For most people, being perceived as an eccentric outlier is something to be feared. This isn’t fundamentally because most people are corrupt, it’s fundamentally because most people are social animals, and feeling connected with the pack is critical to our sense of well-being. This is why “moving the goalposts” works, even when those doing so barely bother to conceal it. Nancy Pelosi is a left-wing extremist. Joe Lieberman is a centrist. The mass of Americans don’t want us to withdraw from Iraq. Most Americans favor replacing Social Security with private accounts. There’s a serious scientific dispute over human-created climate change, and Michael Crichton is a moderate in that dispute. None of these things are true, and you know non-crazy people who believe them all.
The phony middle, and why we fall for it (Making Light)
Sure … I guess those people are non-crazy in a delusional way. It all depends on definition, eh?
- A handy guide to the Overton window from a “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” tank-thinker
- An Introduction to the Overton Window of Political Possibilities (Mackinac Center for Public Policy)
If I were in a tank, I would think, Time to get out of this fucking tank. Unless it were the type of tank that rolls on treads and shoots a bloody cannon, in the middle of a zombie infestation. That could be kinda handy.
It seems peculiar for even the VRWC people to say there are no left wing think tanks. There are plenty, and plenty of left wing intellectuals, but they rarely have any utility to the power structure, which is inherently right wing wherever there is one. People like Soros and the folks the giant liberal foundations will throw money at the ameliorative and procedural reform policy centers, but it’s a bit like putting band aids over deep puncture wounds. They have to draw up short because, really, the status quo is treating them well. The big progressive outfits cut their own hamstrings in twittering over “Leninist” strategies and twist themselves into pavlovian-conditioned toys for the wingnuts.
Re: left-wing/right-wing
Ha ha! Tanks can’t fly! And if they could, they’d need more than one bloody wing.
My zombie-fighting think tank will have helicopter rotors, and it will be awesome.
With or without rotors, it will be an honest think tank. Certainly far more honest than calling a psychological warfare office an educational organization.