Shannon Love

It’s become something of an article of faith among the Left that Kerry lost due to homophobic social conservatives voting for Bush because they oppose gay marriage for no good reason. The fact that they lost ground in the House and Senate, and in many state races as well, doesn’t seem to register.

Now we see this compilation on Real Clear Politics (via Instapundit) that shows that Bush gained in the percentage of the vote he received in every single state! Nowhere did Kerry increase the Democratic percentage of the vote.

Perhaps of more interest to those obsessed with the blue-red divide, Bush’s biggest percentage gains occurred in Blue states:

Hawaii: +7.8
Rhode Island: +7.0

Other blue states returned surprising increases as well:

California: +2.6
Connecticut: +5.6
New York: +5.3
Massachusetts: +4.5
New Jersey: +6.2

So even in states which Kerry won, the margin of Democratic victory decreased, sometimes sharply, compared to 2000. If, and that’s a big if, these trends continue in 2008, the Democrats face a loss in a dramatic landslide.

The Left in America needs to understand that they have a fundamental problem. It is they, not the Right, who are heavily dependent on voters choosing them due to social issues. Younger voters support the Left almost purely due to social issues like abortion and gay rights. Younger voters reject leftist 20th-century solutions for a broad range of issues like medical care, trade, national security and Social Security. If forced to run purely on those issues the Left would get creamed. Only among older voters who remember the New Deal and the Great Society does the Left perform better on economic or management issues. The young and middle-aged don’t trust the Left’s centralized hierarchal solutions anymore.

The more the Left ignores this problem, the worse it will be for them at the polls, as those older voters whose world view was stamped in the Left’s glory days of the mid-20th century die off. Social issues will keep the younger voters for only so long. Eventually, they will trade social issues for economic ones.

Consider the following hypotheticals: A friend ask you to build a bookcase to fit in a particular niche in his house. In the first case, the friend doesn’t really know the dimensions of the niche. He just says that it is a couple feet wide and about “this tall.” In the second case, he provides you with exact measurements. Of these two cases, which is more likely to result in a bookcase too large to fit in the niche?

Everybody who has dealt with technical measurement knows the ugly truth. The second case is more likely to result in a bookcase that is too large. In the first case, you won’t know the true dimensions, so you will build conservatively, shaving off inches to try to make sure that the bookcase will fit. In the second case, however, you will feel confident of the size of the niche and will build the bookcase to take up all of the available space. If your friend measured wrong, the bookcase won’t fit because, believing you knew the true size of the niche, you didn’t build in any margin for error.

This example demonstrates a truism within science and technology: Bad data are worse than no data at all. With no data, people plan conservatively and are always reexamining their actions and assumptions, but with bad data they charge forward, with far less ongoing reexamination. Bad data lead people to got wrong with confidence.

Which brings us to The Lancet‘s published Study of Iraqi mortality by lead author Les Roberts (PDF HTML).

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CBS News is reporting that the assault on Fallujah has begun with the bloodless seizing of Fallujah’s main hospital by Iraqi troops. Did I call it or what?

The strategy seems to be to deprive the insurgents of symbolic defensive positions, like hospitals, schools and mosques. Most of the civilian population has also left the city. Unable to shield themselves behind either civilians or sacred buildings, the insurgents won’t stand up to Coalition firepower and tactics long.

I expect this fight to take less than a week.

I think my hopes that a defeat at the polls would prompt a self-reexamination on the part of the Left have already been dashed. The rapidly emerging consensus on the part of leftist media figures, pundits and political figures is that they lost due to “moral issues,” which many are interpreting to mean gay marriage and maybe abortion. The subtext here seems to be that they lost because too many Red Staters are bigots, not because people have lost faith in leftist solutions on economic and regulatory issues.

I swear, one can almost see the spinnerets, erupting from leftist asses pulsing with the liquid silk of rationalizations, just waiting for the barest of factoids on which to spin a comforting cocoon of leftist self-delusion.

Jeebus!

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Via Instapundit comes a round of links to Leftwing blogs indicating that this election may prompt some critical self-examination.

Unfortunately, reading both the blogs and their comments doesn’t inspire much hope. The major theme is best represented by The Poor Man.

“People don’t respond to complicated ‘on the one hand, on the other’ arguments about policy, and they don’t respond to lengthy word problems about the economy. People respond to good vs. evil narratives, whether it is America vs. terrah, or Godly people vs. Massachusetts liberal faggots”

Translation: “The American people are too stupid to understand our sophisticated arguments. We lose because we’re too smart. We need to dumb our message down. We need to trick the American people into voting for what we think is good for them.”

Apparently, the ownership society, free trade, charter schools, privatized social security etc., are simplistic, whereas a cradle-to-grave nanny state and eat-the-rich redistributionism is the height of intellectual attainment.

Leftists spend so much of their time congratulating themselves on being smarter and more moral than everybody else that they never stop and actually ask themselves if maybe they’ve got something wrong. They spend so much time telling each other that they represent the “progressive” and “future oriented” segment of the political spectrum that they never realize that the American Left has not put forward a new idea in the last 30 years.

Look at John Kerry’s health care plan. It’s just an extension of Medicare/Medicaid which is itself a 1930s-era program implemented in the 1960s. Social Security: Not a problem, the same system that worked in 1935 will work in 2035. Education: Keep the same system we’ve had since the 1920s but spend even more money on it. Oh, and more federal decision making. I could go on.

The first step in the revitalization of the Left will come when they realize that they are progressive only rhetorically. Just as an experiment, every leftist should pick a problem like health care, Social Security or education and ask, “How does the existence of the Internet fundamentally alter how individuals could receive or manage this benefit?” If you can’t think of anything in response then you should stop referring to yourself as a progressive.

(See: Dotcom Democrats for related thoughts.)