Hope and Change – John Malcolm

Change—and Some Hope

May 20, 2012 by John Malcolm 1 Comment

By Victor Davis Hanson | May 12, 2012 | PJ Media

Rays of Sun Amid the Storm

The Rasmussen Tracking Poll recently had Romney up 50 to 42 over Obama. At this early juncture, such polls mean nothing—except as diagnostic indices of why perhaps both candidates go up and down in popularity.

So why has Barack Obama plunged in the polls these last few days?

The Republican slugfest is over. The media cannot headline any longer the daily conservative suicide. Barack Obama’s job report came out at 8.1% unemployment—but, more importantly, with information that a smaller percentage of adult Americans are working than ever before, and fewer in absolute numbers than nearly four years ago when Obama took office.

So someone must be asking, “What then was the lost $5 trillion for?” Note, in this regard, the 5.4% unemployment rate that won George Bush the slur of a “jobless recovery” in 2004.

There was some pushback to Obama’s spiking the football on the anniversary of bin Laden’s death.

Demonizing Conservative Thought

May 14, 2012 by John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Howard Slugh | May 13, 2012 | American Thinker

The president has adopted an electoral strategy of demonizing conservative thought. In a now-infamous speech, President Obama referred to his conservative opponents as “stuck in the past,” and as “naysayers” who “don’t believe in the future.” He scoffed that his detractors were “founding members of the Flat Earth Society” who “just want to keep on doing things the same way that we’ve always done them.” The president contrasted his critics with people who “refuse to stand still” and who “put their faith in the future.” In a second speech, discussing Congressman Ryan’s proposed budget, the president implied that liberal policies create “opportunity” and “upward mobility” while conservative policies entrench inequality. These false dichotomies mischaracterize conservative ideas.

These were not merely off-the-cuff remarks intended to smear political rivals. This caricature of conservative ideas is popular among liberal social scientists. In 2012 alone, two well-respected psychology journals published studies perpetuating these smears, citing more than a dozen previous studies.

“Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing ideology and Low Intergroup contact,” by Gordon Hodson and Michael Busseri, argued that conservatism is linked to low cognitive ability and that it acts as a precursor to racism. This study described conservatism as characterized by “resistance to change” and “the promotion of inter-group inequalities.”

“Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism,” by Scott Edelman, et al., links an absence of critical thinking to conservative conclusions. He describes conservative positions as evincing “low-effort thought” and as “initial and uncorrected responses” correctable by “overriding and adjusting initial conservative responses.”

Edelman claims that conservatives are marked by an “acceptance of hierarchy” and an “opposition to equality.” He describes this acceptance as “proceeding in the absence of effortful information processing.” Hodson and Buseri claim that these apparent cognitive problems are “associated with prejudice” and stem from fear and anxiety.

But this reductionist view ignores reality and the beauty contained in the conservative position. In fact, the president and these social scientists denigrate conservative thought because its rejection of utopianism and insistence on cautious incremental change denies them the ability to unilaterally design a future that reflects their preferences.

Conservatives recognize that talents, such as the ability to write great novels, paint beautiful paintings, or hit five-hundred-foot home runs, will never be equally distributed. Inequalities will exist even between people with similar levels of natural talent due to differences in their levels of dedication and pure luck. Social scientists cannot wish these “hierarchies” out of existence, no matter how many papers they write.

Of course, this says nothing of political and legal equality, which conservatives embrace. What conservatives do deny is that a society that suppresses the differences between people is attainable or even desirable. Such an effort eliminates notions of nobility, heroism, and the aspiration for self-improvement. We can either appreciate the novel, the painting, and the home run — or we can begrudge the “hierarchy” created by inequalities. We cannot do both.

Only a dystopia, such as the one described in Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron,” could achieve perfect equality. Vonnegut’s story takes place in a time where “everybody [i]s finally equal … every which way.” This equality is perpetuated by a tyranny that forces intellectuals to place buzzers in their ears to prevent them “from taking unfair advantage of their brains,” hides the handsome behind masks, and encumbers the athletic with weights.

The characters live in a world devoid of joy; everyone is equally uninspired and miserable. Vonnegut illustrates this dreariness by describing a ballet in which the ballerinas are “burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces [a]re masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.” The imposition of equality obliterates everything that makes the ballet worthwhile. This is allegorical hyperbole, but only because no one actually believes we should truly pursue a world without hierarchy. The debate between conservatives and liberals is over where to draw the lines and which of our differences are worthy of esteem.

The adoption of universal equality is contrary to the natural human inclination to seek out excellence. The attempt to deter such behavior cannot destroy that longing. It merely perverts and distorts it. This has led to the phenomenon of the celebrity who is “famous for being famous.” Once people were admonished against recognizing and honoring people for their merits, they transferred that honor to entirely unremarkable people, undeserving of such esteem. Is society better off because our children revere Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian rather than brilliant minds, moral exemplars, and great leaders? As a conservative, I think not.

Edelman claims that conservatives have a “preference for the status quo” which requires “little time, effort, and awareness.” He maintains that conservatives “simply assume that existing and long-standing states are good and desirable.” Hodson and Busseri attribute this to the fact that “individuals with lower cognitive abilities may gravitate toward … conservative ideologies … that maintain the status quo and provide psychological stability and a sense of order.”

What these social scientists view as laziness is actually a humble understanding of our own limitations. Conservatives value tradition because we recognize that our inheritance contains wisdom that we could not quickly or easily replicate. Conservatives do not view tradition as perfect or final; they see it as a collection of ideas that were successfully implemented throughout the ages and should not be hastily discarded. The trial and error of generations have delivered a product superior to the one society could design based on current theories and prejudices.

Conservatives recognize that no individual or even individual generation is wise enough to recreate society from scratch. Society is far too complex to maintain or improve without relying on the knowledge transmitted through tradition. This, more than anything else, irritates these social scientists because they think it is their job to free us from tradition and to teach us how to remake the world. They trivialize conservative thought because it counsels prudence and stability, while they think it is their place to lead the revolution.

Read the full article here.

House Dems Receive Training on Portraying Conservatives as Racist (johnmalcolm.me)
Missing Link Friday – Conservatism, prejudice and intelligence (clubtroppo.com.au)
Dim minds and dark attitudes. (mindblog.dericbownds.net)
Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism (psp.sagepub.com)
A hopeful, youthful, idealistic and optimistic conservatism (dailycaller.com)
Are Liberals Smarter and Nicer? Just Ask Academia (bigjournalism.com)
How to Think About the Foundations of American Conservatism (johnmalcolm.me)
Jonah Goldberg: Obama, Tom Friedman among America’s top cliché artists (dailycaller.com)
Hatch Despises the ‘Radical Libertarians’ Who Oppose Him (spectator.org)
Paul Ryan, the Catfish-Wrestling Cult Leader (spectator.org)
Obama’s evolving morality challenges religious absolutists (my.psychologytoday.com)
Conservatives Produced By “Low Effort” Thinking: Study (wmbriggs.com)

Filed Under: Conservatism Tagged With: Caricature, Civil Society, Cognitive Ability, Collectivism, Community Organizer, Conservatives, Critical Thinking, Demonize, Distortion, Dystopia, Economic Growth, Edmond Burke, Envy, Equal Justice, Equality, Fads, Fear, Flat Earth Society, Free Market, Generations, Harrison Bergeron, Health Care, Heroism, Hierarchies, Hope and Change, Human Nature, Humility, Hyperbole, Ideas, Ideology, Kurt Vonnegut, Liberals, Limitations, Machiavellian, Marxist Agitators, Meritocracy, Merits, Nobility, Obamacare, Perversionm, Political Ponerology, Politics, Prejudice, Psychology, Racism, Racist, Radicals, Reformation, Republic, Revolution, Self-Improvement, Smear, Social Darwinism, Social Justice, Social Science, Socialism, Society, Stability, Status Quo, Traditionalism, Trial and Error, Tyranny, Unborn, Unintended Consequences, Utopianism, Vast Rightwing Conspiracy, War of Ideas

The Forwardism Disease [Video]

May 7, 2012 by John Malcolm 1 Comment

By Daniel Greenfield | May 01, 2012 | Sultan Knish

The Obama slogan for 2012 is in and it’s “Forward”, which is a compact version of that old classic, “Don’t change horses in the middle of a stream” that every incumbent is forced to run on sooner or later. Forward implies that there’s no alternative but to go backward, which is a place that no right-thinking person wants to go.

The left has always been enamored of “Forwardism” or “Progressivism” which mean much the same thing. Before MSNBC had Lean Forward, Mao had the Great Leap Forward which killed some 40 million people, far more people than MSNBC can ever dream of tuning in to their programs.

When Lenin wanted to launch his own newspaper, he called it, “Vperod” or Forward. The name still lingers on among the left and appears on the mastheads of newspapers across the world. It’s Vorwarts in Germany, Voorwarts in the Netherlands and Ila al-Amam in the Arab world. Back in New York it’s The Forward, the venerable blotting paper of the Jewish left.

There are any number of left-wing political parties who have already named themselves “Forward”, including the Forward Communist Party of India, Kadima, the left-wing opposition party in Israel, and Vperod, a Russian political party that split off from the Socialist Resistance on account of the latter not being radical enough.

Picking “Forward” as his campaign slogan puts Obama in good company with the likes of Lenin and Mao, and it sounds positive until you stop and realize that it’s meant more as an order than a suggestion. There’s a reason most leftist newspapers with that name add an exclamation mark at the end of it. It’s not a proposal, it’s a command. Lean forward, march forward, live forward and then die forward. We’ve burned the bridges, run up the deficit and trashed the economy so there’s no going back.

An old Soviet era joke told the story of the wife of a Communist leader who upon hearing that her husband had developed a progressive paralysis, clapped her hands and exclaimed that at least it was progressive. That is the underlying message of “Forward” to voters, the country may be paralyzed, but at least it’s a progressive paralysis which leaves us unable to move our heads and stop leaning forward while the Entertainer in Chief croons to us about the wonderful world to come.

That may be why it remains a popular campaign slogan among desperate left of center candidates. When Adlai Stevenson, dean of the liberal eggheads, ran in 1952, the campaign buttons read, “Forward with Stevenson”. The country chose to go backward instead with Eisenhower winning by a landslide.

Tony Blair ran for his third term under the slogan, “Britain, forward, not back”, which despite its clumsiness did conclusively explain that”Forward” as a campaign slogan means there’s no going back. However Blair forgot to tell voters that this referred to his immigration policy which helped create Broken Britain.

In this forward-thinking Britain, the police are being trained to look for signs of sorcery among immigrants after children have been murdered on suspicion that they might be witches. The last woman to be executed on witchcraft charges in the area was back in 1727, but now the UK is back in the witch hunting business or the hunting witchhunters business as the case may be. That’s not to mention the Islamic female genital mutilation business, which is also booming as part of Britain’s forward march into the 7th century.

Had Blair been a touch more honest, the slogan would have been, “Britain, so forward, it’s backward.” Much like having a mind so open your brains fall out, that is one of the dangers of being so forward, going so far ahead you end up in the middle of the Arabian desert praising absolute monarchies and slave states like Qatar as beacons of freedom and democracy, while your police hunt witchhunters and the mutilators of little girls.

In Australia, Julia Gillard rolled out “Moving Forward”, explaining that the slogan fit because Australians are an optimistic forward-looking people. Which they had to be as their country had suffered the worst economic decline in twenty years. When things are that bad, you might as well look forward and find something to be optimistic about.

The Grenadan Revolution had its own forward thinking slogans like “Who Controls the Minds of the People Have the Power” and “Forward Ever, Backward Never”. Sadly the revolution ended up going backward when the reactionary running dog capitalists overthrew the Cuban backed revolutionaries and robbed them of control over the minds of the people.

The Obama campaign has largely adopted both Grenadan slogans, but its control over the minds of the people may prove to be as tenuous as that of the People’s Revolutionary Army did over Grenada. The backward view is surprisingly appealing even to Obama supporters who can’t help remembering that there used to be more jobs and more money before the Hope and Change revolution.

Romney might ask you if you are better off now than you were four years ago, but Obama will tell you to forget the past and look forward to the eternal future that is always peeking over the horizon. The mirage of the progressive world of tomorrow which we can reach over a pile of dead senior citizens, energy saving lightbulbs and multicultural coloring books.

The very use of “Forward” as a slogan summons up a century’s worth of socialist ghosts that they are blind to. But recognizing that would require looking backward, which forward thinking people do not do.

Read the full article here.