The rational alternative is the realization that the party you’ve voted for in previous elections in fact bears much of the culpabilitly for the current state of affairs, and simply may be incapable of solving the problems that it at least helped to create.

Which is to say that if your primary concerns remain abortion or homosexuality or other social concerns, you will most certainly continue to vote for those who at least pay those issues lip service, even if/when you know that they aren’t actually going to do anything about them. For at least the issues remain on the corner of the table, with the prospect, however dim, of moving foursquare into the middle of it if only you can get the “right” people in office.

But if those aren’t your primary issues, I simply do understand how continuity is somehow preferable to change. Sure things are bad now and likely to get worse; but we don’t want to roll the dice because there’s a chance we could lose. History is generally made, and change only occurs, when you do roll the dice.

I’m not assuming that those “moral, emotional, social, or cultural issues” are more emotional or visceral than they are moral or social or cultural, so the idea that it’s solely about the gut really doesn’t apply here. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it was “all about” God, guns, and gays, either. Surely there are economic reasons why voters who’ve identified themselves with one party or the other don’t stray.

What I’m getting at is the idea that there is one clear rational alternative available to conservative or Republican voters now — one choice that would be more rational or better than simply staying with the devil you know. If there is, what would that choice be? If there isn’t, can you really blame voters for sticking with what they think they know?

Those who are enthusiastic for Palin now probably wouldn’t vote for Obama under any circumstances. Third parties aren’t much of an option either. Voters may like the candidate who pokes at free trade or NAFTA or foreign wars or porkbarrel spending, but they aren’t going to go whole hog for protectionism or isolationism or libertarianism.

When push comes to shove most voters don’t want to face the risks involved in overturning the status quo in a major way. Who’s to say they’re wrong in that hesitation? And what or where is that rational alternative preferable to staying with the party you’ve voted for in previous elections?

Both thrive on vicarious identification and clannishness—basic survival instincts that precede and sometimes conflict with enlightenment values and the prudence necessitated by personal responsibility. Politics has actual consequences, and sports do not (save European Futbol, given its traditional association with nationalism), but this all important difference doesn’t seem to compel a difference in approach, maybe because the costs of politics are socialized, causality often obscured, and responsibility for outcomes arbitrarily diffuse—acting as a subsidy to the viscera, and an incentive to be reckless and impulsive, without personal penalty.

If you assume that foreign policy isn’t going to change, that no one’s going to “clean up the mess in Washington” for once and for all or “roll back the size of government”, and that each party is going to be about as good or about as bad for the economy as the other, what else do you have to vote on but those moral, emotional, social, or cultural issues: abortion, guns, gays?

If both parties move to the center, before or after the election, what is it but a few wedge issues that separate them? Democrats would like to say “health care,” but if it looks like any system will be imperfect and merely replace one set of deficiencies with another, where does that leave us?

When you look at the various campaign appeals — this move on the part of each campaign from “experience” to “change” from “maverick” to “moderate” and back again — voting one’s gut looks as rational as anything else.

You do raise some good points in your last comment. But if you are a social conservative and figure that no president is ever going to be as conservative on the social issues as Bush was, but that McCain couldn’t be as bad as Obama would be, where’s the irrationality in supporting him? It’s “half a loaf is better than none” politics, but there’s a long tradition of that here.

Another concern–and this comes back to the scam remark–is that social conservatives are being duped into endorsing another GOP ticket that will yield no action on a social conservative agenda, but meanwhile social conservatives will bear the stigma for empowering McCain and whatever misguided policies he implements and will bear the blame for propelling him to power more than any other group because they will be identified with Palin. So I don’t see her inclusion on the ticket as a grand gesture or a magnanimous act, but as another stunt designed to lure us in and then ignore our concerns for the next four years. For that matter, I have come to the view over the last few years that pursuing a principally party political agenda is not really the right priority for conservatives, and to the extent that Palin’s selection has typified the privileging of party political activism over preserving and creating the culture we want to have it is a reinforcement of the wrong habits and ensures conservatives’ increasing reliance on the political process to try to address unwanted cultural change, which will ultimately prove unsuccessful.

Maybe that makes me implacable, but on the major areas of policy where I think McCain is most in the wrong (e.g., foreign policy, trade, immigration) and where his policies are most detrimental to the national interest Palin not only does not provide any counterbalance but seems ready to embrace and perpetuate the sorts of policies Bush and McCain have backed. I don’t know how I can look at the prospect of those policies continuing to dominate the GOP and win the support of most conservatives without making my objections known right away.

The reflexive loyalty I see is not to a party, but to a person primarily on the basis of her small-town, middle-class Christian background, and it troubles me the same way that the uncritical embrace of Bush by movement conservatives troubled me in years past. We have seen how this instinct to endow a politician with virtues blinds people to the pol’s flaws, and I fear it is happening all over again with Palin. I see that people feel the choice to be magnificent, and I don’t doubt that this is a sincere feeling, but I would suggest that we need to do less feeling and more thinking. Maybe I am too inclined to make the perfect the enemy of the good, and I’ll leave it to you all to determine whether I am being unreasonable, but I confess to not understanding the importance of embracing pragmatism when the things being done by the pragmatists are misguided.

It is not as tempting to support someone out of an instinct to defend shared values and culture when you assume that the entire exercise is something of a scam.

John McCain is a muddled, somewhat dangerous conviction politician. He is pretty evidently not a man of much guile, however. How can his campaign be described as a scam? To me, this makes about as much sense as describing Eunomia as a scam. Neither makes much sense to me.

I remember how scathingly critical you were of my man Mitt Romney during the primary. You had your reasons and they were good ones even when I disagreed with your conclusions, but does the McCain campaign not have altogether a different feel than the Romney campaign had? Yet the McCain campaign too is to be regarded as just another scam, it seems. I don’t get it.

When you take it for granted that the pander is designed to sucker people into endorsing policies that are directly detrimental to the very way of life and culture in question, you feel less inspired to defend this or that politician against attacks from the left.

All right, fair enough, but—you must admit—the vice presidency is a pretty plum of a prize for our old foe John McCain to offer. If we will deride such generous compromise on Mr. McCain’s part as “pander,” then are we not irreconcilable, even implacable?

On the other hand, if you are still under the impression that the GOP takes cultural conservative concerns seriously and does not simply use them as election-time bait, …

I am under the impression that the GOP is a diffuse party which its national committee, to the committee’s occasional frustration, cannot really control, for the party’s real power resides in its thousands of local county committees. It is not a matter of the GOP’s taking cultural conservative concerns seriously; it is a matter of the GOP’s actually being composed of cultural conservatives.

In other words, I am under the impression that there exists no strongly centralized GOP capable of effectively baiting anyone.

… you may think it is really important to defend Palin.

Yep.

Sure, you may say, reflexive loyalty, groupthink and a failure of critical thinking may have brought conservatives to their present state, but this example of reflexive loyalty, groupthink and failure of critical thinking is vital for the greater good.

Come, Daniel. Some of us who seem so enthusiastic about Sarah Palin’s marvellous national debut are not people known for reflexive loyalty to party. Regarding groupthink, well, Republicans do believe in working politically as a team, and there is a certain justifiable feeling among us of that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but is it not possible that we simply feel the Palin choice to be magnificent?

Actually, I do not want to argue against you, because yours is a clear voice for reason and you are a persistent, effective apologist for our side. But I do not understand the stridency against Mrs. Palin, nor your seeming willingness to let the proverbial best be the enemy even of the very, very good. What am I misunderstanding?

Howard

There is no doubt that this effected me, as well. The large family, the church, the guns led to my visceral reaction as “she is our of ours: back off.” Now this is undeniably stupid of me, and it is always important to make sure your brain has your “gut instincts” firmly in check. A vote for Palin is a vote for McCain, and is simply not in the cards for me. What I (and all dissident conservatives)can root for, however, is for Gov. Palin to strip the bark off of Joe Biden in the debate next month.