At one level, this article is extremely funny -- although it is also sad. Some left coast liberals took a "safari" to of all places, Western Wisconsin .. places I'm very familar with. The following paragraph is what I believe the BOistan "Declaration of Government Dependence" to replace the old American one might be ...
We hold these truths to be self evident; Uncreated, randomly evolved humans can be educated, indoctrinated, or forced to believe in the true way of centralized all powerful government proscribing their every thought and action." (The New Preamble of BOistan, Year ONE of No god but Government)
So after some crying time after the election, the "Third Way" decided to go on safari in this strange land they did not understand.
Third Way, for its part, announced in January it would spend $20 million on what it called the “New Blue” campaign to “provide Democrats with a path out of the wilderness.” Like many of their peers, the think tank’s brain trust had been stunned by the election. On November 9, too devastated to work, its staff had simply sat together and cried.Here we have the premises of their trip ...
One shudders to think what "the middle" in the minds of these people is -- they built a lot of Hillary's strategy, so clearly, HILLARY was a fairly "non-partisan, consensus meet in the middle" candidate in their minds.
The trip was predicated on the optimistic notion that if Americans would only listen to each other, they would find more that united than divided them. This notion—the idea that, beyond our polarized politics, lies a middle, or third, path on which most can come together in agreement—is Third Way’s raison d’etre. It is premised on the idea that partisanship is bad, consensus is good, and that most Americans would like to meet in the middle.
In the old country of America, politics was usually well down the list of things of importance ... God, Family, Friends, Vocation, Community, Hobbies, Pets ... and then somewhere on the 2nd set of fingers, the priority of politics might pop up. Crying about politics was generally unthinkable in America unless you or someone close to you was a losing candidate.
In Ellsworth WI, a local farmer explained to the anthropologists what was wrong -- he could just as well have been talking to the elite in ancient Summeria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, or Victorian England -- bureaucracy, parasites, vampires, syncophants, toadies, lackeys, etc are anything but a new problem for humanity.
“You’ve got all these parasites making a living off the bureaucracy,” the farmer declared, “like leeches pulling you down, bleeding you dry.” We had been in the state for just a few hours, and already the researchers’ quest for mutual understanding seemed to be hitting a snag.Certainly Hillary strategists are positive that "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" is a completely sensible statement. To the extent the "Third Way" makes any sense at all, is to forget left and right, let's have one huge single party government where we ALL think alike -- you know, CORRECTLY. It's the TP ("The Party - D) way!
It isn't that they could not find broad consensus, it is just that the only example of such was that young people no longer wanted to work ...
As we proceeded to meetings with diverse groups of community representatives, this sort of blame-casting was a common refrain. Disdain for the young, in particular, was a constant, across demographic, socio-economic, and generational lines: Even young people complained about young people. “They don’t want to do the work, and they always feel like they’re being picked on,” a recent graduate of a technical school in Chippewa Falls said of his fellow Millennials.The low point for at least one of the 3rd Way folks was with a group of organic farming hippies who she thought would be dedicated consensus builders like themselves.
“I had a very hard time with that meeting,” she finally said. “The longer the meeting went on, the more it started to feel to me like just another community that had isolated itself, and it was right and everybody else wasn’t, you know?” The hippies should have been her kind of people, but the attitudes they’d expressed had offended her sense of the way America ought to be. She had come seeking mutual understanding, only to find that some people were not the least bit interested in meeting in the middle. And now she was at a crossroads: Would she have to revise her whole worldview to account for this troubling reality?
In the end, the safari found that BOistan was just like what they thought it was ... strong work ethic, lots of agreement, 70% of the people are "in the middle", meaning the "I'm with IT" -- Hillary, transgender, kneeling for the anthem, DC is great. In short, the BOistan that they expected to find. Confirmation Bias is alive and well. The 3rd way turned out to be "just another group that isolated itself, and it was right and everybody else wasn't, you know?"
I'm thinking that a good many folks in previous nations that went from being successful to being sucked dry by a blood sucking leech of an Adminstrative State bureaucracy and large parts of the population paid off in one way or another to at least be quiet, would find more than a little of "deja vu all over again". Isolated elites living off the fruits of the little guys and surrounded with a bubble that tells them that all is A-OK would not be "new news" in the time of the Akkadian Empire over 2K years BC ... a glance through all the empires that have risen and fallen through history is theraputic from time to time.
How would someone come to agreement on some value, ANY value that "70%" of BOistani's are in agreement on? People need to stand for the flag / anthem? Nah. "Hard Work"??? Seriously? Over half of the population is is drawing funds from the federal government in one way or another. God? Not likely ... I maintain there is not a single value that 70% of BOistanis agree on.
How SHOULD "America" be? It would be nice to agree on what America even WAS before it's destruction to BOistan before we try to think about that!
'via Blog this'
Thanks for pointing out this article. It is strange that the Third Way group was chosen for this study because their members live in a bubble on the coast. This article paints the Third Way as a group that is fragile and is driven "over the edge" and Nancy put it by hearing opinions that a different than the typical west/left coast elites. I would have expected the $20 million dollars for these field trips be funded to a more diverse research group that can actually handle the truth about America. America is diverse and there are diverse opinions out there. What a a shock.
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