Hannibal

Beyond any possible shadow of a doubt, the Carthaginian leader Hannibal must once have said, "What's wrong with the Elephants?"

The question, even it's framing, is possibly relevant in modern America. The fact is that the Republican Party has been dealt a possibly mortal blow and they can't seem to figure out exactly why or even how it happened. Normally at this stage of a post I'd expound on those very questions. This time I'm going to cut to the chase: How do they fix it?

Step One: Get past the Bible. Religious zealots are patently irrational and will not allow you to negotiate, which is the very essence of the political process. They undermine your strength by driving away every other possible backer. This isn't to say that religious types don't have the same right of participation as anyone else, simply that you can't let people who eschew reason and logic by definition dictate the policies of a group of people who have to coexist peacefully. They only way a diverse group can coexist peacefully is within a framework of secular law, grounded in objective, demonstrable, logical precepts of evidence and universal applicability.

Step Two: Get past Darwin. The robber-baron mentality of frontier survivalism is not applicable in the modern world of complex, integrated systems. The social Darwinism of of those late 19th and early 20th century capitalists is no more functional than The Total State. Recognize that a system or institution of sufficient size and wealth, commanding and tied to sufficiently large and/or complex shares of the marketplace are too vital to the public interest to be allowed to simply rise and fall like so many tiny Empires. The Captains of Industry have made their fortunes by becoming indispensable to the Masses and now they just realized that the Masses aren't going to simply let them go. They may pay for elections, but they can't buy the electorate for anybody. You must strike a balance between the rights of the private citizen and the needs of the whole system.

Step Three: get past binary logic. The world is not a black and white, either/or place. There are always options that you can explore if you're willing to recognize that you and the opposition can both be right about something.

There is more to this I'm sure and I'll return to it later.