Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to P.S.

Now that's just plain silly
Robert — (archived)

But a fine example of the Way of the Nitpicker.

I notice that the word "Republican" appears nowhere on Cato's About Us page; instead there's several thousand words parsing "liberal" and "conservative" to imply that the Republican Way is the right way. Do you really think that Cato is as supportive of the Democratic Party as the Republican Party? Oh puhleeeze!

But more seriously, you may be overestimating the cohesiveness ("monolithicity"?) of the other side. Conservatives naturally gravitate to a formal command-and-control political structure (a natural consequence of the "strict-father" worldview), but it's a mistake to assume that that's true for the other side (with its "nurturant parent" worldview). When Republicans use the term "grass roots", they're talking about an organization able to issue commands down to the level of neighborhood cells. When Democrats talk about "grass roots", it's the opposite, a process of bubbling-up to the national level from myriads of local initiatives.

Rockridge may well be nonpartisan, in the sense that it has no connection to the Democratic Party. The Right fixates on what Howard Dean and other officials of the Party apparatus say, but frankly, Dean's just a stalking-horse (another hide-in-plain-sight disclosure of our strategy--you'll scoff, I'm counting on it). The action right now on the other side is taking place at a much lower and more distributed level. People are thinking and planning, writing books like Lakoff's and Carville & Begala's, and at a fundamental level plotting to take over (or back, as C&B put it) the DNC. (You thought "Take it Back!" refers to the country? Oh no, mon ami, it's about taking back the Democratic Party and making it win again. We never lost the country, the country's just lost its way amid the fog of Republican rhetoric.)

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