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Left and right: Too far apart for tolerance?

Left and right: Too far apart for tolerance?

Has politics become so divisive that a new intolerance keeps left and right from connecting emotionally?

Research purports to show that left and right are that different, according to this post at NPR titled For Democrats And Republicans, It’s Happily (N)ever After:

Political preferences seem to come packaged with a whole set of other kinds of tastes, with liberals and conservatives having separate preferences when it comes to things such as humor, food and even whether they want poetry to rhyme, according to John Hibbing, coauthor of the forthcoming book Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives and the Biology of Political Difference.

Hatemi, the Penn State political scientist, has written a forthcoming study that indicates political inclinations are deeply rooted — all the way down to the sensory level. Politically like-minded people tend to share preferences in taste, sense of smell and what their eyes are drawn to.

Ah, but what about political changers like me? How do you explain us? I’m not sure why, but just the way I look seems to make people assume my politics are at least somewhat to the left, and if and when I reveal the situation to be otherwise they tend to express shock.

Perhaps it’s due to retaining that liberal odor? I mean that quite literally:

How deep does it run? Make conservatives and liberals wash with the same shampoos and soaps, and like-minded people can still sniff them out. “Liberals found the body odor of liberals more attractive,” Hatemi says. “Conservatives found the body odor of conservatives more attractive.”

The article also discusses the fact that most couples are uni-political. That does seem to be the case, at least in my small circle of acquaintances.

And here’s a finding that shows how much more divisive the country’s politics have become in the last half-century:

A recent Stanford University study that people are more likely to have hostile feelings toward people of the other party than members of another race. The who say they would disapprove of their children marrying someone from the other party has shot up from 5 percent in 1960 to 40 percent in 2010.

You see that politics has become, among other things, the new religion. Very few people these days would object to racial intermarriage and probably the same is true of religious intermarriage. We are now “tolerant” of diversity in those things. But politics has a lot more emotional valence now, and for more and more people it’s those on the other side of that divide who have become the enemy.

[Neo-neocon is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.]

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Comments

pablo panadero | August 14, 2013 at 8:59 am

Two things have happened over the past 30 years or so:
1. You used to have conservative Democrats, specifically in the South, since the remnants of the Civil War would prohibit Republicans from being elected. The Republican Revolution of 1994 changed that permanently.
2. White Liberals have en masse abandoned religion, so they have latched onto liberal politics as their new religion.

In Islamic countries, it is impossible to separate religion and politics. Any disagreement on politics is seen as an attack on Islam. Same thing is happening to liberals here.

    Phillep Harding in reply to pablo panadero. | August 14, 2013 at 2:58 pm

    “Need to believe” level varies across the population. People with a high NtB are going to latch onto whatever is available, no matter how silly it looks to bystanders.

Here’s an observation I made a few decades back…

As a capitalist, I can readily accommodate within my society people who want to voluntarily live as socialists or even communists (in communes, say).

That is free association at work. I’m good.

But Collectivists are not ready to extend me the same rights. They aggressively seek to strip me of my rights, and to impose their systems on me.

They insist on what are correctly seen as “totalitarian” systems. See ObamaDoggle and its progeny.

    lichau in reply to Ragspierre. | August 14, 2013 at 10:34 am

    Rags: Goes down as the thought of the day. Capitalism, at its core is tolerant. Collectivism is at its core totalitarian.

    An allied thought/observation: While there are intemperate thoughts and opinions on both sides, I find that most conservatives think that liberals are generally good people with bad ideas; liberals think that conservatives are bad people.

      Midwest Rhino in reply to lichau. | August 14, 2013 at 11:48 am

      also aligned, the western religions separated their religion from government, whereas the PC religion uses the state to coerce all.

      Free market capitalism also separates itself from government, but now we have government being bought by business. Or government (taxpayer money allocated by politicians to friends) buying and supporting business, as with GM, GS, or the solar handouts to donors.

      moonstone716 in reply to lichau. | August 14, 2013 at 8:32 pm

      That’s the way it used to be….now I think liberals must be the dumbest people on the planet or the most evil. Even the few nice ones I know are willfully blind.

Political sentiment runs deep. I worked for a guy who was rabidly Democrat. His dad had been a representative in the state House for years. Rabid. Someone was giving him grief over some Clinton policy, challenging the guy on the basis of his faith (how can you call yourself a Christian when Clinton supports that kind of reasoning). The guy’s response summed things clearly. “I was a Democrat before I was a Christian.” Like cults with easily-refuted goofy ideas, people hold even more tightly to their political ideas in the face of mountains of evidence that those ideas are failures.

Tolerance has become a weapon to club someone over the head with. See: College Insurrection.

I have long marveled how Left and Right seem to perceive reality differently. My friends on the Left do not think they live in the same world I think I live in.

    Liberals generally cocoon themselves in a way conservatives could not even if they wanted to.

    I know the State Media’s line on Fast and Furious for example. How many liberals know the actual facts?

      NC Mountain Girl in reply to 18-1. | August 14, 2013 at 11:26 am

      That is also true of global warming. I’ve had to explain the term anthropogenic to several liberals. I’ve been known to bait them, let them accuse me of being anti science and then lower a very well credentialed boom. In one case my accuser was a high school grad who wasn’t even on the college track and thus never took even high school chemistry or physics. I was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow. The lack of understanding about the scientific method and peer reviewed research can be astounding.

      The same ignorance seems pervasive on social issues. I’ve had a straight married grandmother lecture me on gay rights. I lived near Chicago’s Boys Town neighborhood for 20 years. What she knows about gays is mostly what she has picked up from TV sitcoms, Bravo and HGTV. Her information is a bit skewed. For example, she thinks there are more gay people than there are African Americans in the population.

        Midwest Rhino in reply to NC Mountain Girl. | August 14, 2013 at 12:02 pm

        Just the name changes show the sick pathology of the left. Believing in “Climate Change” is like believing in “world peace”.

        The cursing and personal attacks usually occur before a rational person can mention the hundreds of feet of ice that used to cover Chicago, removed without an internal combustion engine in sight. But AGW is taught as science in high school now, as I understand it. It seems like another stealthy way to insert politics in public school education, deeming any rational person a skeptic, drawing the child into their cult of non-science PC religion.

          Henry Hawkins in reply to Midwest Rhino. | August 14, 2013 at 1:10 pm

          Maybe better yet, believing in Climate Change is like believing in The Earth Orbits The Sun, a “well, duh” sort of thing.

          The scientific record identifies constant climate change. The AGW movement depends entirely on polemics towards disagreement and an ignorant audience, all draped in the robes of pretend Science.

As pointed out above, liberalism has become a jealous religion, and as such has become not just a political ideology, but sets completely how one many live his or her life.

There is an added complication though. Most mature religions are somewhat ambiguous on end goals in the mortal realm.

So a Christian, for example, does not expect that even if his political leadership is made up of strictly adherent Christians that he will live in Utopia.

Modern liberalism, being millennial in nature, holds that if we give complete power over society to strictly adherent liberals that we will implement a Utopia.

This belief is clearly shown to be false though in practice. So not only do liberals believe they have a moral imperative to seek power by any means, but they face severe cognitive dissonance over the fact that their overwhelming recent success in the political world has significantly degraded society as a whole.

One stellar example of this is Detroit. A city run by unions, racialist hucksters, and Democrats for generations was ruined by the very same policies that are supposed to usher in heaven on earth.

And look how the left has reacted – blaming Republicans who had no role in Detroit’s destruction and those who have fled the would be Utopia as racist sabotagers….

I don’t usually blogwh0re but since it’s basically the same topic:

http://crayfisher.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/feuding-fussing-and-a-fightin/

Democracy by its very nature divides. What will unite a people are common core values.
As a nation many have replaced Christian morality coupled to the value of a human life and to dignity with a feel-good relativism.

Relativism is now deciding by majority vote the laws being passed and the candidates to be in office. Mass confusion ensues e.g., Obamacare, and the chicanery of Elizabeth Warren.

America is in a tailspin that I don’t think we can recover from…unless this nation returns to God.

Henry Hawkins | August 14, 2013 at 9:52 am

First problem: the term ‘political science’ is an oxymoron. Just like other soft sciences such as sociology and psychology, its body of held truths are 99% in the gray zone and wide open for political spin by individual practitioners, knowingly and otherwise. When one chemist holds that water is a liquid and another that water is a solid, chemistry ceases to be a science, but this is de rigueur in the soft sciences. Inherent liberalism among western university faculties has totally politicized these fields, and they cite each other for support in complete ignorance of that decidedly unscientific logical fallacy of the appeal to authority.

Second problem: this article treats the political landscape as if it hasn’t changed much in recent years, which in political time frames means recent decades. I remember when an independent like Joe Lieberman was considered a leftist Democrat and someone like Obama was considered an unelectable radical. The two-party system has always been a den of thieves, but the leftists who’ve taken over the Democrat party did so by removing the concept of honor among thieves. The new Democrat Party mantra is win at any cost, by any means – lie, cheat, steal, and use the people’s government against them.

Anyone intolerant of that ought to be honored, while anyone tolerant of that shall reap the whirlwind.

    Henry Hawkins in reply to Henry Hawkins. | August 14, 2013 at 10:02 am

    PS: As for presumptions about political affiliations based on appearance, I’m an automatically assumed to be a liberal based on no more than the physical feature of having a long pony tail and beard, and on the occupational feature of being a psychologist. When I mention that I am a conservative, they all move to chairs a few feet further away, and when I mention I belong to the tea party, they run away as if I’d said I had leprosy. Very handy.

      elliesmom in reply to Henry Hawkins. | August 14, 2013 at 11:14 am

      Is water a solid, a liquid, or a gas? It depends on where you are at the moment you ask. Good comment overall. Bad example.

        Henry Hawkins in reply to elliesmom. | August 14, 2013 at 11:59 am

        H2O: Liquid=water, solid=ice, gas=steam. Fixed it for you. If it communicates the point, it’s good enough.

        Midwest Rhino in reply to elliesmom. | August 14, 2013 at 12:33 pm

        Makes sense to me, in that arguing whether H2O is in one state or another without discussing conditions (PV=NRT 🙂 ) is like saying all Tea partiers are racist, but blacks cannot be racist. People (H2O) have more factors than just skin color, and in fact all have melting points. Leftists seem especially volatile.

        The left argues it is science that TPers are always in racist state, and disagreeing with a leftist identifies an object as a solid racist. But colored water is still basically water, and should be treated equally based on its other conditions, which make it solid, liquid or gaseous (Tea Party, RINO, leftist). 🙂

        Phase changes in culture can be examined, but the left prefers to color code, or divide by class, rather than consider elemental factors such as family and traditional values.

          Henry Hawkins in reply to Midwest Rhino. | August 14, 2013 at 1:01 pm

          Well, my chemist/water point was merely that in hard sciences, facts aren’t malleable without scientific cause, like 2+2=4. They are not easily spun for political reasons.

          The soft sciences, however… yeesh. I am totally embarrassed by what my chosen field, psychology, puts out as ‘science’. Sociology and political science are just as bad.

          How often do we hear it: “Studies show that…..”? When, in fact, name the premise and no matter how silly, somewhere in the world there are ‘studies’ to support it – flat earth, moon landing was faked, conservatives have cognitive disorders, etc., etc.

    On the other hand, ask two chemists what glass is….

    Chem_Geek in reply to Henry Hawkins. | August 14, 2013 at 2:28 pm

    “When one chemist holds that water is a liquid and another that water is a solid, chemistry ceases to be a science”

    Well, it is. What temperature and pressure are we talking about? 😉

Well, I’m a Conservative happily married to a left-winger, albeit a very open-minded one. Of course, she’s from DC, so the fact that she’s pro-Israel already makes her a right-winger in her circles. ‘Course, we’re both religious Jews; neither of us would marry someone of another religion although we are technically of different “races” (she’s African-American).

What worries me is the appeasement coalition on foreign policy – the like-mindedness of the Leftists, the Libertarians, and the Paleos. Worse, they largely seem to agree with our enemies. Ronald Reagan would be quite foreign to these people; in fact, Ron Paul left the GOP in protest over Reagan’s policies.

Richard Aubrey | August 14, 2013 at 10:53 am

The smell issue is interesting. Presuming it’s run correctly with good methodology; Either the two camps have sufficiently different metabolism as to affect body odor or there is a dietary difference between the two. Perhaps far fewer conservatives eat arugula, for example.
I suppose that different metabolism might affect cerebration. So that would account for it.
OTOH, being constantly annoyed does stress the adrenal glands and that will affect metabolism generally and body odor specifically.
So maybe one side–libs–are constantly irritated while conservatives are pretty mellow most of the time.
Or something.
When a study takes you into the great blue world of speculation, the test itself seems to be discredited. But if it’s run right, with good methodology, the issue remains.

Fascinating post, Neo-neo. Political intolerance, in many ways, has become the new racism. We saw this pretty clearly in the leftists’ reaction to the IRS scandal (as but one instance). It was okay to target, harass, and silence people because–and only because–they were “TEA Party.” Many leftists admitted that if it were regressive groups they’d feel very differently, but after all, the TEA Party is composed of subhumans. That dehumanization is a mark of the most dangerous kind of racism, and it’s interesting that our “tolerant” friends on the left see absolutely no problem with it. Or with the deeply worrying leftist war cry that they “hate hate.” They’re upset about lynching of black people back in the day not because lynching is bad but because it was the wrong victim group. Disturbing in the extreme.

But yes, I can see the shift happening in real time; we are (it’s become cliche to say, but it’s true) so divided as a nation that it’s not even recognizable to me in some ways. Divided by race and class, Obama works hard on that, but also divided politically/ideologically. But don’t despair–at least try not to–one thing that we all know is that in times of trouble, Americans do rally, and though it’s difficult to remember, we rally around the flag. Remember when bin Laden was killed (not the crazy Obama-did-it-all-on-his-own-like-Superman crap)? The shouts of U. S. A. were loud and bipartisan. Lefties were seen publicly waving–not stomping on, not burning or pooping on–American flags. It was quite strange, looking back, but when something happens, Americans come together as Americans (forgetting all the phony boxes they’ve been packed into for the political survival of regressives).

Lefties, the diehard ones, hated it with all their evil, shriveled little hearts, because (and only because) they’ve worked so diligently to get rid of that connectedness Americans feel in times of challenge and hardship. But it’s there. Granted, it didn’t last. And granted, that seems like a one-off, but 9/11 had a similar uniting effect (and remember, the left wasn’t too happy with Bush’s election, but think about how the nation rallied, Bush’s approval went through the roof). Americans still have that spirit in their hearts and souls; it is there.

Midwest Rhino | August 14, 2013 at 11:19 am

I blame the “commies”, as in “The Naked Communist”.

This national division was a planned event, and actual communist subversives have had a plan for decades. (e.g. Obama’s mentor Frank Marshall Davis) Christian/Western traditional values are systematically cleaved from law and order, replaced with politically correct dogma. The great uniter Obama unites the left around fires of Orwellian Hate for conservatives. It is a plan of divide and conquer.

McCarthyism is now a dirty word, gender norms are remnants of Neanderthal traits, and “fairness” means we must accept any illegal and fund their welfare or be branded racist. In CA children’s bathrooms will be open to whatever sex the child feels like at any given moment, exposing young children in new ways.

A vocal liberal sees Al Gore’s movie and in two hours becomes an expert in climate science, ready to castigate and curse any that expose the lies with real science. The idiocy is impenetrable, which is by design, playing to ego and fueling the hate.

As in most cults, the “special knowledge” syndrome sets the otherwise below average citizen in a special place, able to leap tall buildings with a single movie. The desire to have approval overwhelms measured thought, and any challengers must be shouted down and cursed out, before they have a chance to expose the hypocrisy.

Conservatives/capitalists are right, but the gang mentality of the left mobs the self reliant independent. The left has molded their armies, who are more interested in Hollywood PC approval, because they are less capable of independent thought.

Sadly, that tribalist nature is common to man. Our founders are the political Moses giving us the tablets, but the nature of man prefers the golden calf of communism. “Love your neighbor as yourself” becomes “your neighbor is forced to provide for you”. And adultery becomes “free love” (e.g. Filner, Clinton, Kennedy). Tolerance only for the PC false god, while the tablets of the constitution must be smashed.

A government by/for/of the people (under God), versus a people owned by the government as god, which really becomes just the “mafia” of a few tyrants, with devoted “made men” willing to kill the non-compliant, as with Lois versus the Tea Party.

There is another axis of division – elite vs. non-elite members of society. Members of the elite live similar lives, despite what they might claim politically. There is almost no consideration of what a political position actually entails. People call for higher taxes, but do not voluntarily pay more, call for green living, but have massive houses. The elite are the big backers of illegal immigration, as they want cheap servants and sweatshop labor.

    Chem_Geek in reply to OmegaPaladin. | August 14, 2013 at 2:57 pm

    This is the primary, nay only, division. The only thing is whether the left-elites will exploit us, or the right-elites will exploit us.

The outing of the Liberal Media in the Social Media age as lying biased liberal bastards from hell made activists of millions of people who were previously un-in-formed.

Liberals are not happy the curtain has been drawn back.

Whenever Liberals are on the losing end, many of them don a “moderate” cloak to do a ‘let’s compromise.’

No quarter asked; none given. screw em.

I totally get what used to be said about the Civil War, that families were torn apart over it, part of a family on one side, another the other side.

I see it my my own immediate family: mother, father, brother. We can’t talk politics, or issues and news that touch upon politics. But when it comes up, I’m to blame because I disagree with them. They always assume that they are in the right.

Don’t attempt science like this at home. I’m a hobbyist with extensive practice.

1) Like neo-neocon, I evolved from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican, as did my siblings and parents. Very few people change sides/worldviews, but the vast majority of those who do travel in this direction. We didn’t talk politics at home, but it was a given that we were liberal Democrats. And we found out as adults that we’d all made the switch, independently. My older sister, especially bright, recently told me that when she turned 18, while our family still considered ourselves liberal Democrats, she secretly registered as a Republican. This is in uber-liberal Santa Monica in 1972! Even today this shocks me as being a bit too much too soon … she instinctively rejected the “thinking with your heart” phase of young adulthood, even during the Watergate era. It’s all the more remarkable when you think that this blonde, gentile, beach babe always had liberal Jewish boyfriends growing up. Go figure. How did we change so drastically? I don’t think we really did. It’s the Democratic Party that did. We stayed sane while it lost its mind.

2) To reconfirm that those who self-identify as conservative and/or Republican these days are not the shifting side, that it’s the left and Democrats who are radicalizing … slowly at times with sudden periods of punctuated equilibrium, we have to find some kind of control subject. An apolitical, commonsense-infused, disinterested observer. Some might say, “A Martian, in other words.” No, I’m talking about the next best thing: my wife.

She’s an alien, a legal one, (though scary as any extraterrestrial might be at times, I imagine).

Like most Japanese women, she has close to zero interest in politics. The only time she takes interest is to tell me to shut-up when I start talking about politics. Her main focus is doing everything she can to make sure our kids grow up to be successful … even despite their father’s crippling social phobia (which they all inherited to varying degrees).

But she will tell you that, as much as she doesn’t want to hear about politics, she is convinced that liberals in America have lost touch with reality.

She doesn’t want to hear or talk about politics, but she’ll tell you that through her experiences in America, looking at both sides, and dealing with both sides in personal relationships, that people on the right are much more tolerant of others and opposing viewpoints; that people on the right have a worldview based in reality and address unfortunate truths rather than trying to wish them away with PC gobbledygook and the threat of social stigmatization and ostracism; that you have to be perpetually on guard with what you say, no matter how true it may be, and no matter how politely you couch these truths, in front of people on the left.

3) She’ll tell you she sees little hope for America. That we’ve passed a tipping point. She bases this on what she sees in our children’s schools as a volunteer. When American children are so far behind what she was doing in school in Japan at the same grade level (even as a slacker student by Japanese standards), any hope she might’ve held on to was long ago swept away but was she sees as the inordinate amount of wasted time spent away from the “Three R’s,” to no benefit of the children, instead used making offers to the gods of multiculturalism, diversity, and other PC volcanos. That’s why, even as she beats me up over our being “the poorest family on the Westside,” she won’t bat an eye paying thousands of dollars a year to supplement our children’s academic education outside the public schools.

I could go on and on, but suffice it to say, whenever I doubt my worldview … a natural kind of doubt that comes occasionally through being part of what feels to be a minority dwindling away … I look at this lab rat I married. And when I see her laugh and scoff at PC lunacy in a way I’d be fearful to express lest I were overheard and taken away in handcuffs … I know I’m right. Sometimes it just sucks to be right. Maybe “lab rat” is too harsh. “Outside observer” might be better. We’ve all been swimming in this sea called America. We’ve been wet all our lives. It’s all we know. She’s in the fishbowl now, too, but unlike most of us, she came from dry land, and can always step back out of the fish bowl in an instant, dry off, unlike us, and peer inside. It’s a unique angle of a viewpoint.

4) As an add-on, women on the right are just much hotter than women on the left. neo-neocon is just too pretty for the left. My wife, too, for all her myriad faults, is quite attractive. Mrs. Jacobson, gorgeous. You see, the left is just jealous. They’re a bunch of mean girls. It’s hell to be beautiful at times.

5) Admittedly, the above are all just personal anecdotes. But a preponderance of anecdotes pointing in the same direction establishes a pattern. And a preponderance of pattern establishes as near to something as “proof” as can be had in an area that cannot be measured empirically. Well, not easily, at least. Although, UC Berkeley social science professors never stop trying!

    I always enjoy your comments, LHC, and this no exception. Like you and neo-neo, I was once a Democrat, but I think that like you both (I’m not sure of your exact liberal leanings before becoming conservative), I was never a leftist. I was always on the “fiscally-conservative” side and have always been a supporter of/advocate for “peace through strength” and a believer in American exceptionalism. In other words, I was a Reagan-Democrat, even a JFK-Democrat.

    But you’re right, the party changed, radicalized, became communist (some prefer “socialist,” but socialism is just, as Lenin and Marx well-noted, the path to communism, never an end in itself). Sadly, too many current Democrat voters simply don’t understand what the party has become, that it is–truly, deeply, devoutly–anti-and unAmerican. This is the message that conservatives can’t seem to get across, but once we figure it out, the current crop of commies pretending to be Democrats will be defeated.

      LukeHandCool in reply to Fuzzy Slippers. | August 14, 2013 at 4:09 pm

      Add Fuzzy Slippers to my point number 4, above.

      I originally thought of mentioning her and a few others, but I feared some might think, “My God, he sounds like some kind of lecherous psycho.”

      I do so have to protect my sterling reputation at LI. Even if it means having to occasionally forgo flirting with the HOT*HOT*HOT conservative women here.

      There I go again.

There is only one solution, irrespective of Pollyannaish dreams of rallying around the flag. The breach is too great, the leftist too feral and too indoctrinated in ideology that is immoral, unethical, mendacious, and forever poised to immolate those not so indoctrinated. Dissolution of the Republic is the solution.
It was hailed as a good thing for the USSR, India, Yugoslavia,etc.etc. It would be a good thing for the USA, also.

I detest the false equivalence in the article, ie “both sides do it”. An easy proof is (was) the Althouse blog – conservatives wanted to discuss the issues, liberals wanted to throw feces at the conservatives.

Henry Hawkins | August 14, 2013 at 3:33 pm

Don’t recall where I heard it, and I’ll probably mangle the analogy, but it’s like a group of leftists and a group of conservatives find themselves on the same Greyhound bus in, say, St. Louis MO. The lefties demand to go to Los Angeles, while the conservatives demand to go to New York City.

How to compromise?

* SHRUG * …. its pretty simple I have very little in common with idiots and feel no compelling need to subject myself to their idiocy

delicountessa | August 14, 2013 at 6:29 pm

That’s exactly right. I was talking to a Leftist and we were engaging in hypothetical scenarios concerning Healthcare. We both acknowledged that it was, indeed, a hypothetical HC plan. She wanted Single-payer. I said if the government had to be involved, I preferred Dr. Carson’s idea of funded HSAs. I suggested that those who would prefer the HSA would get them and those who wanted Single Payer could do that. She was absolutely adamant (even in this dream world) that nobody should be allowed to have the type of healthcare they wanted unless they wanted Single Payer. Can you imagine being so wrapped up on collectivism that you can’t even PRETEND to give another person choices?

Ain’t a hand-shaking politician alive who just uses two categories to describe his voters. It’s an INSIDE GAME!

But people haven’t figured out, yet, that insiders make all the decisions. While lots of people say when they go to vote they have to hold their noses.

There also really isn’t a functioning “right.” Some people really, really believe there is, though. They put lots of effort (outside the inner circle), expressing their delights and their displeasures. Alas, all are ignored.

But the trick works!

The other thing that is known is that if your country is full of poor people they will vote more taxes on the rich. Which makes things worse, if you look at the Laffer Curve.

Who’s the most powerful man in DC? Harry Reid.

No. It’s not Obama. Because Obama thinks “meeting and greeting” people are something he disdains. One of the few politicians who hates this part of politics. Another one was Nixon.

How long before they try to pull out another skewed regression between IQ and increasingly progressive thinking?