Publishing revolution; political strategies

View 746 Monday, October 15, 2012

In today’s Wall Street Journal, L. Gordon Crovitz tells us “In 1902, Jules Verne predicted novels ‘will be supplanted altogether by the daily newspaper,’ which would ‘color everyday events’ so that readers wouldn’t need well-crafted fiction to fire their imaginations.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443294904578052991841553024.html Actually, the novel seems to have a better future than the newspapers; Crovitz also tells us that “A record more than 100,000 novels are now published in the U.S. and Britain each year.” He doesn’t say how many are print and how many are electronic.

The revolution in the publishing industry continues. And small computers continue to be the great equalizers…

The political strategy of the two major parties continues and will likely govern what happens in the debates. The Democrats can’t run on their record, and indeed would prefer that you didn’t look at the economic picture. They do not seem to have a program for the future that they want to sell. The attractiveness of Hope and Change carried the last presidential election, but apparently they don’t want to try that one again, nor is “We’re the ones you’ve been waiting for.”

That leaves scaring the voters away from Romney and Ryan. Don’t elect them, they’re horrible.

This pretty well dictates the Republican strategy: make no mistakes, and show that our candidates are worthy and display dignitas. We’re not scary people. We know what we are doing. We’ve given you a broad picture of what we’ll do. We’ve shown you that we care. We’re the good guys.

Given those strategies the rest of the campaign is pretty predictable. The Democrats win if the Republicans do something really frightening. Democrat strategists say they already did, with Romney’s remarks about the 47% who don’t pay income taxes, and they’ll continue to emphasize that remark as showing that Romney is not worthy to be President.

Of course the frightening thing is that we have come close to the point where more people get entitlements than pay taxes. That’s only frightening to old fashioned freedom advocates, of course. It has long been the goal of a large part of the political public, who don’t worry much about dependences and who do not believe that the Iron Law of bureaucracy dooms the best intentioned welfare state. But we’ve been through all that before. Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. Liberty has its costs. This is a Republic, not a Democracy. And other such dull truisms, which just happen to be true, and alas are now treated as platitudes.