\u201cPerception is everything\u201d appears to be the organizing paradigm of modern political campaigns in the US.\u00a0 Technology and capital have combined into the perfect storm for managing perception.\u00a0 Perceptions thrust into the early years of technology kept the Republicans largely out of office for decades after FDR and the Great Depression.\u00a0 Republicans were portrayed as the elitist party of the rich.\u00a0 They were opposed to the plight of the average working guy.\u00a0 In the seventies with the economy worsening and gas lines growing long the Republicans saw the chance to grab the reins of perception.\u00a0 Instead of the perception of concern for the working man in a time of economic affluence the Republicans saw that the economic reality of a weakening economy was a perfect moment to launch their perception of tax and spend.\u00a0 The Democrats were not the party of the working man.\u00a0 They opposed the working man by spending frivolously and even selfishly.\u00a0 The Democrats were the true elitists.\u00a0 However, the underlying necessary condition that allowed this perception its oxygen was a changing economic reality.\u00a0 In a time of affluence, social programs are a plus in political marketing.\u00a0 When money is not a concern it is easy to spend, to create images of ourselves as holy, caring, giving.\u00a0\u00a0 However, when economic needs start dominating the day to day experience of voters, the time is ripe for creating the perception that tax and spend liberals are to blame, leftist elitists bent on nothing other than benefiting themselves at the cost of the common Joe.\u00a0\u00a0 The Republicans seized the perceptional opportunity with Ronald Reagan and controlled the perceptions and dialogs for decades.\u00a0 They cloaked their conservative ideology in the modern garbs of egalitarianism and the working Joe\u2019s fight against the liberal elite.\u00a0 Liberal, the \u201cL\u201d word was profane.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now, the managed perception of Republican ideology has become fat and ripe for takeover.\u00a0 Economic realities have again given an occasion ripe for perception\u2019s paradigm shift.\u00a0 The elite have now become the ones in power, the ones to blame, the party of the elite.\u00a0 The true Republican believers have fled into the concaves of their historical, conservative ideology and left the neo-cons to fend for themselves.\u00a0 The righteous indignation of the true conservatives is set to blast the folks that enabled their political domination.\u00a0 While Republicans were all too happy to get votes and cater to their perceptual electorate, they also discovered that managing perception came with a cost.\u00a0 It cost them their conservative soul.\u00a0 Now that they appear soulless, bereft of new ideas, bearing the burden of the image of fault and elitism they have retreated.\u00a0 Those that are the party faithful have hunkered down into their ideological roots to regroup and try to re-forge an image for another day, an opportunist day.\u00a0 Conservatives are looking at perhaps decades in the perceptual doldrums.\u00a0 The smart ones know it.\u00a0 The last desperate screams of the dying McCain campaign are shrill and are now working to dismantle the last bastions of their credibility.\u00a0 As many Joe\u2019s are saying, \u201cIf a Republican\u2019s lips are moving they are lying\u201d.<\/p>\n
What shows itself in this spectacle is that \u201cperception is not everything\u201d, perception is an opportunistic infection of economic reality.\u00a0 When reality happens the managers of perception lose.\u00a0 They are ripe for takeover.\u00a0 When \u201cmanagement\u201d begins to believe its own propaganda it loses touch with the shifting sands of reality beneath their feet.\u00a0 However, necessity requires that \u201cJoes\u201d keep a healthy stand in underlying realties, that they do not take the manufactured perceptions too seriously and, when perceptions grow thin, the perceptual power brokers find they are touch with their own economic realities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cPerception is everything\u201d appears to be the organizing paradigm of modern political campaigns in the US.\u00a0 Technology and capital have combined into the perfect storm for managing perception.\u00a0 Perceptions thrust into the early years of technology kept the Republicans largely out of office for decades after FDR and the Great Depression.\u00a0 Republicans were portrayed as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,16,18],"tags":[185],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capitalism-and-marxism","category-politics","category-republicans","tag-republican"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3943,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/3943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}