You shouldn’t wait for the mainstream media to point out that a Low Information Voter (LIV) class even exists, so don’t wait for the Beltway political consulting class to acknowledge that there is more than one strain of this class.
It’s still early, but just as sure as political consultants tried to marginalize the Tea Party class, in tandem with the Democrats’ attempt to suppress it as a voting bloc, the consultants will only try to get its arms around that portion of the LIV population it feels it can reach out to with conventional campaign media. And being who they are, the Beltway consultant mob will then hold out that 10% of the LIV virus family as the de facto majority strain. All the rest will be discounted.
Navigating the Low-Information Highway
Stereotypes abound on the Low-Information Highway. Most of us can identify an LIV just by looking at him or her. Many, if not most, Low-Information Voters are easy to identify.
(Occupy WallStreet Strain, Type IV LIV) (The Fluke Strain-Type IV LIV)
(The Obama Claus Strain, Type IV-LIV)
Deadbeat college kids and recent graduates, with degrees in 16th Century Swiss Literature, Underwater Basket-weaving and Women’s Studies, are aligned politically with the perpetual (and stereotypical) underclass of the inner cities, who these days get Obamaphones, a weekly trip to the hairstylist, and of late, the ability to use their Food Stamps while on vacation in Hawaii. All college kids get is sweet revenge, or so they think.
(Note: after forty-eight consecutive Christmases since LBJ got them all out on bail, there’s still no ladder out of the holding cell (hole) they’ve been living in ever since.)
Don’t get me started, for I still refuse to believe that a few freebies could encourage these reliable Democrat-Obama voting bloc to show up in greater numbers than they normally would, especially enough to offset the traditional Beltway consultant class’ reliance on the vaunted swing Independent/Undecided voter. I think this is all a crock, and have another theory to explain how Obama “won,” but will also admit more than one other alternate theory exists to explain this.
I think the left-driven media idea here is to create a hologram army of voters who never were, so as to ease the consultants who owned the GOP campaigns for decades into a kind of limp impotency.
The Stupids, like the poor, have always been with us, and we at UP can take some credit for being among the earliest to point them out as a class before the election. We just didn’t know they would be cast as the tie-breakers, which as I’ve said, the real numbers still seem to belie.
But by identifying, then broadcasting the size and strength of the LIV Strain, the Left can minimize, in the eyes of the media and public-at-large, the value of traditional polling and campaign strategies, something that we on the right had always hoped the Tea Parties would accomplish. Impute to the left-centered mob what the Beltway consultants had refused to acknowledge in the Tea Party mobs, and what you get is a two-fer; 1) a media consultancy class that is suddenly confused, feeling the sand shifting beneath their feet of what once was solid ground on a whole host of long-held political truths, with no earthly idea how to counter them, and 2) relegating the Tea Parties to a footnote in American history.
I call this voting bloc collectively the Type IV LIV Strain. While over the years we’ve learned bushels about them, we rarely actually encounter these Low Information Voters, as they live in areas we rarely visit. That they are there, and in great number, has never shocked us. But that they might be large enough to swing an election, again, rendering 95% of all GOP media dollars entirely wasted, is a huge, huge surprise.
But even greater, I think, is that nagging feeling that while we’ve strutted around, our noses in the air as if we owned the public highway, the proof in the pudding is that they own it, not us. What has had us confused all these years has been the belief that their existence in cheap dives and flop houses, gin joints and Hooters, places we’d never go (OK, you ladies wouldn’t) were all down dark alleys and side streets, while we commanded the well-lit high road.
Twarn’t so.
This has been quite a shock to our systems. A trauma, in fact, but one we must overcome. And quickly, for it grows each year. While this army is large, it can be brought over to our side, but only by the most unconventional of arm-twisting, and down-in-the-dirt mud ‘rasslin with the Devil. His alternate universe now rules the main highway, in the media, in the popular culture, and in the schools, where they’re spitting out a 13- million litter every year…while it is we, not them, who are scrambling about on America’s side streets trying to make our voices heard above the din, revelry and profanity of what used to be a nice place to take your children to fly kites and walk the dog. It is we who have been assigned to the national catacombs, and while we sensed this in one way or another for several years, Obama’s re-election has branded on us with a hot iron.
So, while the GOP consultants fight ghosts, and the GOP leadership search for courage in all wrong places, and wisdom not at all, we must go it alone to find ways to cut the legs out from under this Low-Information Voter army. In doing so we will find other LIV strains who are much fewer in number, but far more educated, more economically and socially secure, powerful, but oh, so very much more stupid than those poor souls depicted above.
The Type I, Type II, and Type III LIV strains, the Three-Legged Stool of the Left
While the vast army of the LIV are easy to identify, the three legs of the stool that supports it are not; Society Dames, Media Chic and dense academicians.
All are twice as stupid (information-challenged) but a hundred times more dangerous than the Low Information army.
In one way or the other, these three LIV types hold this vast army of know-nothings in thrall, umbilically. You will find the finest knitwork joining these three to each other, thence, as a long train to a wedding gown, you can see them tugging the Obamaphone minority lady, the Occupy cretin, and the unmarried professional woman with push-button thighs, along behind them. It’s not a pretty sight.
The Type III LIV Strain refers to the affluent social set of virtually every city. The society in which they revolve goes back to those cities’ founding, tied to their original first families and original wealth producers, from steel, grain, livestock, oil or construction, etc.. In each city and state they are as royally held as the Grand Dames of Jamestown and Plymouth. They grew, each in their own time, from the 1880s through the rise of information technology. Some have been around for generations, others, still in their first.
From the 1880s into the 1950s all this society was predominantly Republican. As long as they were directly related to the production of new wealth, their members was predominantly civic-minded, church-going and conservative albeit smug, exclusivist and arrogant. But over time, since wives almost always survived their husbands, this society is now manned (sic) predominantly by women.
Or men who dare not cross them.
Today, almost all “society” lives off investment wealth earned at least two generations before. They pay taxes like Warren Buffet, not like his secretary. And they don’t mind a minor tax increase either. They run foundations that someone else paid for, and hire only special kinds of geldings to manage them. They spend millions on pet causes, and may even develop an ersatz expertise in one of them, perhaps the environment, women’s issues, children, or weapons of mass destruction. But their principle mission is their self-keeping and their power.
What separates them from regular Americans is that wouldn’t recognize a newly-created dollar if it came up and bit them on the ankle. Job creation is as dreary a subject to them as a fire sale at Kohl’s. They are a culture apart.
They are also the gatekeepers to all society, so all new money, all the earned money out there, is just dying to get into their circle, as it always has been. (Read Ring Lardner from the WWI era, for nothing has changed in this regard.) They set the rules for admission to “society,” and thus wield great power.
To the local coffee klatch Cindy Sheehan ran in California, there are thousands of social satellites yearning for attention and acceptance into the inner circles. They cuckold every male that comes within their orbit, and have thus emasculated half the Republican Party (the original creators of all that wealth) and the Democrat Party, the whole of it.
And they have achieved all this without a single earthly idea about any reality pertaining to business, or the economy at any level; national, state, local, even household, or any virtue we’d recognize as such since the Anglicans turned Left. “Only dock workers’ wives worry about managing a budget.” (VB) “Only the working class needs morals” (Chesterton.)
To all the things we consider normal and commonsensical in human affairs, from the way society arranges itself for mutual benefit and prosperity, to providing for the common defense, even to delivering the mail, they are as Stupid as that Obamaphone lady in Cleveland.
Still they are one of the three legs that underlie the Left in general and the Democrat Party in particular.
The Type II LIV Strain is the mainstream media. All of it. This is the second leg of the Stupid stool that now runs American politics. They are the gatekeepers to the Low-Information Highway, for it is largely of their design, with some help from Hollywood. They grovel for a chance to sit on the foot of power wherever found. Cunning and manipulative (think Grima Wormtongue)…
…they are as clever as the velociraptors were perceived to be when working as a team, in unison with other velociraptors. Alone, they are as stupid as an oak board. While they laugh and giggle at trying to trip up Republican candidates with spelling contests, Uzbek ministers of defense, or various pronunciations of Pahkistahn, not one of them could name the capital of Tulsa without a cheat-sheet written on the palm of their hands.
The mainstream media is the only institutional narcissist in America, and can never see beyond its very, very tiny orb(it).
(This is Alexander King’s vision of media navel-gazing. Works for me.)
The American media measures everything…everything…in terms of its own self-interests, and as you can see, its self-interests are narrow indeed.
Incredibly stupid, much more so than their clients or viewers, the media is the classic example of a group that cannot connect more than two dots in any equation. Which means they how babies are made, but are uncertain as to why.
(Soledad processing an unsolicited thought and David Gregory thumbing his nose at the law on the basis of sovereign immunity)
Finally, the Type I LIV-Strain was developed by none other than Karl Marx.
This is the last of three legs that makes up the pillars of the Democrat Party, and the only one which can exist outside of the orbit of the Type III Society Dames.
To understand this, you must understand Marxism, and to understand Marxism you must first know some basics about Karl Marx. (I’ve mentioned all this before.) If you know just who and what Karl Marx was, you will understand why “Marxism” exists on more than one plane. There are at least two Marxisms, one the economic theory which both common sense and history have proven makes absolutely no sense, and is provable destructive and failing in every way. Why they keep trying it anyway is because of the second nature of Marxism, which is a narcissistic, elitist, bitterly angry, yet envy-filled vision of self having nothing to do with workers, the poor, capitalism or capitalists, justice or fairness, or any of the rest of the socialist swill we’re made to drink everyday by the media and politicians.
Several years ago I read Thomas Sowell’s short biography of Karl Marx which gave me insights, but recommend to you here The Naked Communist, written in 1958 by Cleon Skousen, the same man who wrote the Five Thousand Year Leap. A must read for anyone who truly wants to understand the nature of this Beast, it exposes the great hatred, best described by Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer’s character in Tombstone) in describing the hole in the gunslinger Ringo’s soul: “He hated being born.”
Marx was a brilliant student but never worked for a wage a single day in his life, He watched two of his children starve to death in London while he refused to find work, then watched two of his daughters commit suicide later. Still, he decided he was qualified to re-order the world.
In 1848 he co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Frederick Engels, who help support him, and admired him.
Follow me here: The language he used, more than the ideas about the working classes he imparted, lit a match among similarly situated academicians throughout Europe, who were among the lowest paid literate class in the world.
Karl Marx had a following, but he was anything but grateful for it. He adopted a “my way or the highway” approach in his speeches and lectures. In Q & A’s he chastised and talked down to questioners, deriding them for questioning any aspect of his thesis. Interestingly, many of those he chastised became his most ardent supporters, but by and large, Marxism grew in areas where he could not screw the pooch with his personality. It was his writing that inspired. But only certain types of academicians, what today we call call the soft-sciences, where facts were iffy.
The English claim to have come by socialism through a non-Marxist route, and a genteel Europe recoiled generally at the hard “get even” invective of Marx. As intellectual socialism grew in Europe, Marx’s communism became more and more marginalized, until a Russian named V I Lenin picked Marx up at about the time he died in 1883, where, outside the free inquiry of the university, Karl Marx got a second reading.
It always seems to work out that way, doesn’t it? Not European by most congeniality standards, still I doubt even the Russians would have ever accepted the teachings of Marx had he been alive to hand-deliver his sermons.
Marx (and also Saul Alinsky) had the ability with his writings to reach inside certain men and tap a wellspring of hatred that dwelt within them, then turn that into a virtue, literally flipping the universe of Good and Bad upside down. At that time, Marx suddenly made sense. In his life he personified a worship of self, even as he cast a public image of a man bereft of common, civilized virtue. He turned his arrogance and ill-manners into things to be sought after, and which have tapped the spirits of millions of under-appreciated stupid people ever since.
Like Type III and Type II LIV’s, Karl Marx knew absolutely nothing about the things he wrote about. His psycho-babble was designed (I argue) to push different buttons altogether. Everything he wrote was the product of his own imagination gained from books he read at the library. Though desperately poor, he never knew a “worker” he deified by his writings. But he knew capitalists aplenty, who he considered all well beneath him, even as they wore the best of clothes and he had holes in his socks. His entire adult life was a 40-year long teat fit because men he considered beneath him had more of the things he considered entitled just for being born, in mind, smart.
Yet, Karl Marx never knew work. Like Obama who has no problem spending opulently other mens’ money (as if by birthright) he only knew self and self-gratification. Having once found himself two months behind in rent, with no food in the house, he obtained a gift of $200 from a benefactor. He promptly paid the rent then threw a three-day drunk. His wife and children never saw a penny of it.
Marx knew exactly the type he was seeking to reach, just as Alinsky did (and Satan does) when looking for lieutenants.
The Decade of the Living Dead
Marxism is to intellectualism what the Anti-Christ is to Christ.
For over 150 years the know-nothing anti-intellectuals of academe have stomped their feet and insisted on being put in charge. As their birthright. Now they are, and they can destroy, and they can destroy absolutely.
This is the regime America now lives under. It’s not enough to simply say “Get used to it.”
