From my inbox

A friend predicted a 7% Kerry margin of victory. Obviously that did not happen. He asked himself why:


So...I've been mulling this whole thing over, and
thought I'd share with you something I wrote to
another friend of mine and see what you think...
As I have begun mulling over the "what happened to my
7% popular vote margin?" question, a couple of
scenarios/explanations have come to mind:

a) Somehow, all the conventional political wisdom,
from voter turnout levels all the way down to silly
things like the Redskins losing have for some reason
been totally upended, heralding some kind of new,
scary age in American politics in which the votes of
the rural and exurban contingent of Jesus Freaks
(a.k.a. the American Taliban), manipulated by shysters
like W. into voting against their own true best
interest, combine with the corporate crowd to have
enough votes to consistently maintain Republican
control of both the executive and legislative branches
of government.

This is the "Damn, these Americans
really *are* stupid, ignorant fools" scenario.


b) If you lie about every single damn thing under the
sun, and use every avenue available to you to keep the
facts secret (or even claim, when presented with the
facts, that your failures aren't even failures but
successes, the world is really flat, and 2+2=48,000),
lie about anyone who disgrees with you to the point of
practically accusing them of treason and sedition, and
then lie some more with the goal of scaring the shit
out of the populace, you can capture 51% of the vote
even if a majority of the public doesn't even believe
you deserve to win or that you're doing a good job.

This is the "Well, I guess these Americans are
severely lacking in critical thinking skills if they
managed to get fooled by this shit but I can cut them
some slack because it takes quite a bit of work to see
through the propaganda screen" scenario. Or maybe one
could call it the "The
Good Germans" scenario.

Good Germans, eh? I edited a book for a prof in grad school titled "The Path to Collective Madness" which is exactly what this line of reasoning is about. A shared delusion which allows us to short circuit our own good sense in order to rationalize the most evil of deed, such as the holocost, the Rwandan genocide, Bosnia, etc.

The trouble with this is that this episode of collective madness is domestic. I say keep on eye on your neighbors, especially the ones who voted for Bush.