Fighting fire with water hoses, not candles: a metaphor

Politics & Elections
1

BrainGlutton, sheltered soul that he is, is talking about GOP “overreach” possibly costing them future elections. I admit that I see no likelihood of future Democratic legislative-election victories until (at the earliest) fallout from the desertification of the Great Plains redounds against the so-called conservative movement (and possibly not even then, if GOP partisans can restrict the franchise to their loyalists in the interim).

But here’s a metaphor for y’all.

The SCCM (so-called conservative movement), which run the GOP, are like a band of lunatics setting fire to the city. The Democrats are like a bunch of people who think we’re competing to put on light shows, and they’ve shown up with a bunch of candles and sparklers, aren’t they pretty? The SCCM sneer at this, because the “proper” function of fire is to burn the city down. The Democrats talk about how you can use fire to heat homes, the SCCM berate them for not worshiping destruction. And all the while more buildings are destroyed.

What we need are not our own fireworks, but water hoses to stop the flames. And then we need to lock up and/or put to death the lunatics who wrecked our city.

When the GOP want to cut the budget for agencies that keep the government honest, Democrats agree and say they’re for “reinventing government” too; but what we need is to keep budgeting for watchers of watchmen, so government is less wasteful in fact.

When the GOP want to slash taxes so that we have to borrow money from billionaires to operate the people’s business, Democrats say they’d like a greater proportion of tax cuts for the poorest Americans; what we should say is that middle-income people shouldn’t have to pay more tax to pay one red cent of interest to fat cats who get to lend money to the people at interest, and we are going to raise the tax on capital gains income to higher than the tax on earned income, and if this means a few richie riches leave the country, well–don’t let the door hit you in the ass, and good riddance.

When the GOP say we don’t need OSHA, or EPA, we must, every time, point out that more socially conservative politicians than they voted for these things out of desperate need. And if they keep this up (which they have) then we remove them from power by any means necessary.

Right-wingers talk about the four boxes (soap, ballot, jury, ammo). But the system works for them and caters to them. Left-wingers, who are outside and despised by the system, patiently wait for the system to work. What’s wrong with this picture?

Water hoses, not votive candles. When the crazies are destroying your country, you stop them. If that means dirty tricks, use dirty tricks. If that means infiltrating their organizations for entryism, be entryists. If that means infiltrating their organizations to play provocateur, then do that. If that means civil war, then fight one. But don’t let the city burn down.

2

How do you plan to bell that particular cat?

3

Sooooo…Second Amendment solutions???

:rolleyes:

4

And in this analogy, exactly who in today’s American political field, what candidate or party or movement or even website, corresponds to the fire department?

5

The kind of civil war that is against the status quo without being for anything in particular is only worth having in situations as desperate as Libya’s. We ain’t there yet.

6

Out of curiosity why is foolsguinea so obsessed with the idea of the desertification of the Great Plains? The US isn’t some land-locked country in the Sahel where desertification would cause apocalyptic disaster rather than some minor grumbling and few annoyed farmers.

I do agree on the need for boldness, however and recommend a platform roughly resembling the one I posted here (with some edits obviously, for example I don’t see the Dems adopting the pro-life plank): http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=690806

7

Google “Dust Bowl”.

8

I’m from the central US. Particularly one of the parts that got hit by absurdly hot temperatures in 2011 and 2012. I can see it coming. And I’m not the only person to notice that much of central US agriculture relies on what is damn near fossil water at this point.

We’re going to have to build one, because it sure isn’t the party of Bubba and Barry.

Let me be blunt. I do not particularly expect the “conservative movement” can be removed from its stranglehold of dominance in the central and southern USA–at least not before a cascade of multiple environmental disasters–*without *a shooting war.

I’m John Brown here, I’m Nat Turner, I’m calling for insurrection.

But at the least, understand what you need to be fighting* for.* It’s not Democratic Party victories; I spit on that. It’s accountable government, civil rights, and* the continued viability of North America as habitable.*

9

So you are advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government?

10

No. That is not a political program and not political content. The fate of the Reform Party shows the limits of a movement with unclear ideology. Is this movement to be socialist, libertarian, Green, or what? You have to make clear before people join up, or we’ll be like the Libyan rebels, tacitly assuming all along that all our comrades share the same notion as to what comes next after the revolution, and, if we win, unpleasantly surprised to learn it is not so. And if at that point we’re all still armed . . .

11

I am sympathetic to this, but this is a long-term (decades) project, one that takes serious financial backing. The current incarnation of the conservative movement started in the 1960’s by taking an amorphous conservative sense among Americans and feeding it a steady diet of William F. Buckley, Henry Luce, Milton Fredman, the John Birch society, Evangelical church leaders, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers–god I’ve got to stop before I make myself sick.

The “party of Bubba and Barry” may not be the party you want, but they are a helluva lot closer to being a viable movement in favor of your specific cause than a modern Nat Turner would be. Turner’s rebellion was in 1831; it took another 30+ years before the slavery question was resolved, and the direct, short-term (30 year) result was to make conditions worse for blacks in Virginia. He was obviously right in the long run, and his cause was unquestionably the moral one, but it’s debatable whether his rebellion was effective at achieving his ultimate goals (I agree his enslavement didn’t give Turner himself any other effective means, but IMO we’re a long way off from that as it applies to current political disagreements).

All I’m saying is the money and organization are the de facto currency of political change. If you want to build that from the ground up, it’s going to take a long time to turn that into a viable political force. It is far more advantageous to leverage a group that already has money/organization and move them in your direction (with a lesser amount of money/organization).

12

Soros?