I see Civil War II on the horizon.
It’s not what I want, but it’ll happen. Increasing physical conflict.
See, both sides attack differently, and neither understands what the other is doing. If combatants can’t even agree about who’s winning and losing, how do hostilities ever cease?
“Don’t Tread on Me” Americans wage rational war, statists wage emotional war.
Tea Partyers’ rational arguments–government spending is unsustainable, centrally-planned economies invariably get worse–are “countered” with social pressure–you’re racist Nazis, you hate women and minorities. The emotional attacks are seen as rational arguments–which they are not–and refuted on rational terms. These, of course, also fail to be recognized. Which “failure” gives progressives cause to redouble the emotional attacks.
Ad nauseum.
Progressives don’t fight in the arena of ideas. Tea Partyers aren’t waging social war.
Until somebody changes tactics, the “conflict” will both intensify and remain meaningless. That’s not a stable configuration. So tactics will change. But neither “dog” seems capable of learning a new trick. So things will change when enough people want resolution. And it’s found at the intersection between reason and emotion:
The physical body.
Rational arguments can’t be countered with emotions, nor vice versa. But both can be silenced by killing their champions. The dead aren’t known for arguing.
Thus, physical war. It’s the only thing both sides understand. Unless one group meets the other on its own terms, war will someday come. It must.
There’s no other way to keep score.
World's Only Rational Man 
“Until somebody changes tactics, the ”conflict” will both intensify and remain meaningless.”
Your argument is more persuasive than I care to admit. The left can’t change tactics anymore than we can. To change tactics is to lose.
The only real hope, then, lies in the middle–folks who aren’t committed yet to leftist emotion or right side logic.
Are there enough of them, yet to be swayed, that CAN be swayed?
This is the question you have skipped over. This is the question, the real answer to which I fear. This is the question that I insist on answering maybe. Maybe there are enough that can be swayed.
This affirmative hope drives me to continue the seemingly hopeless, endless fight against irrationality. The day I am forced to answer, NO, there are not enough left to be swayed, I bet you’ll notice the change.
I take it that the answer is already “no” for you. Perhaps you are impatient.
best,
Lin
My latest two (lengthy!) posts address your very questions. Which are exactly the right ones.
Short version: yes, the right side could sway emotional voters, and I show exactly how. But no, they’re not going to, because they’ll find the work too distasteful.
I believe we are about to enter a period of SEVERE austerity. Nature will FORCE unnatural behavior to stop because it is unsustainable. I perceive that if things get really bad, a lot of people are going to die. (Mostly Liberals)
These silly b@stards simply don’t realize it’s impossible for them to win. Even if they could beat us at physical combat ( a very unlikely prospect ) they will simply not be able to survive the loss of their slaves. (People who pay taxes.)
They will riot. It will not help. Nature is a cruel bitch.
What you call a “very unlikely prospect” I’d say is “possible only in the theoretical sense”. “Blue” American cities could have control of the nuclear arsenal and would still eventually lose to “Red” America.
They could have stayed just slightly symbiotic, but greed got the best of them. Now either parasites go, or host and parasites go.
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From http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sane
Definition of SANE
1: proceeding from a sound mind : rational
2: mentally sound; especially : able to anticipate and appraise the effect of one’s actions
Herein lies the crux of the problem. One cannot reason with the unreasonable, cannot rationalize the irrational. How do you use logic to convince someone that they are not sane? How do you lock up a paranoid schizophrenic and make him understand that you weren’t out to get him all the while?
You can’t. You simply do what needs to be done for their own good and the good of society…you try to help them AFTER they’ve been constrained. You DON’T put them in charge of the asylum!
Civil War II? Oh, it’s coming. We’ve put the inmates in charge of the asylum, and we only have ourselves to blame.
Leftists aren’t rational, but they aren’t exactly insane. They do what they do because it works, and they know it works. They just can’t do anything else. They’re waaaaay more predictable than a Bedlam resident.
Elsewhere on this site I contend that progressives are best understood as a hive mind. They’ve sacrificed independent thought for the ability to swarm. And social pressure is their sole non-physical weapon.
So social pressure is how we’d have to beat them, short of physical violence. Lots of folks point to the wrongness of saddling children with debt. They try to reason with the people insisting on deficit spending.
Call progressives “child enslavers” instead. Loudly and often. Unlike their smears, that one is defensible.
The only way to avoid war, sooner or later, is to put the tyrants on the social defensive and keep them there. Forever.