Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Sorta political: Election analysis

I write this at 11:12 local time. None of the swing states have been called yet but I think it's over and Romney loses and I'm going to bed now..

What's it mean? I think it means the culture war is over and conservatives lost it. The biggest losing point for the right now is sex and the conservative Catholic-Evangelical alliance is like an anti-sex albatross around the neck of the Republican party. No matter how many votes these people pull in, they will always alienate more.

I know, I know, cultural conservatives don't think they are anti-sex but that is because their understanding of sexual issues is so far from what the rest of the world means that they aren't talking the same language anymore. No matter what cultural conservatives say, most others hear a plan to deny them their sexual freedoms.

ADDED: To put it in one sentence: Women don't want to have babies that they don't want to have. You can parse the question as much as you like but the basic fact of Catholic sexual ethics is that Catholics want to take away the ability to decide these things from women. Look, I'm anti-abortion myself but when Akin and Mourdock and then others said what they said, almost all the women I know started hoping for a Romney defeat.

And I live in Canada!!!

And let's not even get into birth control.

The cultural conservatives also hamper any sort of libertarian case. I don't know that a libertarian argument could succeed in any case but it definitely can't succeed so long as the conservative Catholic-Evangelical alliance is stirring up the pot. For starters, Catholics just don't understand economics and they don't understand economics because they won't abandon their paternalistic notions.

Last question for tonight: Is this a good thing? I don't know. There are some upsides and there some downsides. I suspect the downside is probably a lot steeper than anyone guesses but even if it is, things probably aren't as bad as they might be. They usually aren't. Usually.

How do I feel? I'd like to see greater individual liberty and more freemarket policies along with a scaling back of entitlements. The chances of those things happening just got to be even more remote than they already were. That said, they already were a very, very long shot.

This is the theme song for the day:





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