{"id":245,"date":"2007-09-05T12:34:40","date_gmt":"2007-09-05T17:34:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hushbeck.com\/blog\/?p=245"},"modified":"2007-09-05T12:34:40","modified_gmt":"2007-09-05T17:34:40","slug":"stages-of-a-political-movement-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hushbeck.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/stages-of-a-political-movement-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Stages of a Political Movement Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Part 1<\/a> \u00a0I looked\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0at the five stages that movements in general and political movements in particular go through : \u00a0\u00a0Origin,\u00a0 Development, Struggle, Dominance, and Decline. \u00a0\u00a0Currently, the conservative movement is in stage 3 struggle, hoping to move to stage 4, Dominance.\u00a0 The political dominance of Liberalism was weakened by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and \u00a0broken in 1994 when the Republicans won control of Congress.\u00a0\u00a0 Currently neither side has dominance. Conservatives are trying to gain it, while the Liberals are trying to reverse their decline and regain it.<\/p>\n

While this goes a long way towards explaining the current climate of partisanship, there are two\u00a0 additional factors that can further explain the current battles.\u00a0 The first is openness to new ideas.\u00a0 In stages 1, 2, there has to be a great openness to new ideals and new ways of thinking about things if a movement is to progress. This is facilitated by the lack of any power, so there is nothing to lose. However somewhere in stage 3, as the\u00a0 base of support grows, the openness to new ideas begins to decline. If, and when, a group gains dominance, the openness to new ideas greatly decreases.\u00a0 Part of this is because everything begins to be cast in terms of the great leaders who brought the group to power.\u00a0 New ideas are often cast as \u201cdestroying the legacy.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0As a group moves into decline, these old ways are often defend even more tediously \u00a0with calls to \u201creturn to our roots.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus, for example,\u00a0 Liberals are normally portrayed as the ones with the new Ideas and conservatives as defending the status quo.\u00a0 \u00a0Yet when it comes to issues like social security, it is the Democrat, the group who until recently was dominate, who defends the status quo, frequently by pointing to the legacy of FDR. \u00a0On the other hand, it is conservatives, who are in stage three hoping to gain dominance, who are the ones proposing the new ideas.<\/p>\n

The second major factor is willingness to hear differing opinions and to debate issues.\u00a0 Groups in the early stages have to be open to differing opinions. Since they have no power, the only way to get their position accepted is by debate. \u00a0\u00a0However once in a position of dominance, stagnation sets in. Since they are in power, differing opinions do not need to be engaged, they can simply be voted down.\u00a0 If the period of dominance last long enough, the current leaders may even have lost (or never developed) the ability to defend their position against serious intellectual challenges.\u00a0 Thus when serious intellectual challenges do arise, there will be a strong inclination to use their dominate power to suppress opposing views, rather than to defeat them intellectually.<\/p>\n

Both of these factors can be seen in the current political debate.\u00a0 The dominance of liberalism began in the early 1930s.\u00a0 While there were Republican presidents, Eisenhower, Nixon, \u00a0and Ford were not conservatives; nor was the first President Bush.\u00a0 In addition, \u00a0liberalism dominated not only political power, but the news and entertainment media, and universities.\u00a0\u00a0 Liberalism was simply the norm, while conservatism was rare.\u00a0 Conservatives, if they remained conservative, were challenged on a daily basis, and thereby had to learn to defend their beliefs, if only to themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 As the dominate power this was not the case with liberalism. Liberals could pretty much live their entire lives without ever being seriously challenged in their beliefs. Any differing\u00a0 view they did encounter could be written off as a minority views that did not need to be taken seriously.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

When Reagan broke the dominance of Liberalism, many liberal simply could not believe it, and they did not know how to respond.\u00a0 In the absence of rational arguments, irrational arguments take over, and the easiest (and thus most popular)of the irrational arguments is the ad hominem attack.\u00a0 Be it Regain, Bush 41, \u00a0Dan Quayle, \u00a0Newt Gingrich, \u00a0Bush 43, Dick Cheney, or any other Republican leader, they are portrayed as dumb, a puppet, out of touch, insensitive,\u00a0 uncaring,\u00a0 evil, or some combination of the above.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

This also explains the great disparity in talk radio, a medium based on the discussion of ideas.\u00a0 While there are some \u201cshock jock\u201d the vast majority of conservative talk radio\u00a0 consists of taking apart liberal views. While they are often criticized for not allowing differing points of view, most spend a great deal of time debating liberal guest, playing clips of what liberals say, and love to take liberal callers, because they know, based on experience, that liberals for the most part are not very good at defending themselves intellectually and thus normally it is not very long before they resort to ad hominem attacks or other types of fallacious reasoning.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This also explains why liberals employ a number of techniques aimed at suppressing differing points of view.\u00a0 If you hold a view that the fetus is a person with right to life, and you are labeled religious and your view must be excluded from political debate because of separation of church and state.\u00a0 The belief that marriage as an institution\u00a0 should be between a man and a woman is homophobic and to be excluded from political debate.\u00a0 The claim that affirmative action does more harm than good is racist speech and to be excluded from political debate.\u00a0\u00a0 And with the failure of Air America, talk radio needs to be regulated by the \u201cFairness Doctrine\u201d which would effectively silence it. \u00a0\u00a0Groups in the Decline stage normally seek to suppress opposition, rather than debate and defeat it.<\/p>\n

As these tactics fail, the normal response is to simply ratchet up the attacks, however irrational.\u00a0 Thus the increasing hatred on the left with attacks such as\u00a0 Bush lied,\u00a0 War for oil, and even that Bush knew about or in some cases even planned 9\/11, all the while accusing him of causing the division. \u00a0\u00a0In short when understood against the background of the stages of a political movement, much of the current political debate become understandable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Part 1 \u00a0I looked\u00a0\u00a0at the five stages that movements in general and political movements in particular go through : \u00a0\u00a0Origin,\u00a0 Development, Struggle, Dominance, and Decline. \u00a0\u00a0Currently, the conservative movement is in stage 3 struggle, hoping to move to stage 4, Dominance.\u00a0 The political dominance of Liberalism was weakened by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,11,24,28],"tags":[387,399,408,422,960,972,1002,1003,1004,1100,1220],"class_list":["post-245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservative","category-culture","category-liberal","category-politics","tag-decline","tag-democrat","tag-development","tag-dominance","tag-origin","tag-partisanship","tag-political-leaders","tag-political-movement","tag-political-parties","tag-republican","tag-struggle"],"yoast_head":"\nStages of a Political Movement Part II - Politics and Religion<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/hushbeck.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/stages-of-a-political-movement-part-ii\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Stages of a Political Movement Part II - Politics and Religion\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In Part 1 \u00a0I looked\u00a0\u00a0at the five stages that movements in general and political movements in particular go through : \u00a0\u00a0Origin,\u00a0 Development, Struggle, Dominance, and Decline. \u00a0\u00a0Currently, the conservative movement is in stage 3 struggle, hoping to move to stage 4, Dominance.\u00a0 The political dominance of Liberalism was weakened by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/hushbeck.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/stages-of-a-political-movement-part-ii\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Politics and Religion\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-09-05T17:34:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Elgin Hushbeck\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Elgin Hushbeck\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/hushbeck.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/stages-of-a-political-movement-part-ii\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/hushbeck.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/stages-of-a-political-movement-part-ii\/\",\"name\":\"Stages of a Political Movement Part II - 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