Given all of the precious time that they have invested in talking about the gazillions in debt with which Democrats are saddling future generations, it appears that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have imbibed their party\u2019s conventional wisdom to the last letter.<\/p>\n
From the outset of this year\u2019s presidential election, it has been said over and over again by many a Republican commentator that, far from getting \u201cpersonal,\u201d the Republican challenger(s) simply has to address President Obama\u2019s \u201cfailed policies\u201d in order to make their case to the American electorate.\u00a0 Just explain what Obama has done, so goes this reasoning, and the American People\u2014always attentive and eager to do the right thing\u2014will act accordingly at the ballot box.<\/p>\n
Plato referred to all socially useful lies as \u201cconvenient fictions.\u201d\u00a0 The idea, relentlessly promulgated by Democrats and Republicans alike, that the American voter is a bottomless font of virtue and wisdom is the convenient fiction par excellence or our day:\u00a0 considering that every partisan who parrots this line disagrees vehemently on virtually all things with about half of their compatriots, no one can possibly believe it.<\/p>\n
The average person, whether American or otherwise, is not moved by allusions to bare facts alone.\u00a0 Actually, naked facts move no one.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What moves most people is a good story designed to appeal primarily to their emotions\u2014not their intellect.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Such a story need not be devoid of facts, but\u2014if they are to inspire action\u2014the facts need to be included in the story.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Given that the average American is far more interested in who will be America\u2019s next \u201cIdol\u201d than in who will be its next president, one would think that it should go without saying that talk of remote abstractions like some unfathomable national debt promises to be of little effect.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Of course, it isn\u2019t that the issue of our debt isn\u2019t of importance. But of greater importance, from the standpoint of the average American, is that he has to spend more of his earnings on gasoline for his car than he has ever had to spend in the past.\u00a0 Of greater importance is that he is now spending more on groceries than ever before.\u00a0 Of greater importance is that the average American, or someone who he knows and cares for, can\u2019t find a job.<\/p>\n
All of these ugly facts\u2014stone cold realities that your average American feels throughout every one of his bones\u2014can be easily packaged into a narrative that has as its chief antagonist the man who four years ago pledged to \u201cfundamentally transform\u201d the United States as we have always known it.\u00a0 The narrative would make abundantly clear that this is the same man who had spent all of his adult life surrounded by the worst anti-Americans, radicals whose detestation for the country culminated in acts of domestic terrorism.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The villain of the story\u2014we are all suckers for a good (and even not so good) morality tale\u2014is Barack Hussein Obama, the Architect of the miseries with which Americans have had to live for the last four years.<\/p>\n
Man does not live by brute reason alone.\u00a0 The more conservative minded theorists of yesteryear knew this.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The seventeenth century French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, Blaise Pascal, stated: \u201cThe heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.\u201d\u00a0 We should be on guard against overestimating the power of the intellect, Pascal insisted, for \u201cthe supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.\u201d\u00a0 In the final analysis, Pascal concluded, \u201call of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another French essayist, Michel Montaigne, said: \u201cOur normal fashion is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, left and right, up and down, as the winds of occasion bear us along.\u201d\u00a0 A human life is nothing other than \u201cmotion and inconstancy,\u201d and \u201cour willing of anything is never free, final or constant.\u201d At another place, Montaigne asserted that \u201ceven when our trust is readily placed in them, reasoning and education cannot easily prove powerful enough to bring us actually to do anything [.]\u201d He continues, swearing that \u201creason is so inadequate\u201d and \u201cso blind, that there is no example so clear and easy as to be clear enough for her [.]\u201d\u00a0 For reason, \u201cthe easy and the hard are all one,\u201d and \u201call subjects and Nature in general equally deny her any sway or jurisdiction.\u201d<\/p>\n
The eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume famously declared: \u201cReason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.\u201d\u00a0 He also said that \u201celoquence, at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection, but addresses itself entirely to the desires and affections, captivating the willing hearers, and subduing their understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n
The great Edmund Burke reminded his contemporaries, and ours, that: \u201cWe are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason,\u201d for \u201cwe suspect that this stock in each man is small [.]\u201d\u00a0 Rather, \u201cinstead of casting away our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree,\u201d for \u201cprejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give to it permanence.\u201d<\/p>\n
More recently, in the twentieth century, Joseph Schumpeter took a machete to what he called \u201cthe classical doctrine of democracy.\u201d\u00a0 According to this doctrine, the democrat is a rational agent who weighs over facts, draws out their implications, and then chooses accordingly.\u00a0 This, Schumpeter judged in no uncertain terms, is a fiction of the first order.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ways in which issues and the popular will on any issue are being manufactured,\u201d Schumpeter states, \u201cis exactly analogous to the ways of commercial advertising.\u201d\u00a0 That is, \u201cmere assertion, often repeated, counts more than rational argument\u201d for the average voter. \u00a0Rational argument takes a back seat as well to \u201cthe direct attack upon the subconscious\u201d inflicted upon him by politicians and their accomplices in the news media.\u00a0 As in commercial advertising, these attacks assume \u201cthe form of attempts to evoke and crystallize pleasant associations of an entirely extra-rational\u2026nature.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Schumpeter concludes:<\/p>\n
\u201cThus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field.\u00a0 He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. His thinking becomes associative and affective.\u201d<\/p>\n
Men are not moved by reason alone.\u00a0 An example from early American history illustrates well this truth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In his magisterial, Liberty and Freedom, <\/em>David Hackett Fischer relays an exchange that transpired in 1843 between Mellen Chamberlain and Captain Levi Preston.\u00a0 The former was a young scholar in search of the roots of the American Revolution.\u00a0 The latter was a ninety-one year old veteran of the War for Independence.\u00a0<\/p>\n Chamberlain wanted to know why Preston fought at Lexington and Concord.\u00a0 \u201cWere you oppressed by the Stamp Act?\u201d he asked.\u00a0Preston replied that he had never seen any stamps and, in any event, \u201cI always understood that none were ever sold.\u201d<\/p>\n Next Chamberlain asked him if it was the tea tax that had provoked him.\u00a0Preston scoffed at this suggestion just as forcefully as he scoffed at the idea that he may have felt oppressed by the Stamp Act.\u00a0 \u201cTea tax?\u00a0 I never drank a drop of the stuff.\u00a0 The boys threw it all overboard.\u201d<\/p>\n When Chamberlain questioned whether Preston had drawn his inspiration from such great theorists of liberty as [James] Harrington, [Algernon] Sidney, and [John] Locke, the old man said bluntly: \u201cI never heard of these men.\u00a0 The only books we had were the Bible, the Catechism, Watts\u2019 Psalms, and hymns and the almanacs.\u201d<\/p>\n Finally, as if to throw up his hands in exasperation, Chamberlain asked: \u201cWell, then, what was the matter?\u201d\u00a0Preston\u2019s response is telling.\u00a0 \u201cYoung man,\u201d he began, \u201cwhat we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: we always had been free, and we meant to be free always.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t mean that we should.\u201d<\/p>\n It is not reason, not bare facts, from which our motion originates.\u00a0 Republicans need to remember this the next time they are tempted to use a televised debate or a campaign speech for but another opportunity to throw around abstract numbers about debts and deficits and anything else.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Given all of the precious time that they have invested in talking about the gazillions in debt with which Democrats are saddling future generations, it appears that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have imbibed their party\u2019s conventional wisdom to the last letter. From the outset of this year\u2019s presidential election, it has been said over…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n