Paradigm Lost: Why the rEVOLution Has Not Been Televised
Submitted by Robin Koerner on Tue, 05/01/2012 - 21:05

Robin Koerner is the original "Blue Republican", a term he coined in this article. He also runs WatchingAmerica.com. He is a British permanent resident of the United States.

To those who care about such things, the silence of the media about the extraordinary events around Ron Paul's campaign is deafening.

Some see conspiracy. I don't. I see the expected reaction to a paradigm shift -- a complete change in the concepts we use to make sense of our politics and culture.

An excellent illustration of the power of a "paradigm" is the Perceptions of Incongruity experiment that was conducted at Harvard in 1949.

In this experiment, subjects were shown playing cards and asked to call out what they saw. They would consistently identify the cards correctly. After a while, however, the experimenters would slip in "incongruous cards" in which the colors red and black were switched, such as black hearts or diamonds and red clubs or spades.

What did the subjects see when shown those incongruous cards? They did not see the incongruous cards, but normal playing cards -- the cards they were expecting to see, without noticing the incongruity. For example, when shown a black six of hearts, they might call out simply "six of hearts" or "six of spades" -- neither of which was correct. The subjects didn't misunderstand or misinterpret anything -- they actually misperceived something according to the paradigm in which they were operating -- in this case, "the playing card paradigm," comprising everything they already knew (wrongly) about the cards they were looking at.

Subjects continued to fail to notice the incongruous cards. Eventually, they would exhibit a physiological reaction of discomfort, knowing that something was wrong, but not being conscious of what. Only when they had been forced to look at many incongruous cards for very long times did they "get" what was going on and see what they were looking at. Suddenly, they realized that "the playing card paradigm" did not apply. They finally knew that reality included non-traditional cards. They thus adopted a new paradigm (that included black hearts etc.), and thereafter saw what was in front of their eyes.

Goethe said, "We see only what we know."

So what do we know about American politics? We "know" that there are two opposing ideologies, Left and Right. We know they are largely staked out by two established parties, Democrats and Republicans. We know that all political positions that are "reasonable" or "mainstream" are represented by them. The trends in American politics can be identified by listening just to them: other views are held by so few that they can be ignored because they can have no significant impact.

All this "knowledge" is false, but it comprises the prevailing paradigm, so we know it nonetheless.

Any paradigm worthy of the name -- such as this American political paradigm -- lasts for a long time and is hard to unlearn.

But when it is about to collapse, a few things happen.

A) Most people ignore or try to "explain away" the data that threaten the old paradigm.
B) The old paradigm becomes stretched in increasingly artificial ways to fit all the threatening data. This is called, "saving the phenomenon."
C) More parochially, people with a career interest in the old paradigm fight for it with increasing dogmatism.

"Saving the phenomenon" is particularly interesting, and history (as well as everyday life) provides many clear examples. Consider the cosmological paradigm that prevailed for centuries. To a first approximation, heaven is perfect; circles (actually spheres) are perfect; planets are bodies in heaven, and so being perfect, they move around circular paths.

Thus, for centuries the motions of the planets were explained... until enough people made enough observations of planetary orbits that were not, in fact, circular: the circles were actually squashed. But since an entire theology -- and an entire political establishment -- were based on the idea of heavenly bodies' following the particular divine design that was endorsed by society's paradigm makers, the data could not be allowed to make the paradigm false. The "phenomenon had to be saved." Clever men worked out that if the center of a small circle was imagined to travel around a large circle, and a heavenly body traveled around that small circle, then the body would appear not to be traveling around a circle, but the motions would really all still be circular: circles on circles are still circles, and the old paradigm is still correct!

More data had to come in, and people with especially open minds apply themselves to the problem, before observers could actually perceive what they were observing: that heavenly bodies travel in ellipses. When they did, the paradigm shifted: Kepler was then able to formulate his law of planetary motion, political power throughout Europe was redistributed, and soon Newton would formulate gravity.

Admittedly, changes in a prevailing political paradigm are, unlike planets, hard to observe directly if they occur in people's heads, but many important political and cultural changes of our time are much more visible.

For example, the average adult under 30 is expected to feel that there's not much point in engaging in politics because she can't make much of a difference. Politicians are not rock stars and their ideas don't inspire young people to congregate in their thousands in stadiums to get high on old fashioned ideas like liberty or abstruse concerns like monetary policy, chanting their favorite lines from their candidate's "greatest hits" (unless of course, that candidate has already been nominated as his party's presidential candidate). People certainly don't make computer games out their favorite candidate's favorite positions. Hundreds of them don't spend hours writing songs and recording high-quality videos about political issues that turn them on. And, usually, people who read books about the history of central banking for fun don't number in the hundreds of thousands. In short, it's been several decades since so many people became more inspired by politics than by anything else in their lives, and felt so able to make a difference. It also used to be that most politically active, educated and non-religious under-30s voted Democratic, while the number of Americans who were politically active but felt completely unrepresented by either main party was too small to matter.

But the media are people too... and so, like everyone else, they do not see what their current paradigm does not allow.

That is why cable TV has not even considered the extraordinary rise of Independent political registration, the decline of party-political thinking, the upsurge of interest in America's political and historical identity, kids' climbing trees to hear an old white politician tell a story that no mass political movement, let alone party, has told for generations, or the remarkable scenes that are playing out in GOP caucuses around the country as the party breaks its own rules to ensure that those who don't like its anointed candidate cannot choose their own.

It is why the rEVOLution has not been televised.

But it will be.

The very fact that the prevailing paradigm cannot accommodate the cultural and political changes in the USA, or even the GOP, is evidence that those changes are radical enough to establish a new one.

Eventually, when the gap between what is so and what everyone "knows" becomes too large, it becomes impossible to carry on everyday life without seeing it, admitting it, and dealing with it. That point may finally be in sight.

This week, some people who both operate in, and shape, the prevailing paradigm came up against that impossibility for the first time. Two cable networks - Fox and MSNBC - discretely acknowledged that Ron Paul was now winning states (IA, MN etc.) and that it was likely (Fox actually ventured "inevitable") that he would win enough states to be on the ballot with Romney at the GOP convention for the presidential nomination.

Whether that happens is much less important than the paradigm shift that has led to it, for when paradigms shift, history is made.

We may not yet have a new narrative. But the old one just cracked.

Ron Paul Keeps Winning as Supporters Prepare For a Battle With GOP Old Guard

Allan Stevoin 13 hours ago

Ron Paul Keeps Winning as Supporters Prepare For a Battle With GOP Old Guard

Four years ago, Nevada State GOP insiders so disliked Ron Paul supporters that they actually walked out of the state convention and turned off the lights behind them. In a windowless assembly room with some 2,000 people in it, one might imagine the terror this might cause. In what had been an otherwise orderly meeting, this move took place when it became clear that Ron Paul would sweep the Nevada delegation to the Republican National Convention. A bunch of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington types, inspired by Ron Paul, got involved in their party to effect change, and the party insiders didn’t like having these idealists around.

This year looks a little different. Ron Paul’s supporters have assumed a significant portion of the Republican Party leadership and Ron Paul’s supporters seem like they will show up in droves as delegates to assure their candidate is the best represented in Nevada. At the Nevada Republican Convention this year, 25 of the 28 Nevada delegates will be decided.

A showdown is ahead at the convention in the western corner of Nevada in the town of Sparks, where on Friday and Saturday, Ron Paul supporters will culminate their takeover of the Nevada GOP at all levels after being so brazenly rebuffed in 2008.

That showdown will be between the old guard of the Nevada GOP – the Romney-supporting, McCain-supporting, Bush-supporting neo-conservative establishment – and the more numerous and active conservative and libertarian base of the Nevada Republican Party.

Scheduled to speak the afternoon of May 5 at the state convention is Ron Paul himself.

The harder and more violently the GOP establishment fights the organized grassroots of the Republican Party, the more fervently those grassroots seem to fight back. “Blowback” is how the CIA refers to this phenomenon when referencing political struggles abroad. That same type of blowback seems to be taking place across the GOP. Another notable recent example being in Alaska, where the conservative and libertarian base of the Republican Party are pushing back against a moderate and corporatist establishment.

Alaska Republicans held a state convention last weekend that Politico hailed as “more evidence of the political maturation of the Paul forces, who are beginning to seize the levers of powers from within the state parties.” A Paul supporter was elected state chairman and Paul took at least a quarter of the delegates with him out of the Alaska Republican Convention. There is likely to be much controversy around this transition, however, as the Alaska Dispatch reports that the former state chairman took some $100,000 in party funds with him as he was removed from office by transferring it to a Republican organization that is friendlier to the state’s old guard.

The more intense these fights get, and the more success Ron Paul’s supporters see, the more notice they are generating around the county. “I just came back from the national (Republican National Committee) meeting and everybody was talking about the Ron Paul, well-organized takeover,” said Heidi Smith, Nevada national GOP committeewoman.

There is little question that Ron Paul is pushing hard for delegates and that his plan is starting to succeed. Focusing on delegates is the strategy that Barack Obama used with success against an opponent with greater name recognition. The strategy worked for Obama and it seems to be working for Paul. At the Republican National Convention on August 27 in Tampa, Paul will be a force to be reckoned with. The RNC convenes \to choose a nominee and conduct the business of the party. Like any meeting convened under Robert’s Rules of Order, it is the delegates of that meeting who are the ultimate authority.

While the media and Republican establishment have concluded that a Romney-Obama race is a given, Republican voters do not yet seem to agree with that conclusion. After an estimated $80 million spent by the Romney campaign this election cycle and after five years of campaigning for the presidency, Romney has yet to appeal widely to Republican voters and bridge the divides in the party.

Voters are still left, therefore, with a two man race for the Republican nomination - either a moderate challenger (Mitt Romney) running against an incumbent president, which has been an unsuccessful option since at least 1976, or an ideological challenger to an incumbent president (Ron Paul). In the years 1976, 1980, 1992, 1994, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2006, and 2008, national elections were either lost by moderates or won by principled candidates. It’s still not clear who the Republican delegates will rally around in 2012.

To win on the first ballot at the RNC, Mitt Romney needs 1,144 delegates to vote for him. If he doesn’t get that, he ends up in an ugly scenario where a floor fight is sure to take place. If Colorado, Missouri, or Minnesota are any indication, Santorum supporters and the religious right are likely to side with Paul over Romney.

National conventions are usually a coronation for an established candidate. That is not always the case, however. During a convention, anything can happen. Any political junky of a certain age remembers the drama inside and out of the 1968 Democratic convention. Political historians know that Warren Harding walked into the 1920 Republican National Convention with the support of only 7% of delegates, before being chosen as the Republican nominee at that convention on the tenth ballot, and elected president later that year.

According to an unnamed party official, a less principled candidate may fare better in a brokered convention: “An important difference between Paul and Romney is that Romney can horse-trade by promising sweetheart deals, influential positions, and government contracts, should he be elected. Ron Paul has only the promise that he will work his hardest to scale back the unconstitutional growth of government…. [Paul’s] philosophy on the role of government may limit how influential of a horse-trader he can be.” Results over the last few weeks from states like Colorado, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Alaska tell us that that the Republicans don’t yet have a guaranteed frontrunner and guarantee us only one certainty at this point.

On the floor of the RNC, in late August, on primetime television, the American people will watch a political drama unfold in which the Republican old guard tries to horse-trade its way out of the pressure that has built up around it for years. The Mr. Smiths of the Republican Party are angry and organized and have worked their way into the highest levels of the Republican Party. They are the delegates of the highest legislative body of the Republican Party – the RNC. They have voice and vote to change the direction, structure, and leadership of the GOP, and in 2012 the Mr. Smiths of the GOP seem to like Ron Paul a whole lot better than they like Mitt Romney.