Interesting article on Frank Luntz who I know only by his multiple appearances on Hannity (Fox News) or after debates of one type or another. He (or the host) asks a focus group of ordinary folks of mixed political persuasions and either getting “hand raise” answers or “intensity dialing”. Well, I haven’t seen much of him lately, and as this snippet from the Left leaning Atlantic shows, he is despairing of our future since his “claim to fame” is that he listens to people (before doing his political wordcrafting):
…It was what Luntz heard from the American people that scared him. They were contentious and argumentative. They didn’t listen to each other as they once had. They weren’t interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor. “They want to impose their opinions rather than express them,” is the way he describes what he saw. “And they’re picking up their leads from here in Washington.” Haven’t political disagreements always been contentious, I ask? “Not like this,” he says. “Not like this.”
Luntz knew that he, a maker of political messages and attacks and advertisements, had helped create this negativity, and it haunted him. But it was Obama he principally blamed. The people in his focus groups, he perceived, had absorbed the president’s message of class divisions, haves and have-nots, of redistribution. It was a message Luntz believed to be profoundly wrong, but one so powerful he had no slogans, no arguments with which to beat it back. In reelecting Obama, the people had spoken. And the people, he believed, were wrong. Having spent his career telling politicians what the people wanted to hear, Luntz now believed the people had been corrupted and were beyond saving. Obama had ruined the electorate, set them at each other’s throats, and there was no way to turn back.
Why not? I ask. Isn’t finding the right words to persuade people what you do? “I’m not good enough,” Luntz says. “And I hate that. I have come to the extent of my capabilities. And this is not false modesty. I think I’m pretty good. But not good enough.” The old Frank Luntz was sure he could invent slogans to sell the righteous conservative path of personal responsibility and free markets to anyone. The new Frank Luntz fears that is no longer the case, and it’s driving him crazy.
As Andrew Breitbart said, “politics is downstream from the culture” – and what has drifted down from culture? Peoples’ ideas of what Government should do are a function of what they learned in school and afterwards, what they see in the culture. Each little message in the media (magazines, tv, movies, music), the ideas expressed in our celebrity worshiping media, in the pop culture, and in higher education – drip by drip by drip the Left’s socialist message has added up. The Italian Communist / Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci understood this well and set the stage – if not by revolution, then take over the cultural institutions and turn the culture inside out. Do what is necessary to sever the traditional culture from its historical foundations and you don’t have to change the politics – the culture will do it for you with just little nudges. The 60s Marxist radicals learned that lesson well when their efforts at revolution failed; they burrowed into culture and set about to change the culture and educational system.
Republicans, however, have concentrated (and that only in short bursts that surround elections) on the politics; pickup games of short duration. The other side has been involved in a 100 year marathon that had no timeouts and we are now seeing that the traditional virtues that made this country great (honor, duty, self-responsibility, work ethic, delayed gratification, Constitutional boundaries, fiscal frugality, a vibrant Civil Society, an absolute morality based on Judeo-Christian values) have been overridden by a hiding or lying about our history, a disparagement of the Founders and their radical idea that Individuals should trump the Collective, that Government is supposed to see to your every need (instead of the limited purpose of protecting our Liberties & Freedoms), and that the nucleus family that formed the foundation of our nation is in the process of being so fundamentally transformed and redefined that it is hardly recognizable.
As I wrote about yesterday, this current generation now shows the reaping of that 100 year transformation – it expects everything to be given to them – that no one has to provide for themselves but everyone must attend to their needs.
Luntz may be reacting rationally to what he has heard and what he has seen electorally. After all, what is the number one topic politically in DC? Yes, that’s right – more entitlement spending either by direct government expenditures (extending, once again, “temporary” unemployment spending) or by Government telling businesses you WILL pay more of your money to others (the furtherment of Government simply absorbing companies into itself; in this case, raising the minim wage).
I don’t think we will ever be a united people again – the Foreign Political Philosophy known as Progressivism may have grabbed too much of the electoral beachhead – and the befuddled Republican Party wears the mantle of the Stupid Party way to often to figure out how to kick them off it. In the last eight years, the only bright spot has been the Citizen uprising otherwise known the TEA Party – and in four short years it has accomplished than the Left did in its first few decades.
All I hear from the Establishment Republicans to me as a Social Conservative is that the Party should concentrate solely on fiscal issues. Every time, I respond that every social issue has a fiscal cost to it. They refuse to take the blinders off to the fact that the Left uses both fiscal & cultural issues to form its political club with which to beat them up with about the head, shoulders, and other vulnerable parts. They want to play a half-court game of B-ball while the other side is running a full-court press.
Like him or not (or me, for whatever reason), it remains to be seen if the Republican Party will smarten up and learn from Luntz’s observation, that the culture has ingrained an anti-traditional American angst as the Communists assaulted the culture and social cliffs even as the Republicans played in the ripples on the beach.
