The Weapon

Some might argue that I overprioritize understanding the other side, believing I'm not unlike the multiculturalists who wish us to deepen our understanding of the root causes of terrorism so that we become less apt to kill terrorists. On the contrary, I advocate understanding their vision because I see it as our potentially greatest weapon, for its one they'll never be able to possess.

I reiterate that the hardcore lefties like Chomsky, Jesse Jackson, and the trolls who make rude comments on conservative blogs have almost no hope of seeing the light. Fortunately, they don't make up a very sizeable portion of the electorate.

The "war for hearts and minds" instead lies among those who only peripherally pay attention to politics, those who may or may not consistently vote for either party (or even at all) and who don't necessarily equate their sense of self with a political viewpoint. (This is supposedly conventional wisdom, but I see the GOP spending much more time identifying Republicans than creating new ones.)

It's therefore we who care about this stuff on the right and they who care about this stuff on the left competing for the hearts of the relatively apathetic, and as I argued in my last post, they control most of our educational system and popular culture, hence their long-term advantage.

But the left's inherent disadvantage we fail to exploit is their total lack of understanding of our point of view. They either blithely dismiss what we really have to say, distort it in their own minds before allowing themselves to consider it, shout over us when we come to speak on their campuses, or simply let the matter remain unconsidered. "The debate is closed on global warming."

Were they able to challenge our views on their own merits, I highly doubt they would spend so much time and effort to keep us from expressing them (speech codes on campuses, speakers getting shouted down, cyber-attacks on blogs, crimes prevented by private citizens with guns not mentioned in the newspaper, etc.)

Therefore, if we can get our perspective heard within favorable parameters, they will loose their advantage, and they seem to know this better than we do.

However, the very nature of their vision gives them some exceptionally effective tools to prevent this. We need to understand their vision because we must to know why certain conditions favor them so heavily.

If we can shift the debate to one of facts within the correct context, we can and will persuade Joe Sixpack. Instead, on almost every issue, we allow ourselves to debate within the parameter upon which the entirety of leftism is based.

This can change, if, and only if, we recognize how we've been helping them.