The Firefox installation on my laptop is highly customized. I’ve essentially created a “dashboard” from which I run my daily routine. One of the menus on that dashboard is a blogroll (slowly making it’s way into the sidebar on the left). Honestly, I wasn’t sure that Nate Silver (of FiveThirtyEight.com) would remain on my daily blogroll after the election was decided. Sure, he had an almost uncanny knack for accurately predicting the outcome of elections, but I wasn’t sure that type of mind (in my thoughts, a mathematician’s mind) would make for an interesting blog after all the fuss died down.
Well, I stopped by FiveThirtyEight.com today, and started to glance through his latest post. This paragraph stunned me (emphasis mine).
This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don’t win elections anymore. It is not that conservatism generally permits less nuance than liberalism (in terms of political messaging, that is probably one of conservatism’s strengths). Rather, the key lies in the second passage that I highlighted. There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.
Reading his interview with Mr. Ziegler felt like reading a transcript of a conversation I might have with my father. It has always amazed me that my father, when he has one of his beliefs called into question, falls back on the Bible as “proof” of his statements. Not only do I not believe like my father does, I dispute the very basis of that belief – that the Christian/Hebrew Holy Texts are valid sources of truth.
It is simply astonishing how blind religious conservatives have become to the basic reality that what they say and believe isn’t obviously irrefutable truth. I believe that this last election might have been the tolling of the bell for the Republican Party, or at least its current religious conservative-centric incarnation. I certainly hope I’m right.
