what i find interesting about this thread is, for example, the wholly unsupported assumption--no, the certainty--that bush will win re-election--and the attempts to rhetorically shore up this assumption with nonsequitors like this:
Quote:
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I think even the most shrill anarchist reading this knows in their heart of heart this is true
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which is the kind of thing that apprently has some weight in conservativeland, but nowhere else.
the arbitrary appeal to some imaginary inward sense, for example, would be funny were it not an index of the alternate media universe within which it seems that the right operates. the entirely arbitrary characterization of the democrats as a left party--this too would be funny if it were not obvious that there are people who actually believe it in a way that is not falsifiable--which leads me to wonder if questions of fact can be posed to the inhabitants of conservativeland in this form, or whether what matters is holding together a view of the world by holding together a rhetoric.
it seems to me that conservativeland--this curious mediaspace, this wraparound world--is more self-reiforcing than the world fashioned by the most sectarian of the old trotskyist groups--"research" to reinforce lines that float in this space is carried out almost exclusively with reference to conservative "sources"--which are used to situate material assimilated from other spaces and to subordinate that material--it seems that this whole system in the end relies on a faith-based committment to certain premises and that the system functions to cut those premises off from unpleasant contact with the world that other people know about.
of course, this whole system legitimates itself by claiming that it operates as a counter to another, that of "the left" which seems to be little more than the mirror image of the right itself, its necessary opposite, rather than anything in that exists empirically. this negative image has to be tightly ordered because that of the right is; this negative image has to be a wholly self-reinforcing space because that of the right is.
it is frankly alarming.
one consequence of this is that debate across positions really difficult--conservativeland provides its inhabitants a framework that legitimates the refusal to enagage. arguments rarely if ever reach anything meaningful--instead you get endless attempts to substitute catch phrases. which in part explains how people like ustwo, who started this thread, works when he intervenes in threads that do not operate along the assumptions that shape his world.
i see the whole of conservativeland as delusional, purporting to be rooted in a descriptive discourse that is in fact entirely normative, incapable of providing a descriptive dimension for itself. what is frightening is that there is a population out there, and a sizable one, that prefers this internally harmonized, self-enclosed world to anything approaching contact with the complexity of the social.
i wonder if anyone who occupies this space can step outside of it long enough to explain why it has this appeal.