Post by philunderwood on Nov 3, 2009 9:40:34 GMT -5
A quiz from Bill Quick
November 2nd, 2009 | Author: Billy Hollis
Bill Quick has been pondering why the GOP establishment can look so lost:
I’ve been wondering why the suicidal wing of the GOP – the elites and others who want to turn the party into an echo of the Democrats – think that way. I finally believe I may have a glimmer.
He then summarizes the state of the disconnect between the establishment GOP and the wider world, and finished with:
It’s easy to say they don’t get it because they’re stupid, but the truth is much worse: They don’t get it because they don’t want to get it.
Your quiz for today, then, is to answer the question: Why don’t they want to get it?
The quiz answer has got to be some variation of “They’re getting what they want right now, so why change?” If it were not in their self-interest to try and perpetuate the status quo, then they wouldn’t do it, at least not again and again the way they have.
Here’s my own mental model: they are members of a separate society from the rest of America. That society consists of politicians, lobbyists, top-tier media people, A-list celebrities, and top-level bureaucrats. The GOP establishment politicians are far more loyal to the society they belong to (including the most liberal members of it) than they are the wider American society.
So they regularly and consistently do what their own tribe expects and demands, rather than what the rest of us want. They grow to see us as simplistic rubes who don’t know any better, and they talk themselves into believing that the ways of their tribe are the right ways. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just ignorant or confused.
Being chauferred around in limos and having 95% of the people you run into pay obeisance to you smooths their assimilation into the tribe and and serves to remind them every hour of ever day of their special status and the vast gulf separating them from the rest of us. They also get security in the form of big pensions, various perks from those who want to get their attention, and respect far beyond what their abilities would otherwise command.
When someone comes in who was not formerly a member of the tribe, they take special effort to initiate that person into the tribe and ensure that they know the unwritten rules of membership. This is how a Bill Frist goes from being a campaigner for limited government in his first campaign in 1994 to being a senator who helped pass a bunch of Bush welfare state programs – in only about six or eight years.
The tribe ostracizes anyone who does not take to the assimilation process, but that’s seldom necessary. The immense craving for acceptance that is a part of the typical politician’s personality profile is almost always enough to eventually suck them in.
This is perhaps an inevitable result of having a professional political class and ever-growing government.
Spending all their time in the tribe, and accustomed to being buffered and covered by the media wing of the tribe, it’s hard for them to assess when a level of dissatisfaction is reached that will seriously threaten very many members of the tribe. The tribe was caught flat-footed in 1994 and they saw several members forced into new roles or even retirement. As a whole, though, they recovered quite well. In two or three years things were back to normal. They assimilated the new members, ramped up the media control, and prepared to ride out the next such wave.
They passed a bunch of new rules to keep the outsiders in line: Campaign Finance Reform, Sarbanes-Oxley, and others. Since the nominal process they thought they controlled got a little beyond their control, they simply passed rules to give themselves more control.
That gave them the confidence that they can ride out any such episodes in the future; nothing the barbarians outside the tribe have attempted has worked to cause any real change in decades. So they’re paying lip service to the principles of the Tea Parties, but they don’t really think those barbaric outsiders can do anything that really threatens them.
Maybe they’re right. It’s up to us to prove them wrong.
November 2nd, 2009 | Author: Billy Hollis
Bill Quick has been pondering why the GOP establishment can look so lost:
I’ve been wondering why the suicidal wing of the GOP – the elites and others who want to turn the party into an echo of the Democrats – think that way. I finally believe I may have a glimmer.
He then summarizes the state of the disconnect between the establishment GOP and the wider world, and finished with:
It’s easy to say they don’t get it because they’re stupid, but the truth is much worse: They don’t get it because they don’t want to get it.
Your quiz for today, then, is to answer the question: Why don’t they want to get it?
The quiz answer has got to be some variation of “They’re getting what they want right now, so why change?” If it were not in their self-interest to try and perpetuate the status quo, then they wouldn’t do it, at least not again and again the way they have.
Here’s my own mental model: they are members of a separate society from the rest of America. That society consists of politicians, lobbyists, top-tier media people, A-list celebrities, and top-level bureaucrats. The GOP establishment politicians are far more loyal to the society they belong to (including the most liberal members of it) than they are the wider American society.
So they regularly and consistently do what their own tribe expects and demands, rather than what the rest of us want. They grow to see us as simplistic rubes who don’t know any better, and they talk themselves into believing that the ways of their tribe are the right ways. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just ignorant or confused.
Being chauferred around in limos and having 95% of the people you run into pay obeisance to you smooths their assimilation into the tribe and and serves to remind them every hour of ever day of their special status and the vast gulf separating them from the rest of us. They also get security in the form of big pensions, various perks from those who want to get their attention, and respect far beyond what their abilities would otherwise command.
When someone comes in who was not formerly a member of the tribe, they take special effort to initiate that person into the tribe and ensure that they know the unwritten rules of membership. This is how a Bill Frist goes from being a campaigner for limited government in his first campaign in 1994 to being a senator who helped pass a bunch of Bush welfare state programs – in only about six or eight years.
The tribe ostracizes anyone who does not take to the assimilation process, but that’s seldom necessary. The immense craving for acceptance that is a part of the typical politician’s personality profile is almost always enough to eventually suck them in.
This is perhaps an inevitable result of having a professional political class and ever-growing government.
Spending all their time in the tribe, and accustomed to being buffered and covered by the media wing of the tribe, it’s hard for them to assess when a level of dissatisfaction is reached that will seriously threaten very many members of the tribe. The tribe was caught flat-footed in 1994 and they saw several members forced into new roles or even retirement. As a whole, though, they recovered quite well. In two or three years things were back to normal. They assimilated the new members, ramped up the media control, and prepared to ride out the next such wave.
They passed a bunch of new rules to keep the outsiders in line: Campaign Finance Reform, Sarbanes-Oxley, and others. Since the nominal process they thought they controlled got a little beyond their control, they simply passed rules to give themselves more control.
That gave them the confidence that they can ride out any such episodes in the future; nothing the barbarians outside the tribe have attempted has worked to cause any real change in decades. So they’re paying lip service to the principles of the Tea Parties, but they don’t really think those barbaric outsiders can do anything that really threatens them.
Maybe they’re right. It’s up to us to prove them wrong.