Sighting-In: Adjustments for Trajectory

When I first decided to create this blog, I'd had every intention of changing my formal affiliation from Independent to Republican and getting my apathetic @$$ more involved in party reform. Unfortunately, as I watch things continue to unfold, I'm no longer so sure there is anything worth saving.

More and more, I see the party leadership continue to betray its base and really show itself as only the flip-side of the same dysfunctional coin.

I think Ace also has a related, interesting point in his post On Hope and Change and Winning Elections:

Here's the political problem with the GOP: They can take all the polls they like, and compose all the spreadsheets they can, and can have expert consultants (Caveat: consultants are not experts in anything except consultation) type up white papers explaining all the reasons the base can't have what the base wishes to have.

But at the end of the day, people need Hope that things will actually Change if they undertake the efforts the party asks them to undertake.
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No matter how clever you think your arguments are, and no matter how tight your statistical analysis is, if your strategy does not include some sort of pathway by which people can continue to cling to the illusion of Hope, it's an unsound strategy.

People will find such a pathway if it is permitted to exist at all. Just as people's minds naturally find patterns in unrelated events, people's minds are programmed by their Survival Instincts to find a pathway of hope.
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I think this is where some of the anger is coming from: The GOP is not even permitting its True Believers to believe. It's not even leaving them the illusion of hope.

I don't think this is a sound strategy. You always have to let people believe. The GOP's analysis may be statistically sound, but it's psychologically infirm.

This is why the Tea Party continues to inspire passion while the GOP inspires little else but resignation. The Tea Party might be wrong about most things. I believe the GOP thinks they are wrong about most things, especially strategy. (And, honestly, the Tea Party's strategic thinking is not its strongest attribute.)
But one thing the Tea Party understands, on a gut level, is that there must be a sense of idealism and optimism about the future, and idea that things could change if we just make them change.

RTWT.

The further I go, the more damned I feel in trying to find any salvation in either of our well-established parties, the more atrophied and diminished I see our great republic becoming*, and the more libertarian I feel.

*I don't think we are too far off from witnessing the contemporary decline of the Roman Republic with our bread (unsustainable support for dependent masses), circuses (reality TV, vulgar sitcoms designed for their shock value rather than their message), and declining morals (although you could certainly call me a liberal on things like sex, I am against wanton promiscuity and the ongoing destruction of family units and all religious communities except for those considered the darling children du jour of the politically correct sheep).