Don't be so quick to assume that taking over the GOP, assuming it could be done, would work.
From Joel Skousen, in his Aug. 24 World Affairs Brief, discussing the GOP's treatment of Ron:
"Hopefully, this will end the movement's false hope that you can take over or reform the Republican party. Even if we did, the media and key politicians would suddenly claim the Republican Party was 'captured by extremists' and move to form a new party which they would instantly grant majority status. That's what they did in Israel when they formed Kadima.
"And even if it were possible to finally expose the conspiracy which controls both parties, they would reform and create new parties with new names and fresh faces, but controlled by the same people. That's what they did in Italy in 1994 when all the major parties were exposed for corruption. Fighting secret combinations of power in government is extremely difficult once they have gained control of a majority in Congress, the courts, and the media, not to mention the secret organs of enforcement in the police state."
They will indeed try to do this, but forcing them to do so would be a victory in and of itself: The GOP has a 150 year tradition, and identity politics with the GOP brand are strong. When we force the neocon leaders into starting a new party, they will have a significant degree of difficulty establishing the legitimacy of that party as a sole competitor to the Democrats, even with the media's help. In the best case scenario, we'll hold the Republican Party, and their top-down splinter party will fizzle out after ordinary Republicans see them as sore losers and control freaks. In the worst case scenario, they'll gain traction...but this moment of confusion would still briefly destabilize the two-party system and give other third parties an unprecedented chance to get a piece of the action as well. With some luck, we could take advantage of this period and get enough people elected to Congress to replace winner-take-all plurality voting with range voting and proportional delegation, thereby destroying the two-party system for good.
All that said, we must totally expect this reaction and prepare for counteracting the media propaganda the best we can. Nothing is certain...but all we can do is our best. At the very least, we'll make them work for it for once.
This sounds about right to me. Those people aren't going to just say "welp, you beat us, I guess we just have to lay down and accept it." They will find somewhere else to carry on if they're unable to in the Republican Party. That's why the primary focus must be intellectual and educational, not political. Once we win the intellectual battle, the political battles will take care of themselves. The way to win is with intellectual conversion combined with plain old attrition.
Unfortunately, you overestimate the average person's intelligence and open-mindedness, because you have exceptional intelligence yourself. We've come to the point of diminishing returns for purely educational approaches, because most people do not have even remotely rational personality types, and they do not form their views based on intellectual conversation or rational arguments.
Instead, most people form their views based on social cues and conformity and pick up logical supporting arguments later, so they can defend their views just well enough when challenged to sidestep serious cognitive dissonance. The less intelligent someone is, the less they need to know for this, because they're less able to recognize competence or judge an argument's validity. If an argument goes over an average or below average thinker's head, they're likely to just dismiss it and fall back on insults or restate their original points, unaware they've already been demolished. (Virtually everyone does things like this on occasions when they're being absent-minded, but some people make it much more of a habit.
) At the farthest frontiers of incompetence that push the boundaries of credulity, complete idiots won't realize they're losing an argument under almost any circumstances, unless they're made to feel out of touch with the peers whose acceptance they rely upon. That's the one thing most people can't handle: Social rejection. Not coincidentally, most of us are pretty good at dealing with that, which is part of the reason we let our minds stray far enough from the mainstream to take libertarian arguments seriously in the first place.
No matter how emotional, irrational, and biased people are though, almost everyone has brief windows of "vulnerability" to growth when the social atmosphere changes: For instance, if someone who values strength and power ties their identity to the "strength" of the GOP and suffers a humbling loss, it can shake them enough to actually start thinking and wondering why. (McCain's loss helped in this regard.) Similarly, if someone sees that former pariahs are now taking over a major party and ousting former power brokers, this signals a shift in the winds. The same applies to winning elections. It's popular in libertarian circles to think that we need to educate a lot of people, because that's how we came around, but we're exceptional in a lot of different ways. In many ways, it's actually winning that demonstrates "social proof" of an idea's viability (popularity and social acceptability) and opens people up to it.
If we want to actually bring people over, we have to understand how they think...and most people do not think like us at all. We can either learn from this and adapt, or we can continue running into brick walls.
