Once again.

First the long and wondrously inaccurate rants about what horrible pieces of shit conservatives are, how they’re the fascists wrecking everything, and, in defiance of every demonstrated action and policy we can see with our own eyes, that somehow they’re the ones who want to run everyone’s lives for them.

And then the final rant about how ideas, intellect, reason, philosophy, history, or even simple common sense have nothing to do with politics and economics, and any random self-contradictory emotional brainfarts about how to run a country are just as good as hundreds of years of study, thought, and above all, experience.

This election will deal the Democrats the worst shellacking they’ve seen since, well, 2010. Not because the gloves are off, but maybe finally the masks are.

We know who’s after our wallets. The ones who have declared out loud that we are nothing without the State, and that nothing we earn or build is really ours. Not the first time we’ve heard that in history, either.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/16/60minutes/main578497.shtml

(EDIT: note the original air date: 2003)

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I actually do believe that, I just think it would be bad manners to tell someone that publicly, in front of strangers.

“You haven’t thought your politics through” You arrogant self-important little snit. Who the hell do you think you are? What makes you think you might just not be guilty of a wee bit of that yourself? Has it ever occurred to you that anyone dripping with that much certainty might very well be just a little bit mistaken himself? What gives you the right to appoint yourself as anyone elses instructor in Moral Philosophy?

Listen up. Politics is not an intellectual or philosophical, or even moral Gordian Knot. Beware of anyone who suggests it is, he’s trying to sell you something. Politics is public administration, and economics is just business management. Other than a little accounting and Supply and Demand, the rest is just theory, and even that’s in dispute. Anything that works fairly smoothly that doesn’t piss off too many people is probably OK, in fact, its probably the best you can hope for, providing it can be occasionally modified without too much trouble. And you don’t need an advanced analytical mind to know when you’re being sodomized by a bully. People pick up on that real quick all by themselves. They don’t need it explained to them, and certainly not by the likes of you.

There is no book of holy rules, no commandments or parables, no set of guiding principle, no saints or dieties, no laws of physics. Its mostly common sense, and like those management hygiene self-help paperbacks you see at Yuppie bookstores, its mostly made up of equal parts of the obvious and the unprovable.

Its when people start talking about Principle, Morality, the Founding Fucking Fathers, the Flag, Patriotism, Freedom, Liberty and Enterprise and all those other words that need not be in uppercase, that you have to worry. That’s when you know someone’s selling something, and when you should make sure your wallet is in your front pocket.

Don’t you dare lecture me on my inability to think for myself. I think I’m smarter than you, and I know I’m happier.

Kind of like their religions.

And like their religions the rationality, consistency, or practicality of their positions doesn’t really come into the picture.

We already established in polls that our advanced technological society seems to function quite well with a large segment of its citizens believing in some form of creationism.

That part of their head is kept happily separate from the part that has to sit down at work and rationally deal with complex intellectual problems.

Same for politics. It’s why you have multi-millionaire Marxists. The basic intellectual connections are simply never made in their heads, so the inconsistencies and glaring errors never register. Like creationist paleontologists, people can agree with almost the entire agenda of the American Communist Party yet honestly consider themselves somewhere in the “middle” of politics.

So people go through their whole lives happily believing six impossible things before breakfast because it never actually affects them. It doesn’t affect others either. Until elections come around.

You haven’t really thought your politics through. Few people have, even very intelligent ones. It’s not necessary for a normal life, any more than the table of elements or atomic and chemical theory was necessary for people to do simple chemistry or metallurgy.

But now we’re in an age where it isn’t about an old guy in a lab playing with mercury and cinnebar, or talking about phlogiston and humours. We’re in the age of the political equivalent of nuclear reactors, supersonic aircraft, and petroleum cracking plants. We don’t elect representatives any more. We elect people we have given the power of emperors or pharaohs. Or gods. It’s long past time to start dealing with how things actually work.

My politics formed long before there was an internet. Indeed, my political ideas were not formed by any political theory or ideology at all.

My idea of of how the social, political and economic universe should be constructed came from reading science fiction. And not what you might think, Huxley or Orwell, but the SF of the 50s and 60s, the Golden Age. Asimov, Bradbury, Pohl, Lieber, van Vogt, Bester, even Heinlein, until he tried to sell me his seductive brand of benign fascism.

And no, I am not going to explain it right now, because I’m getting sleepy, and because I haven’t really thought it through so it can be explained in a few dozen sentences. But I will tell you this much, it is not of the Left or of the Right.