning journalist spent Election Night talking to people at the Obama celebration in Chicago. She asked people if they thought the President’s re-election would advance freedom. They all said ‘yes’. So she asked them to specifically describe one way having Obama in office would advance freedom. Not a one could answer.

Between Hallmark, Oprah, and the Occupy Movement, America is already overloaded on directionless touchy-feely mush.  Our strength is that we think.  Let’s use it.

Kids, if we’re so worked up but can’t actually outline why this is a so wretched an outcome when asked, we’re just as silly and ineffective. Maybe we’re more ineffective. The left has the media on its side and we don’t, so we need to make our own case.  We play with smaller margins; it’s a given.

There’s a closely related problem. It has the same hallmarks of illogic and unhelpful emotionalism. It’s also handing a weapon to the other side, by making it supremely easy to write off the right.

Kids. Get off the conspiracy bandwagon. NOW.

You sound like lunatics. Look at the past misbehavior of the left. In 2000, they screamed bloody murder over the ‘theft’ of ‘their’ election. I saw tombstones reading ‘America: 1776-2000′ propped up on fashionably progressive lawns. They were cringe-inducing morons and now we’re trying to take up that mantle – a mantle that ought to be burned or chucked into the Goodwill bin or whatever else one might do with a bad mantle.

Obama did not conspire in the malevolent sense intended by the conspiracy theorists. Was their electoral fraud? Of course. There’s electoral fraud in every national election and most local ones.   On both sides, no doubt.  Could we catch and correct each and every fraudulent vote, would it give us a belated victory.

I doubt it. I seriously and deeply doubt it.

Romney would need to pick up several percentage points in each of six or seven states. That’s a big deal. It’s a much bigger margin than the nascent crop of conspiracy theorists grasp. The scale and complexity of an operation that Obama would have had to mount to return a Romney landslide into an unqualified shellacking of the Republicans is staggering. So too is the skill that would be required to conceal such a trick.

Lack of evidence is lack of evidence. Period. It’s standard practice in conspiracy-land to hold up the lack of evidence as evidence; to say the absence of proof only proves how ‘good’ the conspirators were. That doesn’t work. If you think the election was stolen, you need to stop yelping about it and get to work making a case. If you’re going to get on your bully pulpit and cry ‘fraud’, you’d best have a strong case to back that up.

There is no conspiracy here and there is no massive fraud. Obama got more votes – lots more votes – because he spent four years micro-targeting voters, because he vilified his every opponent with great success, because lots and lots of Americans like the idea of something for nothing, and because he and his own viscerally understand politcking.

Certainly, it’s comforting to believe there’s nothing wrong with our message, our tactics, our strategy. But that is a suicidal retreat into a lie. 

If we want this country back on a path of responsibility and restraint, we must make certain admissions. Chief among that class is the admission that we lost. We weren’t robbed. We aren’t victims of any orchestrated fraud.

To deny this is to blindly walk into more losses and ultimately to choose our own irrelevance. We cannot persist in techniques and messages that are demonstrable losers and feign shock when we get drubbed.

Comments

Praise for PPC From Our Lefty "Fan"

• "Zany-ass bombast-entertainment...Hackneyed weirdo communist pseudo-nostalgia" --Alan Franklin, ProgressNow

Featured Posts

• PPC Training for Activists

  UPDATE: Something apparently got messed up with the PayPal buttons during this past weekend’s database glitch – fixed now. Yes, it’s that time again — PPC will be conducting training classes for center-right activists on Saturday, April 20 and Saturday, April 27, at Independence Institute in Denver. The tentative class schedule is as follows: Saturday, [...]

• Holder’s First Letter to Paul Precipitates the Best Filibuster Ever
• The Lamest Twitter Argument Ever Offered?
• Return of the PPC Re-Education Camps – You Know You Want to Be There
• Supreme Courts Blesses Warrantless Surveillance of Citizens in a Kafkaesque Farce
• GOP Elite and the Ruling Class
• Do We Now Get to Call Joe Salazar a “Rapist”?