Paul writes:

Predictions I Wish Had Been Wrong

Looking for some other stuff, I found this post from October 2008 in which I predicted a level of right-wing craziness about Obama similar to that facing Bill Clinton, but worse.

I really, really wish I had been wrong about that.

But this is followed by interesting comments. All from liberals. Like these:

Palin makes and breaks candidates in the GOP now — she’s far and away the most powerful person in the party. Fox News is #1, and they’re basically a beacon of disinformation. When a paper like the WSJ joins in, it makes a lot of people think that what’s being said is legitimate.

I try to challenge this stuff each and every time I encounter it, but the truth is that I’m never able to persuade anyone who believes it that they’re wrong.

It’s as if the whole country has gone insane, and no one is ashamed to lie or hate people any more.

and

You certainly weren’t Professor Krugman. If they gain enough credibility to have a substantial influence on the electorate, then the whole country is in peril.

And this:

The Right has to act crazy, for one thing they are; for another, the Right knows that if the Left takes control of the government, hunting will be outlawed. The Spanish must have their barbaric, anachronistic bullfight/torture ceremony and the gun-lovers must be allowed to shoot Bambi throught the heart. This is a culture war plain and simple. It is not a civil war, but a highly dangerous and uncivil one. I hope the Right loses, but they have the guns, so I’m doubtful. (Un)civil wars are usually costly in terms of lives lost and sheer destructiveness. I can refer you to the Spanish Civil war to give you an idea. Remember, the Fascists won that one, after something like a million people died.

And this:

There was something about Obama’s can’t-we-all-get-along rhetoric, and then confirmed by a first year of making nice with a bunch of thugs who’d as soon lynch him as have lunch with him (with no result, I must add), that showed this is a man who cannot wield power.

Interesting comments. I think they miss the point though.

The country is demographically center-right. Liberals, comprising no more that 1/5 of the population are a minority compared to independents and conservatives. People seek status more than they seek money. Cultural dominance in each class determines status signals. People will surrender money unto Caesar, but they will never surrender their social position willingly.

As Paul has stated before, the left and right are committed. The independents are the only people who determine elections. They are don’t play the great game except at election time, are disinterested, pragmatic, and swayed by whatever emerges as deciding key issues and the personalities of the candidates. The purpose of both parties is to establish simple sentimental memes that can help frame the candidates currently up for election.

Amidst a long term downturn, and faced with a government that passes a law that affects their health care, over the will of the majority, and the country’s only remaining competitive technology, deprived of their cultural status, it’s only rational that they rebel.

White guilt was easy to sway when they were an entrenched majority, and especially when suffrage, then feminism, both the result of mechanization of the household tasks, could be brought against the christian sentiments of the dominant male fraternity. But as a minority that is embattled and demonized, as a cult of family and freedom, they see their status under direct threat, their values and way of life under threat, and they are beginning to act like a minority whose status and way of life is threatened. They no longer see room for compromise. They no longer feel guilt. They are angry.

It certainly looks like in the long term, the cyclic historians are right, and that the political system no longer works as designed – which is the assumed binding mythology of our country. Despite having certain cooperative and organizational technologies unavailable to the ancients, our government no longer works because it is a system of empire over people with dissimilar cultural-status-political and economic-financial-organizational ambitions. And both the domestic and foreign nations are beginning to revolt – because they can sense that both domestically and internationally, the government is no longer legitimate. A government over people with dissimilar interests must of necessity oppress all.

The current political status holders will not easily surrender their positions. The bureaucracy is enormous, in government, unions, academia, education, the vast white collar clerical system, the media and the arts – all the people who do not participate in the market process, but are intentionally insulated from it as intentionally protected classes.

The decline of the centralized media has been instrumental in assisting in the change, and major media will continue to decline, as each subsector of society increasingly seeks confirmation bias for its fantasies, and each race, culture and class will seek confirmation of its underlying assumptions leading to increasing fictionalization.

This election cycle, and this economy, is simply part of this broader change in the distribution of world economic and political power, and the decline of the international attractiveness of, and personal ambitions of, the western secular humanists — a class whose only strategic option now is to ally with the numeric superiority of Islam as a replacement for Marxism, in order to maintain their control and isolation from market participation.

That is my prediction to equal Paul’s. Without cultural cohesion permitted by the wealth generated by selling off the north american continent to immigrants, the unnatural dominance of the dollar, and military control of world trade routes, trade and money, the coalition of DC (violence), NY (Money) and LA (Propaganda) cannot hold. And as Paul senses, and as most synthetic historians have stated for a century or more, a long term economic stagnation or decline will accentuate inter-group differences, as people rely on intra-group status symbols and traditional alliances for support. Egalitarianism is a convenience of a debtor economy.