Digby writes admiringly of the move by several Democratic senators to surprise Sens Vitter and Coburn by co-sponsoring what they thought was a poison pill amendment to the Senate health care bill to require all members of Congress to enroll in the Public Option. It's a brilliant bit of bluff calling. The video clip she posts is enjoyable, Franken is proving worth the fight it took to get him there. One of Digby's commenters captures what happened here perfectly:
Like many conservatives, Coburn and Vitter have internalized their cynicism and assume that others are similarly corrupt and selfish. It must astound them that liberals actually want to rely on the services they would have the government provide.
Not understanding and appreciating one's enemies leads to truly stupid mistakes like this.
Xenos | 12.04.09 - 10:47 pm | #
It is this sort of thing that liberals need to get better at.
Conservatives are very cynical, and the elected ones (being disproportionately double-high authoritarians) are quite often staggering hypocrites. The thing is, they get to a point where they assume everyone else thinks like them too. It's probably a psychological rationalization mechanism for immoral behaviour. It's ok to be self-serving and double dealing because everyone else is too. That sort of thing.
The trick here is to recognize these tendencies in conservatives and find ways to make them into weaknesses. Too often over the past number of years, you find liberals lamenting the "circular firing squad" while grudgingly admiring the lock-step conservative façade and wishing to emulate it. No. No. No.
Liberals need to understand that the psychological differences they have with conservatives go beyond mere opinions or factual beliefs, but to issues of thinking style, temperament and even core personality traits. There is ample psychological research that demonstrates that conservatives and liberals are not merely "flip sides of the same coin" like most centre-fetishizing village types believe. Instead, there are deep asymmetries between the camps, and an awareness of that is vital to finding strategies that accent liberal strengths and exploit conservative weaknesses.
One of the things I was groping to express, I now realize-have been groping to express ever since-is that as ideological tendencies "left" and "right" are never symmetrical. Somehow "copying" the methods of one to deliver the other to glory is dumb. "Left" and "right" are not functions of each other but ontologically distinct categories (for an explication of this idea see here);
He provides a great example from LBJ's time that's worth reading too. Yesterday's revealing episode of sociopaths assuming everyone else thinks like them is another good one to note. More such are needed rather than yet another entreaty to emulate the worst aspects of authoritarianism and movement conservativism. The left can't do the "everyone repeat the same talking point" thing, or the "let's all use the same loaded phrase" thing nor the "coordinated conniption over behaviour routinely seen on our side but unremarked" thing. Those are tactics the right has perfected that work to their strengths. We will get better at dealing with sanctimonious hissy fits by recognizing the right will always be better at staging them, and finding uniquely liberal responses.
First though, a broad understanding of these different tendencies, that they exist at all and exist reliably enough to plan for. They won't be universal, nothing is with humans, so predicting the behaviour of any one individual will be much harder. They only have to be accurate often enough to catch up a Vitter here and Coburn there to be effective.
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