The Way A Conservative Strategist Thinks About Politics

Conservative Rick Wilson, author of the 2020 book, Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves, argues that democrats don't know how to campaign. In an interview with Trevor Noah, Wilson asserts that he is strongly anti-Trump. He argues that the GOP no longer exists because it has been corrupted and lost its bearings as the party of small government, individual liberty and constitutional government.[1] Wilson is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an effort to defeat the president in 2020. He characterizes GOP members of congress who support the president as “liars and cowards” who are afraid of the president and have “given themselves over to a cult.”

Democrat's inability to campaign 

Wilson criticizes democratic candidates as incapable of running an intelligent, effective political campaign. He says that over a period of 30 years, he and other conservatives like him built “a very smart, very sophisticated system to wreck the hell out of democratic candidates, and we did it all over the country.” He asserts that over the 20 years before the president came to power, their system took about 2,000 seats from democrats in state legislatures and congress. That success was built on being better able to do ‘root politics’ and running very tough ads in support of GOP candidates who fit their locality. Those candidates were not all hard core Evangelical conservatives.[2]

Wilson argues that democrats require ideological homogeneity[2] and try to win arguments, while republicans try to win elections by not caring how the win happens, including coming right up to the edge of what is legal. Republican campaign tactics include (i) not saying what’s on a candidate’s mind when it is inconvenient, i.e., deceiving the public, and (ii) don’t make ideological promises based on detailed plans. Democrats say things that scare a lot of people, e.g., medicare for all, so they lose elections. When there's a long policy paper, Wilson hires people to go through it and find all the things that will scare people. Then he runs attack ads based on the scary things.

Wilson says it is far better to wear a hat that says build the wall than it is to put out a white paper describing how to build it. That rings true. Obama had his Hope and Change and millions of people read their own meanings into what it meant as needed.

Exactly what is Mr. Wilson saying?

Given his history as a master of conservative republican political attack ads riddled with dark free speech,[1] what Wilson seems to be saying is something about like this: “Holy crap! We've created Trump the monster and have lost control of it. We never thought conservative politics turn in this direction and corrupt the fundamental anti-government, anti-tax and regulation utopia we were building. We didn't mean for our lies, deceit and sleazy smears and lies to lead to this mess. We wanted our own kind of mess where we had control, not where the looney-toon Trump had full loose cannon power and subverted the whole radical libertarian right ideological shebang. WTF!!! . . . . Democrats help us regain power!”

I believe that is more or less just about what Wilson is saying. Of course he cannot say it that bluntly or honestly, but he made his tactics and complaints perfectly clear: Win at all costs, the ends justify the means including lying, deceit and illegality and those liars and cowards should belong to us, not to Trump.

In adroitly side stepping his own culpability for helping to create the monster, Wilson walks a very fine line with polished expertise. He isn't the only conservative to has expressed regrets at their role in the rise of the monster. Some others on the right who for years fomented disrespect, distrust and contempt for truth and logic have come to see the soil they worked so long and hard to work turned out to be the home for Trump brand incoherence and hate instead of the home for Wilson’s own radical extremist brand of disciplined ideology and hate.

What should democrats do, if anything?

If Wilson is right, democrats should stop talking about details of policy so that Trump minions have fewer scary policy statements to misconstrue and attack them with in 2020. Instead, they should limit their policy statements to what can fit on a baseball cap, e.g., Make America Great Again or Hope and Change. There's nothing scary in any of that. Stay the hell away from details and just say positive, uplifting things like, “No New Taxes”, “America First!”, “Gimme  More!” or “Impossible Burgers for All!” that will fit on a baseball cap.

Oops, we forgot the herbicide

Of course, it’s too late for that. Democratic policy statements are already out there. Even if they are retracted, they will still be used to win hearts and minds in endless attack, smear and scare ads in 2020. The beauty (ugly?) of the monster that Wilson and other conservatives created over the decades is that attack ads can be based on absolutely nothing real at all. Attack ads can be 100% fabrication and still be legal and effective. The political soil that conservatives worked so hard to till and fertilize is the perfect place for stink-cabbage like Trump to grow. They forgot to make some herbicide in case of a political emergency. Oops!

What about pragmatic rationalism?

More importantly than concern for democratic candidates, is the questions raised by what Wilson’s obvious intelligence and professional experience reveal about the human condition and politics vis-à-vis pragmatic rationalism. At this point, a refreshing quote from two political scientists seems appropriate:

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do not Produce Responsive Governments, 2016

That’s sobering, to say the least. Evolution didn’t give us enough data processing bandwidth to deal with politics rationally, especially in the stink cabbage-friendly soil that Wilson and his colleagues created. That’s not a statement of stupid. It is a statement of biological and behavioral fact. Don't forget, Wilson’s soil is heavily and constantly fertilized with copious amounts of dark free speech (win at all costs, the ends justify immoral means). It is unfair and unreasonable to accuse people of being stupid, when they have very little help in wading through a pitch black cesspool full of dark free speech and alligators.

Also sobering are the tactics and political system that Wilson helped develop in the process of blowing about 2,000 democrats out of office over 20 years. Both Wilson and Achen and Bartels suggest that pragmatic rationalism cannot work, at least under the current political circumstances that Wilson helped create. Achen and Bartels correctly say that people have much mental baggage, i.e., cherished ideas and judgments that are fact- and logic-resistant. Wilson accepts this biological-social truth and deals with it by telling candidates to shut up and just put their policies on baseball hats. 2,000 dead democratic candidates backstops Wilson’s advice.

Things look bleak for team Dissident and its vaunted pragmatic rationalism. They are up against Wilson and colleagues and the constantly fibbing, constantly golf-playing president (86 out of 365 days at a golf club in 2019 🥴)they helped bring to power. It’s time for team Dissident to put on their rally hats with a suitable positive message, e.g., “Hey! I’m not lying”.

Questions

1. Do things look bad for team Dissident with its star player pragmatic rationalism?

2. Does this OP miss the mark in describing what Wilson’s politics are like, and instead he advocates something different and much more positive?

3. Is it too late for democratic presidential candidates to back off the wonkiness and go with the baseball hat strategy?


Footnotes:
1. Concepts such as small government, individual liberty and constitutional government are all essentially contested. That means they mean what is in the minds of individuals or groups of like-minded people and disagreements cannot be resolved by facts, truths or logic. Resolution usually comes about by compromise or coercion-force, but very rarely by minds changing to come into mutual agreement.

Wikipedia: Essentially contested concepts involve widespread agreement on a concept (e.g., "fairness" [also, small government, individual liberty, constitutional, etc.]), but not on the best realization thereof. They are "concepts the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users", and these disputes "cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone".

2. Those assertions are confusing to me. The GOP has been herded into a little tent and ideologically cleansed by years of RINO hunts, while democrats are like cats meandering in their big tent in all sorts of directions.

3. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or legally protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), and (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism. (my label, my definition)

Being Bayesian About Beliefs

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an OP, What Happens when Trust is Lost, about my initial reaction to the reason that the president chose to kill an Iranian general when he did. I concluded he did it for personal political reasons, not due to imminent threat to US or other lives or interests. The facts and logic behind that OP were these:

1. The president’s has a public track record of making over 15,000 false and misleading statements to the public;
2. That fact-based record constitutes an empirical basis to not trust anything the president says about anything related to his politics;
3. The president claimed he killed the Iranian general due to an imminent grave threat the general posed against Americans or their interests;
4. Despite the president’s claim of self-defense to justify the killing when it happened, it is reasonable to believe that he intentionally timed the killing to divert public attention from damaging information that had just come from information from federal courts related to his impeachment; and
5. Therefore the president lied about the reason for the killing occurring when it did.

Being Bayesian

For political beliefs, being Bayesian means that one changes one’s opinion or prediction and/or their level of confidence in it as new information comes in that would logically support or contradict the opinion or prediction. Social science research strongly suggests that people best grounded in political reality and logic are Bayesian about their political opinions (beliefs) and predictions. When new contradictory information comes to their attention, Bayesians tend to either (1) reduce their confidence in their opinion or belief that something is true or will happen, or (2) completely reverse their opinion. Similarly, awareness of when supporting evidence or logic arises, confidence in the opinion typically increases. 

People are often not Bayesian when cherished political beliefs are challenged by contrary or undermining information or reasoning. Such beliefs are simply impervious to change in the face of contrary evidence and logic. That is not uncommon in politics. It is a common basis for political beliefs and reasoning being irrational to some extent.

New evidence about killing the general

On hearing of the killing of the Iranian general, my initial logic and conclusions (beliefs) were that (i) the killing is was timed to deflect public attention from bad news about impeachment of the president, and (ii) that the general presented no imminent threat at that time. But since the story was new, it was possible that evidence could come out showing that there really was an actual threat. Thus, my level of personal confidence was pretty low, about 55% certain, that the president was lying about why the general was killed when he was killed.

In the days since the killing, evidence has come out that there was no imminent threat from the general. Comments by the president, his defense secretary and secretary of state and others in his administration were vague, contradictory, inconsistent and not accompanied any solid evidence of any real threat. People in congress, including some republicans, were unconvinced that any real threat existed at the time. Administration efforts to buttress the imminent threat argument were absurd.

Trump administration’s best people getting it’s story straight

Being Bayesian in view of the evidence to date, I have had no choice but to revise my confidence that the president lied about why he killed the general from about a 55% level to about a 95% level. 

allusion/illusion/delusion

CHOOSE YOUR WORDS:

Novelists, magicians, and other tricksters keep these words busy. Novelists love an allusion, an indirect reference to something like a secret treasure for the reader to find; magicians heart illusions, or fanciful fake-outs; but tricksters suffer from delusions, ideas that have no basis in reality.

Blink and you'll miss it: an allusion is a quick indirect mention of something. It's a literary device that stimulates ideas, associations, and extra information in the reader's mind with only a word or two:

Littlemore was not quick at catching literary allusions. (Henry James)

Thomas Paine's writings contain several affectionate allusions to his father, but none to his mother. (Daniel Moncure Conway)

Magicians love to create illusions, or visual tricks, like making a tiger disappear or sawing a person in half. Your eye can be fooled by an optical illusion, and Dorothy and the gang get to the bottom of the Wizard's illusion and discover he's just a regular guy. Illusions aren't always glamorous; sometimes they're just hiding the man behind the curtain:

"We have no illusion that these credits are going to create lots of new jobs," the editorial said. (New York Times)

But while investing in your company's stock might feel safer than betting on the stock market as a whole, that is usually an illusion. (Seattle Times)

Delusions are like illusions but they're meaner. A delusion is a belief in something despite the fact that it's completely untrue. Hence the phrase is delusions of grandeur. People with delusions often wind up on the shrink's couch. Whether you are trying to deceive yourself or someone is trying to deceive you, if you believe the false idea, you have a delusion about reality:

Delusions are closely allied to hallucinations and generally accompany the latter. (Samuel Henry Prince)

Two medical experts had concluded then that the accused gunman suffered from schizophrenia, disordered thinking and delusions. (Reuters)

"Basically, I think he's suffering from delusions of grandeur," he said. (Chicago Tribune)

An allusion shows up in art, while illusions love kids' parties. If you believe something despite reality, you have a delusion.

https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/allusion-illusion-delusion/

SO HELP ME OUT HERE FOLKS, if I understand the meanings of the above words,  would it be fair to say:

Trump has allusions of grandeur, that his followers have been victims of his illusions, and that they suffer from delusions that he really cares about them?

HMM??

More Evidence that Inconvenient Truth Is Irrelevant to the Tribe

The Washington Post article, Doctored images have become a fact of life for political campaigns: When they’re disproved, believers ‘just don’t care’, adds to evidence that dark free speech[1] continues to poison the minds of Americans. The WaPo observes that we are experiencing an explosion of online disinformation from politicians. Despite the immorality of deceit, politicians know that deceit works and there’s not enough social repercussion to deter the tactic.

The brazenness of politicians called out for asserting lies to the public is evidence of how far morality has fallen in American politics. A key goal of even blatantly obvious lies is to reinforce existing beliefs, not necessarily convincing anyone of the asserted truth of the lie. That tends to make compromise with political opposition impossible. The deceiver’s audience already believes or feels a certain way about a politician and their tribe. When they discover the lie many people don’t care. Their rationalization tends to be along the lines of ‘people say it could have been true’ or ‘that actually reflects who the attacked person really is.’ In some cases tribe members just do not care at all that they were lied to because it was their lie and thus morally neutral or good.

The WaPo writes:

To back his assertion that President Barack Obama had coddled the world’s top sponsor of terrorists, Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), cited an unusual source: a clumsily altered image of a nonexistent handshake between Obama and the Iranian president. The doctored photo, once used in TV ads supporting Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, had been repeatedly debunked since it first surfaced on an Egyptian Islamist political website in 2013. 

But when critics last week chided Gosar for showing hundreds of thousands of people a faked image of an imaginary event, the fifth-term congressman said they, the “dim witted” ones, were in the wrong. “No one said this wasn’t photoshopped,” he declared. “The point remains … The world is better without Obama as president." 

For ginning up political resentment and accentuating your rivals’ flaws, nothing quite compares to a doctored image. It can help anyone turn a political opponent into a caricature — inventing gaffes, undercutting wins and erasing nuance — leaving only the emotion behind. 

On Monday, Trump, who has more than 70 million Twitter followers, retweeted a fake image of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) cartoonishly altered to show them in a turban and hijab. The tweet, which falsely claims that the two most powerful Democrats in Congress have “come to the Ayatollah’s rescue,” has been retweeted more than 17,000 times.

Clearly, the GOP leadership sees lies, deceit and irrational emotional manipulation as acceptable tactics. There is no obvious resistance from America's political right to being lied to, deceived and emotionally manipulated. The ends, maybe a republican-populist utopia of some sort, justify the means. The degree to which democratic politicians have sunk to this new low level of immorality isn't clear.

Does immorality ever fade into evil?

In her book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, moral philosopher Sissela Bok argued that lies and deceit are usually immoral to some extent. Some circumstances may exist that some people see as justifying politicians who deceive the public for its own good. However, she convincingly argues that those are rare situations. Other writers point to the standard use of dark free speech against societies as a powerful, necessary tool in the rise to power of tyrants, oligarchs, murderers and kleptocrats. The path and tactics the modern GOP is following fits the standard pattern in the rise of authoritarianism and corruption and the fall of democracy and the rule of law.

Does the current intensity and quantity of dark free speech the GOP leadership uses against American society, in particular the president, rise to evil or something close to it? Do the ends that the president and his party aim for justify means that rely heavily on a constant stream of lies, deceit and irrational manipulation?


Footnote:
1. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or legally protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), and (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism. (my label, my definition)