Taking off liberal blinders

One of the things I like about Neo’s posts is that she develops them so meticulously.  In one her latest posts, she takes on the growing disenchantment with Obama, not just from conservatives, who were primed to be disenchanted, but from liberals who nevertheless were not prepared for someone as extreme as he has proven to be.

These liberals’ lack of preparedness, of course, was their own fault, because they live in the liberal bubble (NY Times, NPR, Washington Pimp).  The problem now is that, having sinned once, their denial is creating a type of cognitive dissonance that may see them sinning all over again in 2010 and 2012, rather than admitting their mistake (emphasis mine):

The problem we face is the same one I faced with my friends back in October/November of 2008. In some ways it’s worse, because there’s more to say. But in some ways it’s better, because I sense some doubt in all but the most extreme Obama supporters.

However, they are still not paying attention, and attention is required. They’re not reading about this in the mainstream media. So, what is my role? I need time and a receptive willing audience to make an argument that could be persuasive, and if people aren’t willing to give the issues the energy necessary, then I run the risk of sounding to them like a raving maniac if I do bring it up, someone easy to put in the category of 9/11-truthers or Holocaust deniers. And now that Obama is in office until 2012, it has also become even more threatening for people who once supported him to even consider that what I’m trying to say may in fact be true: there’s the guilt, plus the fear that the hand on the tiller is purposely steering us in the wrong direction.

Between ignorance and denial, how do we reach people while there is still time.  Neo notes that we can’t endlessly flood people’s email boxes, because they tune us out.  Nor can we forceably rip them away from the mainstream media, which they trust despite its increasingly manifest failures.  As for our blogs, neo and I recognize that most people come to find comfortable, like-minded people.  They don’t come to be converted.  (And indeed, the only liberals who find their way here try to be saboteurs, not intellectual debaters.)

Sadly, despite being one of the most perceptive people out there when it comes to human nature, Neo doesn’t have an answer for the all-important question of how we reach people who are being propagandized into dangerous stupidity:

How can we reach the greater community? Do you speak to Obama supporters you know? What is the response if you try to explain what you think has been happening?

Churchill was thought to be crazy during the 30s, obsessed with his warnings about Hitler, who didn’t appear to most of the rest of Parliament to be such an awful fellow. Maybe the nature of the beast is that such warnings cannot be heard, that they seem excessive until the most dire things actually occur. Most people almost instinctively reject what seems like an extreme point of view unless they’ve arrived at it themselves through personal awareness, step by painful step, or through a dramatic and possibly life-shattering single event.

We’ve had experience with incompetent presidents and/or deceptive presidents before. But I submit that we’ve never before had a president with such malignant and radical designs who also was so deceptive in such a profound way. Nixon, for example, was deceptive about many things as well as malignant towards his “enemies,” but he was still well within the mainstream of American political thought regarding defending freedom around the globe, keeping America strong, and the economy. Also, Tricky Dick seemed tricky; we knew about this characteristic of his even before he was elected.

Obama does not seem deceptive on the surface—at least, he doesn’t to many people, and that’s what’s important. And yet he has been deceptive about something far more basic than Nixon ever was: who he is, and his underlying vision for America.

I think you should read Neo’s entire post. Then we all, every concerned, thoughtful, intelligent person in the conservative blogosphere, needs to start thinking about ways to get out of our conservative ghetto and sound the tocsin of freedom for all Americans.