I've had periodic talks with Tom about his "logic", and the uncanny way that each and every time it "proves", "scientifically", that it's impossible to make the world a better place, and any attempt to try will only make things worse.

Back at the dawn of time, there was a neocon (neolithic conservative) who proved scientifically that fire could never be tamed. "Fire burn!" stated Brog with authority and impeccable logic. Yet somehow we tamed fire and nuclear energy and humans went to the Moon. Damn good thing we've generally ignored neolithic conservative "logic".

It's been theorized by people who study aberrant psychology, such as George Lakoff, that Conservatives have a very narrow perception of causality. They can see it when A directly causes B, but interactions any more complicated than that, and especially those that have one or more component that's not directly visible, are completely invisible to the Winger mind. Either B follows A, or shit just happens. Trouble is, the human mind fills a vacuum like that with evil spirits and Commies that go bump in the night.

That's why we hear George Bush explaining terrorism as arising because "they jes hates us!". That's why Tom's explanation for big government is simply that those evil Commie bastards want big government solely for the sake of having big government. Government just happens, like bad weather, and no government program has a purpose other than to be a government program and add to the total of government programs.

The inability to perceive cause-and-effect when it comes to government leads Wingers to the dangerous state of mind of paranoically objectifying government as "Them", a quasi-supernatural agency with no connection to Us; government is the scary "Other". Odd for people who wrap themselves in the flag and proclaim themselves champions of democracy and self-government, perhaps, but factor in the strain of authoritarianism, and it starts to be comprehensible, if not quite sane.

Winger beliefs are composed of 1/720th democracy, and 729/730ths authoritarianism. In this view, one day every two years America is a democracy, and we elect Authority Figures who have absolute power over us (in the Winger mind) the other 729 days. This no doubt makes sense to people with a limited ability to perceive causality, because fulltime democracy requires holding in your head a picture of a diffuse cloud of 300 million people continually developing opinions and changing their minds and, at the end of the day, all this democracy somehow translates into action by a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Far easier to comprehend are the simple relationships of authoritarianism, in which everybody knows their place and obeys those placed over them and rules over those placed below them, and when Authority says jump, you only have to figure out how high. That's pretty much the definition of "freedom" on WingerWorld.

I have no doubt that Tom sincerely believes that he's right about absolutely everything, and that his logic is scientifically compelling. I almost feel sorry for him when he posts those laments about how nobody listens to him and he can't understand why the logic that's so powerful to him fails to infect others. But it's a closed self-referential logic system that outsiders can see is woefully inadequate to encompass all the rich complexity of the real world. And so we get cognitive debacles like Iraq, and Wingers are baffled once again that their well-laid plans went aft gang agley.