Author: Mark Noonan

What is Diplomacy?

Mark Noonan24 Comments

There have been several attempts at defining this.  Webster has it as “the work of maintaining good relations between the governments of different countries”, but that is a lot of nonsense.  You don’t need good relations between governments – in fact, good relations can some times hamper diplomacy (ties of sentiment are deadly when dealing with intra-governmental issues).  Will Rogers came closer when he said, “diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggy’ until you can find a rock”.  But that isn’t quite right, either – because the purpose of diplomacy is to not have to use the rock.  But, make no mistake about it, the rock must be part of the equation.

I’ll say that diplomacy is the art of adjusting competing claims between actors of relatively equal power with war as the punishment for diplomatic failure.

It has to be between entities of roughly equal power or it isn’t diplomacy – it is either the stronger imposing its will on the weaker, or the stronger being generous to the weaker for whatever reason.  Only between equals can there be diplomacy – two equals (or two groups who are roughly equal) can sit down at the table and try to adjust their differences, all the while with the knowledge that failure to come to agreement means war – and being as it would be a war between roughly equal powers, no one on either side could be entirely sure of the result, and so the incentive is strongly in favor of coming to a deal.  Unless, that is, one side is determined upon war no matter what.  In such a case, diplomacy also cannot happen – because if one side is determined upon war no matter what and the other side is determined on peace no matter what, then the aggressive side is the stronger and will impose its will on the weaker…and, once again, you don’t have diplomacy.  Let’s look at some examples to illustrate my definition:

1.  It is said that we negotiated a treaty with Panama in 1903 in order to build the canal.  We did nothing of the kind.  We told Panama what we wanted and bade them sign on the dotted line or we wouldn’t build the canal, which is the only reason for Panama to exist.  This was the stronger imposing its will on the weaker.  Not diplomacy.

2.  It is said we negotiated a security treaty with Japan in 1951.  We did nothing of the kind.  Because Japan occupies a strategically vital area in the Asia-Pacific, we promised to protect Japan in return for obtaining certain privileges for our military forces in Japan.  It was a good move by us because Japan is a useful ally to have – but the security of the United States does not in any way depend upon the existence of Japan, and its not like a Japanese army would ever arrive in the United States to help defend us against foreign aggression. This was the stronger being generous to the weaker. Not diplomacy.

3.  When Chamberlain, Hitler, Daladier and Mussolini gathered in Munich in 1938, three of the four were determined to have peace at any price, one of them was determined upon war no matter what.  That it wound up with an agreement rather than war was because of the rather startling amount of surrender that Chamberlain and Daladier agreed to – they eventually decided that Hitler should get the spoils of war without war (keep in mind, that if they hadn’t agreed, Hitler would have gone to war in 1938 rather than waiting until 1939).  This was rather unique in human history (to that point, at least) but it still illustrates the point:  with one side willing war no matter what and the other willing peace no matter what, the warlike side becomes immediately the stronger and imposes its will upon the weaker.  Not diplomacy.

4.  When the USSR challenged the United States by putting nuclear missiles in Cuba, both affected parties were roughly equal in power and both sides were equally determined to avoid war.  Negotiations were tense and many fears were raised, but the fact of the matter is that as both were equally strong and no one was willing war, a deal was bound to happen unless some horrific accident took place.  The basics of the deal eventually agreed to were Russian nukes out of Cuba, American nukes out of Turkey.  That is diplomacy.

Now, why bring all this up?  Because as we have gone through the Ukraine crisis, no one is understanding that among all the varied things going on, diplomacy isn’t one of them.  Diplomacy will never be one of them – it can’t be as there aren’t two equal sides involved her.  Oh, to be sure, the power of the United States, alone, is enough to fight and defeat Russia…and the combined power of just Germany and France could probably make short work of Putin’s burgeoning empire.  But no one who dislikes Putin’s actions is putting on the table anything like the force necessary to give Putin pause and make him want to turn to diplomacy…which would, once again, be an adjustment of interests between equal powers and war as the price of failure.  It is my belief that Putin does not desire war – not with us, not with the European Union, not with anyone.  If there were power to match his power, he would climb down and negotiate a diplomatic settlement.  Such a settlement would, of course, have to grant Russia some of her desires – that is the thing about diplomacy: it is never a matter of anyone getting all they want.  It is a deal between equals and each gives a bit, because they don’t want a war which would be more costly than whatever it is they have to surrender to reach a deal.  But with a complete vacuum of power opposite Russia, there is no need for Russia to fear war, and thus no reason to use diplomacy.  Might as well grab all you can while the getting is good.

All the huffing and puffing of Obama, Kerry and the collective world won’t do anything.  To be sure, Putin might graciously agree to eventually sign something which will be hailed as a diplomatic settlement, but you can rest assured – unless there comes along a credible threat of war against Russia – that whatever settlement is agreed to will be entirely in accordance with Putin’s view of Russia’s interests.  In other words, he’ll merely take what he wants at the moment, leave an option to grab what he hasn’t got and attend an international conference to ratify what he’s done.  It’ll be a nice meal and pictures taken and his own press back home will laud him (or else!) as the greatest Russian in a century, etc.

Now that I’ve said all that, what do I think we should do?  Normally, I would advocate a vigorous American response to this but given our current condition and our current President, I’m saying that surrender isn’t so bad.  To be sure, its bad for the people who will come under Putin’s embrace, but I’m not so sure how a half-hearted and incompetently conducted military campaign leading to eventual American failure would help – and, of course, such a thing would actually harm.  As under Obama we are bound to have nothing but the aforementioned half-hearted, etc, I figure we just cut to the chase and make the best of a bad situation.  We can start to repair this in 2017 – hopefully under leadership which isn’t quite as bad as Obama’s.  It is a sad and distressing position for America to be in, but we have no one to blame but ourselves – we might be able to assign our 2008 vote to well-intentioned folly, but our 2012 vote was a gigantic mistake with sufficient facts clearly known.  Now we just have to pay the price for it.

Yes, I Wonder About This, Too

Mark Noonan19 Comments

What he said:

John C. Wright ponders. Ponder with him.

“Perhaps, like me, you have wondered how it is that so many people, otherwise honest, can adopt without demur the Orwellian anti-language of Political Correctness; how it is that so many people, otherwise rational, can adopt without demur the paradoxes, self-contradictions and logical absurdities involved in relativistic morality, materialistic ontology, subjective epistemology, and the other nuggets of vacuous blather forming the foundations of modern thought; how it is that so many people, otherwise possessing good taste, can without demur fund and support and praise the blurry aberrations of modern art, praise ugliness, despise beauty; how it is that so many people, otherwise good and peaceful, can praise and support and excuse the hellish enormities and mass murders of figures like Che and Mao and Stalin and Castro; or can view with cold eye the piles of tiny corpses heaped outside abortion mills, and make such enemies of the human race into heroes; or can rush to the defense of Mohammedan terrorists with freakish shrieks of ‘€˜Islamophobia!’€™ and ‘€˜Racist!’ even thought to be wary of Jihadists bent on your destruction is rational rather than phobic, and even thought Mohammedanism is a religion, not a race; how otherwise happy, moral, reasonable and decent people can not merely excuse sexual perversion, but will be swept up in a fervor of righteous indignation even if someone points out the biological or Biblical reality of the situation; and likewise excuse lies in their leaders, and adulteries, and abuses of power, and abuses of drugs, and any number of things these otherwise ordinary people would never do themselves.

“And, finally, perhaps, like me, you have wondered why it is that these people who are otherwise civil nonetheless can neither explain their positions nor stop talking, and their talk consists of nothing, nothing, nothing aside from childish personal attacks, slanders, sneers, and accusation, accusation, accusation.   Why are they so angry? Why are they so noisy? Why are they so blissfully unaware of the vice, injustice, ugliness and evil they support?

More on this pondering here.  He has some very good insights.  Of course, a lot of them were insighted a bit back and can be read here (yes, its a whole book).  Main thing is that it is good to fully understand where they – our Progressive friends – are coming from.

Is Latvia Next?

Mark Noonan7 Comments

A bit worrisome:

Last week, I warned that the next step for Russia after seizing the Crimea over the status of ethnic Russians would take place in the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia. All it would take, I argued, would be for Moscow to foment unrest in those ethnic-Russian communities, antagonize the governments in both states, and then insist that Russia had to intervene to protect them. More than a quarter of the population in both countries consist of ethnic Russians, while in Ukraine it only came to 18%.

Now it looks like Moscow will skip over the unrest pretext and demand the right to act as economic protector  in Latvia…

Russia is claiming – probably correctly, to a certain extent – that ethnic Russians in Latvia (as well as in Lithuania and Estonia) are not well treated.  Given the absolutely cruel and brutal treatment the Baltic people suffered at the hands of Russians under the USSR, this is no surprise, at all.

All three nations are NATO allies and members of the European Union – if Russia challenges the independence of these three, small nations, then it is our bound duty to defend them, even up to war.  We’ll see how this plays out – but our weakness (and the military impotence of the European Union) is encouraging Russia to get aggressive.  Of course, this new pressure on the Baltic front just might be a blind…Russia will, as part of a “deal” officially back down on the Baltic States in return for our backing down even further on Ukraine.  We’ll see.

Why Did Putin Do It? Because He Thinks He’ll Win

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Later this year, on the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, I’m going to be writing an article about how I view that war – but I’ll give one spoiler right now:  the reason the war started, ultimately, was because the Germans thought they could win it.  That is why all wars start – one sides thinks they’ll win.  And not only thinks they’ll win, but thinks they’ll win in a walk over.  Wars aren’t started by people who are resigned to a difficult task with a doubtful outcome – wars are started by people who think they’ve got it sewn.

And Putin has sent troops in to Ukraine because he thinks he’ll win – and win rather easily.  Whether or not he’ll try to take over the whole country instead of the heavily-Russian eastern part remains to be seen.  But if Putin thinks he can grab the whole of Ukraine in an easy war, he’ll do it.  Now, why should Putin think that?

Well, first off, Ukraine is militarily not all that strong – a lot of their equipment is antiquated Soviet equipment (though upgraded a bit over the years), their armed forces are relatively small compared to Russia’s and, of course, a large minority of Ukrainians are Russians – not inclined to fight against the Russian army, even if not entirely favorable to coming under Russian rule. Furthermore, and probably decisively, Putin does not fear any serious response from anyone.  NATO?  Toothless.  EU?  Blind and toothless.  United States?  Distant and ruled over by fools who don’t understand how the world works.  The harshest thing on the table so far is that we’ll kick them out of the G-8.  Big whoop.  Like Putin will care too much about that – and like he won’t be invited back in a few years from now when tempers have cooled.

The only thing which would have stopped Putin is either a militarily powerful Ukraine or a United States not only powerful, but clearly willing to make Putin’s life miserable for years over the matter.  Neither being forthcoming, Putin moved.  Whether or not there will be some “deal” to smooth things over or whether it will go all the way to annexation by Russia remains to be seen – but Putin has just shown that he is in charge in that area of the world.  Ukraine knows that they can only go so far in offending Russia while other nations on Russia’s borders (especially the Baltic States) have been clearly warned that being tight with the west only offends Putin, while the west will do nothing concrete to oppose an offended Russia.

The worse problem is that the cat is really out of the bag, now.  Every two-bit tyrant out there who wants to grab himself a bit of geo-political territory knows that now is the time to start grabbing – with the United States effectively out of the picture as long as Democrats are in charge, the sky is the limit.

And, Meanwhile, the World Burns Down

Mark Noonan42 Comments

We’ve got stories that Venezuela’s government is importing Cuban mercenaries to suppress revolution while the President of Ukraine has fled Kiev.  Elsewhere, Syria is still a blood bath, the Taliban are poised to return to power in Afghanistan five minutes after we leave and the war clouds continue to grow in the Asia-Pacific theater.

Just when do we start to get some of that “smart diplomacy” that Obama promised?

Here’s the thing – if you ever wondered what would happen if American power were removed from the scene, here ya go.  This is what a post-American world looks like.  To put it bluntly, as the smoke cleared over the radioactive rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world became peaceful only in so far as America prevented war.  Through nearly four years of global battle and at high cost in blood and treasure, the United States emerged in 1945 as both the arbiter of the world and its guarantor of peace.  All the UN organizations; all the international talk-shops; all the treaties and discussions and agreements and alliances – all were completely pointless except that the United States stood behind them.  No one on this earth then (or even now, actually) wanted to ever fight us, again, in a general war.  Small wars on the side could be managed, but no one ever wanted to re-awaken the Sleeping Giant.  To do so was national suicide.  As long as our power was there as a standing threat, everything could be kept under control.

Take America out of the equation and very quickly everything would fall apart.

And so it has, because we are out of the equation.  While our power is intact, the President of the United States refuses to use it and the world knows he will not.  This is because Obama – that child of modern American indoctrination dressed up as education – believes absolutely that the problems the world has had since 1945 were caused by us, rather than kept from getting out of hand by us.  Obama was told in school that if there was a war or oppression some where, then it was because the United States did it – he never learned that the war or oppression was kept from becoming completely horrific simply because we were there, and at will could utterly destroy whomever was making war or causing oppression.  The world now knows that no matter what anyone does, Obama simply will not do anything about it – and so it just goes from bad to worse out there.  Believe it or not, people can be downright evil – they don’t have to be forced to be evil by a clever CIA plot.  I know this will simply stagger our liberals, but its just one of those hard facts of life.

The world is in more danger of a long, general war than at any time since the 1930’s.  We’ll see how it comes out.  Hopefully we can keep out of any war until at least January 20th, 2017 because more fearful than Obama refusing to use American power would be having that man use American power…it would be like giving a machine gun to a drunk.  We’ll have to rebuild all this after Obama is gone – pray it doesn’t take another world war to do it.

The Necessity of TEA Party and RINO Unity

Mark Noonan125 Comments

Churchill once said that if Hitler had invaded hell, he would have made at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.  That was to put it a bit extreme, of course, but Churchill was trying to point out the gravity of the situation.  There wasn’t anything more important for him – and his country – at that time then fighting off Hitler and in service of that goal, he was willing to put up with quite a lot he didn’t actually like.  While we, as a people, are not at death grips with a threat as imminent as that, we are confronted today with an existential threat to our nation – namely, an extreme leftist Democrat party under Barack Obama determined to “fundamentally transform” America.  And its not like they are willing to use truth and rational argument, nor are they in any sense concerned about the legality of their actions.  They are determined to have their way – convinced, of course, that eventually we’ll all love the result.  The trouble is that a republic cannot survive long if the people in charge of it cease to obey the laws – that is what ultimately killed the Roman republic; political leaders determined to have their way simply ignored the law and did what they wished…bribing the people to acceptance with bread and circuses (sound familiar?).  Obama is no dictator – but what he is doing is ensuring that we’ll eventually get one, if we don’t stop this course of action.  And doing that takes winning political victories in 2014 and 2016.

As long time readers know, I am not at all a fan of the GOP establishment.  I do consider them too tight with the corrupt, Big Government/Big Corporation crony-capitalist elite.  But here’s the thing:  there are strong indicators that ObamaCare is causing an implosion of support for liberal Democrats all across the nation.  The political landscape has a very definite 2010ish feel about it.  But here’s the thing – if we go about demanding absolute political purity then we will blow this opportunity.  We must, of course, elect the most conservative candidate possible – but some times that will wind up being someone who is of a RINOish bent.  Now is not the time for political purity, but for all patriots to rally to the defense of their nation.  If we don’t win over 2014 and 2016, then the story of our nation is probably told.  If we don’t stop the rot – what Obama calls the “fundamental transformation” of this nation – then we will eventually go financially and morally bankrupt and, probably, break up in to a series of small republics, easy prey to the rising powers in the world.

Given that Obama and any possible Democrat successor to him will continue to just break the law as necessary in order to advance their leftwing ideology, it fundamentally doesn’t matter who we put in to office, as long as they will at least obey the laws.  This is the crucial moment – this is where we decide, finally, whether the notion of popular government is rational or absurd.  We went through this once before in the Civil War and determined that a people can govern themselves against an attempt to break up the nation – now we need to find out if people can govern themselves against an attempt by the government to break the laws.

As this is the case, it is not time to be hammering on Boehner, McConnell or other GOP leaders.  Go ahead and be mad about the recent approval of  the debt limit hike – that plus $5 will get you a cup of coffee…and, in the long run, a government which will do whatever the whim of the President is at the moment.  The GOP leaders see that the political landscape is favorable to the Republican party as long as we don’t give the Democrats a way out of the ObamaCare box.  ObamaCare, my friends, is the failure of liberalism writ large.  Usually these Big Government boondoggles take decades to reach total failure, and so people get used to them and the only proposals made about them are to tinker at the edges.  But ObamaCare is such a manifest failure in the lives of real people, right now, that it can’t be excused or explained away…and Obama is walking right in to a trap by refusing to countenance any legislative modifications to the law – the tinkering around the edges which would give at least an appearance of success.  Obama has always been arrogant and stupid but he managed to weave his way through because the MSM simply lied to protect him and, additionally, the American people were more than willing to give our first black President all sorts of leeway (the overwhelming majority really wanted him to be a success…not for his sake, but for the sake of the nation).  ObamaCare will crush the Democrats this fall and in 2016 – and will crush the liberal ideal that government can solve problems – provided we allow it to happen.  Give the Democrats something else to talk about (anything else…right now, they’d love to have a Select Committee on Benghazi created…anything to get the subject off of the failure of liberalism as personified in ObamaCare) and they will be able to get out of the box and perhaps stave off electoral disaster.

To be sure, to secure the full victory we need, the GOP will have to run good campaigns in 2014 and 2016.  This will not fall in to our laps – and the Democrats will break every law necessary and cheat like mad in order to deny us victory.  This is still a massive, political battle.  We do need to come forth with a series of policy proposals – but our most important thing to do, especially in 2014, is just to keep hammering on ObamaCare.  It is deeply unpopular.  It isn’t working.  It passed with almost no GOP votes (I believe there was one GOPer in an extremely blue district in Louisiana who voted for it in 2010).  It is the Democrats’ failure through and through – and absent major, legislative modification (which Obama won’t go for), it simply will not get better all through 2014, and looks to just get worse in 2015 and 2016.  Added to this increasing anxiety about the state or the world, an economy still bottomed out from the 2009 recession and increasing fear and hatred generated by Democrat hate-mongers, and we’ve got the ingredients for a major electoral shift.  Unless we blow it.  Unless, that is, we decide that being politically pure and in the political minority is better than compromising as necessary and securing political power.  And don’t forget that we have our con artists – not nearly as many as the Democrats, but there are players out there on our side who simply want to generate attention and donations for themselves and who don’t give a damn about the country…they will play the siren song of political purity, in order to aggrandize themselves.

We can win this.  We can stop the rot.  We can, over the next two decades, reform our nation back in to something resembling what the Founders intended…but our first step is to get the Democrats out of power.  If they have power, they will stop us from doing anything – they must lose it all; House, Senate, White House.  Eye on the prize, good people.

It Appears that History Will Pause in 2014

Mark Noonan22 Comments

Our liberals feel that they are on the side of history – that things always go their way in the long term and that the United States is certain to eventually be a social democratic nation.  Perhaps, but it does seem there are some bumps on the way:

The Democratic Party’s biggest super PAC, recently retooled as an early pro-Hillary Clinton effort, will sit out the midterm elections this year.

A spokesman with the group, Priorities USA Action, confirmed to BuzzFeed on Wednesday night that it would not be involved in House or Senate campaigns.

“House Majority PAC and Majority PAC are doing everything right and making a real difference. We fully support their efforts,” said the spokesman, Peter Kauffmann, referring to the main groups supporting Democratic congressional candidates.

Priorities USA, which operates under loose campaign finance rules that allow it to raise and spend unlimited sums, put $65 million behind Barack Obama in 2012…

This, as VP Biden would say, is a “big f’ing deal”.  It is an essential surrender on a large part of the Democrat money machine.  They are giving up on 2014 and setting their sights on 2016.  And there is a certain logic in this – with Obama increasingly unpopular and heading for his second mid-term, a wipe out of the Democrats was always possible.  But Democrats have learned something under Obama – as long as you’ve got the White House and one house of Congress, you can do as you please.  Just write all the executive orders you want, refuse to pass a budget and live on continuing resolutions which allow the President to move money around pretty easily to whatever is the cause of the day for Democrats.  Democrats are confident (with reason, it should be said) that they can get Hillary in to the White House…and, given the electoral map of 2016, reasonably confident that even if they lose the Senate in 2014, they can win it back in 2016 (and thus Reid has already signaled his intent to run for -re-election that year).  This is just hard nosed, political reality coming in here.

But it also means the GOP can win big – and that can set the stage for us to win in 2016, as well.  It’ll be an interesting couple years.

The End of the GOP, or a New GOP?

Mark Noonan70 Comments

Interesting:

Four Republican-leaning groups with close ties to the party’s leadership in Congress — Crossroads and its “super PAC” affiliate, the Congressional Leadership Fund, and Young Guns Action — raised a combined $7.7 million in 2013. By contrast, four conservative organizations that have battled Republican candidates deemed too moderate or too yielding on spending issues — FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth Action Fund, the Senate Conservatives Fund, and the Tea Party Patriots — raised a total of $20 million in 2013, according to Federal Election Commission reports filed on Friday.

“This is by far the biggest nonelection year we’ve ever had,” said Matt Hoskins, the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund. “It shows how committed people are to electing true conservatives and to advancing conservative principles.”

The golden rule of politics is, of course, “whoever has the gold, makes the rules”.  How long can the establishment GOP really retain control of the party when the non-establishment part of it is pulling in more money?

Democrats have been gleeful ever since 2008 over the GOP “civil war” – I haven’t viewed it in those terms.  It believe that what is happening is that the Republican Party is becoming a party of Jacksonians.  This would, no doubt, surprise and amuse that old Whig Lincoln who helped to build the Republican Party, but I don’t think he’s be dismayed by it, either.  We are a long way, after all, from the Republican Party of the 1860’s, just as we are from the Democrat Party of that era.  Things change and ever since FDR routed the Civil War era GOP in 1932, there has been no political party which has broadly expressed the old, Jacksonian principals of limited government.  Both parties have been broadly in favor of government, with just different ideas about just whom is to benefit the most from government largesse – though with both parties tending, in the last 20 years, to favor the rich and the poor over the middle class.

Jackson, it should be recalled, was for States’ rights…but not in an absurd sense, as shown when he smacked down South Carolina over nullification.  Jackson was in favor of free enterprise, but not to the idiotic limit of just allowing the rich to grind the poor.  Jackson’s power emerged out of the State militias rather than out of the traditional financial (in the North) or planter (in the South) Establishments.  Jackson would fight a man to the death to preserve his rights, but then adopt that enemy’s son and raise him as his own – this neatly encapsulates the American ideal.  Our modern Jacksonians – even if they don’t know they are – are also for States’ rights; for free enterprise (but getting more and more disgusted with crony capitalism); and for the right of the individual to live his or her life however they wish.  These are the general political ideals which are fueling the new forces in the GOP – and the forces which now look to take over the whole enterprise.

To be sure, the final part of this battle for the GOP might result in handing the Democrats just one more victory in 2016 – but the bottom line is that the old GOP Establishment will have to knuckle under to the TEA Party (broadly defined), or go over to the Democrats.  I think most will knuckle under – after all, any group which can raise $20 million in an off year is a force to be reckoned with…and a force which is probably going to win it all, in the by and by.

Conservatives Know Liberals; Liberals Don’t Know Conservatives

Mark Noonan89 Comments

From Volokh Conspiracy:

…One other point that I find really interesting and important about Haidt’s work is his findings on the ability of different groups to empathize across these ideological divides. So in his book (p. 287) Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a “typical conservative” and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: “The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’ The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.” In other words, moderates and conservatives can understand the liberal worldview and liberals are unable to relate to the conservative worldview, especially when it comes to questions of care and fairness.

In short, Haidt’s research suggests that many liberals really do believe that conservatives are heartless bastards–or as a friend of mine once remarked, “Conservatives think that liberals are good people with bad ideas, whereas liberals think conservatives are bad people”–and very liberal people think that especially strongly. Haidt suggests that there is some truth to this…

We see this all the time.  First off, anyone who is right of center in any meaningful sense can usually with 100% accuracy determine what a liberal will think on any issue before the liberal is queried.  This is why we don’t need to tune in to CNN, read the New York Times editorial page or watch the President’s State of the Union Address.  We already know what they are going to say. There is never a surprise in a liberal.

Secondly, we know that liberals will not know what we think about any particular issue, even after they have asked us.  Whatever we say will just go through the liberal’s mental filter and come out as us saying whatever the liberal believed we should have said, given that we are conservative.  The most recent example of this absurdity is the way liberals treated Huckabee’s recent comments  –  whatever one wishes to think about them, all Huckabee said as that liberals treat women as if they are unable to control their libidos and need Uncle Sugar to take care of them.  Once that went through the liberal filter, it came out in liberal thinking that Huckabee thinks that women cannot control their libidos and need Uncle Sugar to take care of them.  I can assure one and all that if Huckabee is still prominent 20 years from now, liberals will be condemning him for having once upon a time said that women cannot control their libidos.

If you read the whole article linked from Volokh, you’ll see that it starts out describing how people originally come to their views – that we tend to take up views which meet our predispositions and then tend to concentrate on evidence which confirms us, rejecting that which denies our view.  This is probably true to a certain extent.  I can see why I was open to the conservative argument when I first started paying attention to politics in the late 1970’s – Carter’s liberalism was such a clear failure that I’d have had to be an idiot to think that liberalism had the answers.  Any particular liberal out there can provide us with reasons why liberal twaddle appealed to them at the start.  But I think there is this difference – when you start entering in to conservative thought, you’ll find a variety of views right from the get-go.  Unlike the mindlessness of liberalism, conservatism has dissidents.

And because we have dissidents, we are forced to argue and when you argue (if you are to be at all successful) you have to get in to the mindset of your opponent.  You have to accord their point of view some respect and assume that they want the same good end as you, even if their means of doing so are different (and perhaps incorrect).  Liberals don’t have dissidents – the powers that be of liberalism decree that this or that is the only acceptable view and everyone must conform to it – and everyone who doesn’t is slandered as a hate-filled bigot.   Naturally, all of us would urge liberals to try and understand our views, but that won’t really be successful – a liberal who enters in to the worldview of a conservative in order to understand it would very swiftly cease to be a liberal.  Not saying that they’d go out and become TEA Party activists the next day, but they’d cease to be liberal because they’d cease to automatically accept whatever the liberal powers-that-be decree…and thus they would be ostracized by fellow liberals, and most people cannot tolerate ostracism (not for nothing did the ancient Greeks give you a choice between drinking hemlock and going in to exile; some choose hemlock as the preferable option).

What all this means is don’t expect liberals to be kind or merciful: they can’t be and remain liberals.  To remain liberals they must remain ignorant of and fearful about us.  Just keep that in mind as we battle it out.