WHITE NEGRO FOR MAYOR

I would argue that 'gay white negroism' or to frame it in a less offensive term, 'metrosexualism', although still relevant, is less a by-product of Thatcherite individualism than feminism, gender equality, specifically women marrying and having children later in life.

And is this such a bad thing? I'm sure women are far happier with men being groomed, 'buff' and more considerate lovers than badly-dressed sweaty blobs with a belly full of Watneys Red Barrel!

I hugely admire Adam Curtis but blaming Thatcher and Reagan for everything does begin to get tiresome. I don't agree that cultural communitarianism is dead. Look at the huge increase in music festivals, book festivals and other communal gatherings, attendance of sporting events, the rise of farmers markets and local food ethos.

Social gatherings are very easy and practically free to publicize thanks to Email, Facebook and Twitter. Witness UK Uncut events and environmental protests and meetings. These happen on a virtually daily basis. Environmental NGOs have regular meetings with government ministers, whose to say groups like UK Uncut won't in future?

Much more interesting is the question of who are the current outsiders. Well, it's very expensive to be an outsider. But do we actually want outsiders? Isn't it better to have people who are enganged in the political process through the kind of collective actions I've described above?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8m9vDRe8fw

@timprobert ... "It is an odd moment because as you watch you realise that it was elements of this rebellious individualism that both Thatcher and Reagan would later harness."
That's all he said about Thatcher, it was hardly the epicentre of the piece and when talking about recent political history in the UK it's difficult to avoid mentioning her name.
I thought it was interesting particularly in light of the growth of mayor level politics here in the UK that has, in the case of London, become a competition revolving around who is hated less as opposed to who can offer more.

This reminds me a bit of the Unabomber's manifesto when he is talking about the "psychology of modern leftism" (https://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt%29 and the growth of identity politics on websites like tumblr where almost radical social justice is becoming meteorically successful.

The fear of nuclear annihilation has been replaced with the fear of climate change and the fear of energy insecurity. People pretend to be outsiders because they cannot face the future implications of being part of a social structure that is stagnant or imperilled. Hipsterism, as a cloak for conservatism, is a means of deflecting responsibility and aggression whilst maintaining wealth. As such it is fundamentally negative and unsustainable.

Adam, its clear that Struassians are the new true hipsters.

Strongly opinionated this one.

I appreciate that Adam is making a VERY different point, but with the recent controversy over David Starkey's 'White's have become black' comment - certainly brave to draw attention to a similar phrase.

In our introverted culture I believe outsiders are generally back-bedroom casualties that don't participate in the mainstream social space - and this can be anyone. I would reverse the question and ask aren't we all outsiders now in this society of the spectacle?

I agree with the point that if the Left had got hold of the idea of individualism, history would be different. Instead, the Left hunkered down around the patriarchal working class culture that began to breakdown from the 1950's onward leaving its vote in decline until Mandelson's focus groups worked out the answer.

Lots to think about here as ever. This makes me think of a recent Will Self article on the beeb that said how intellectualism is generally sneered at. Not in this corner of the web, there are no easy sound bite answers to Adam's work. Thanks again.

Slavoj Zizek is a hipster magnet.. His thoughts on ecology are well positioned to attract that new 'white negro'.

15:45 - WHAT THE HELL.

The New White Negro will be the Muslim that is in-between the liberal and the extremist.

Well it has ever been thus. Romantic primitivism - the idea that humans in their "natural" state are essentially good and if we could ditch religion, politics and all the other institutions that make up "civilisation" and rely on good old-fashioned feelings and common sense, we would have no problems - has been around since the 1500s when the Spanish began to feel guilty about their treatment of the indigenous peoples in the Americas and started to idealise these people's lives as simple and honest.

This in part explains why we idealise and exalt First Nations' cultures, art and music while the originators of those cultures live in poverty or face being driven off their lands by corporations and into cities where they live in slums. I'm as guilty as anyone else in doing this - it's almost unavoidable.

By the way, has anyone else seen Episode 2 of "The World Tomorrow" in which Julian Assange interviews Slavoj Zizek and David Horowitz? Horowitz is a former "liberal" activist who was active in the Black Panther movement in the late 1960s and now espouses neo-conservatism. He has incredibly vile views about the nature of freedom and whether people should sacrifice liberty for security in the post-9/11 world. The film can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM0I5k50XsY

The Mailer I remember was a thug, bully and pimp a 'Hollow man.'I will not go into the pimping except to say he had an enforcer in Washington named King Sized who handled the women. As to the thugdom, I watched him operate in the White Horse Tavern. A young man with a build like Arnold Strange, skinny,rumply dressed asked Mailer if he had to use all that strong language. I had been shadowing Mailer wondering when I should fight him.
Mailer had his hands up and was swinging in on the kid with as a flurry of middle weight punches, well timed. The kid, half way to punch city was grabbed by Murry Kempton who held him for the next flurry of punches and the kids lights were out. I wanted to step in but a big paw came onto my should and the big guy was drinking with, a very tough actor, said "No Cord you're out classed." I concurred and sat down. The Mailer entourage left covered in glory. I switched to drinking Bushmills and felt I'd punked out. The kid, what was left of him was thrown out by the bouncer.
The next time I saw Mailer he was an old man on two canes, his fighting days over.

"Today it is possible to argue that we have all become gay white negroes. We all listen to 'edgy urban' music, spend our time in the gym, go shopping and groom ourselves, take lots of drugs, have sex and then spend the rest of the time talking to our friends about the impossibility of finding real love and connection in the world." The original idea of hip, as an alternative to conformism, was to be authentic and original. If "everyone" is doing what the author cites above, they are just new conformists, not hip. And the original idea goes back way beyond Mailer's generation. The Shelleys, Byron, then later Lizst, Baudelaire, and many others broke radically from cultural conformity, some starting around 1800, and the angst of modernity and the search for alternatives goes back at least that far, if not farther. And is probably just a continually recurring reaction to the alienation caused by the industrial Revolution.

What if the Left had tapped into these sentiments before Thatcher and Reagan?
It would be nice to think the world would be better for it. Also where indeed is the genuine challenge to the current established social norms? Provocative blog as ever.

I like to travel overseas to wilder places. Where I am the outsider. I try to enjoy the nightlife wherever I go. The regular middle class bars always seem to be filled with people pretending to be rich or hard. I was in the Army, don't need to look hard. I can buy the bar, no need to look rich. These places are boring and a bit sad.

After awhile I started to notice a pattern. The places that were fun always had something in common. Negritos(aboriginals), trannies, dwarves, the bar the prostitutes go to to after work,... All bars filled with outsiders. Outsiders have something special. There you could find empathy, humour and the freedom to have fun. They are not trapped by the need to strive. Their exclusion gives them freedom.

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Hipster of the old school white negro variety - https://bccru.tumblr.com/post/22376708542 ?

Another enjoyable and thought provoking post, Mailer was a very interesting character. As for the new outsider, maybe the dichotomy that is the modern luddites!

The fact that 65% of voters couldn't be bothered to vote at all in London and apparently 68% across England couldn't have cared less either, suggests that it's the people who believe in democracy at all who are the new outsiders.

I'd like to think the real outsiders of our time can be found in obscure corners of the internet; faceless, disconnected from the material world, and lost in abstract thought.

For me, the term "gay white negro" conjures an image of Ignatius J. Reilly from Toole's 'A Confederacy of Dunces.' The story of Norman Mailer's campaign to become the mayor of New York very much resembles what could have been a future escapade of Ignatius', right down to the insightful, though laughable and crass excerpt.

Funnily enough ive been pondering the same thing as Adam has lately, where are the non-conformists of today? With individualism being the new conformity, how do you stand out from the crowd?

On the surface it looks as if nothing is happening in our culture today, but look on the fringes and you find a new counter-culture and a "New New Left" emerging (yes, I did mean to type New twice!).

The strangest movement of all since the New Romantics has to be the Chap phenomenon. These are people who dress in the fashions of the 1920's to 1950's and try their best to live to old sets of values in many ways. To many of these people its not just fancy dress, ive met them, its a way of life.

Another is political rumblings like Occupy, Anonymous and The Zeitgeist Movement (which I often call the New New Left) which are looking very different to the old forms of protest and political action.

All in all these things may not look like much, but ive got a feeling we are all in the eye of the storm of something. Perhaps "the on-rush of history" is closer than we think.

@cordley

Ive been trying to look on the net for the 'real' Mailer as you've said in your post. Are there any books or articles out there that document the person you really knew?

I'm glad that intellectual discourse has moved more towards plain clarity instead of the poetic pseudomysticism everything was washed in back then. I don't even know whether Norman Mailer is right or wrong about a White Negro - it's a powerful image that people will be impressed to strongly agree or disagree with, but it's unlikely that many will do so because they've followed and understood his exposition.

Again: 15:45 - WHAT THE HELL.

It's not a joke, it's not a story, it's speaker and audience believing that schizophrenic stoner word-salad is a new system of thought and language for hip people.

I watched the documentary and its fly-on-the-wall style was quite an ordeal to follow. Basically what I got out of it was Mailer's political opposition was a well-oiled and slick machine financed by huge amounts of money.

Mailer's platform was idealistic enough: devolve power to neighbourhoods and boroughs so they can select their own police depts, education depts, fire-fighting services and so on. I didn't see much in the film to suggest it had much voter support. I checked other sources about Mailer's platform and interestingly it was supported by an economist Murray Rothbard whose political / economic philosophy might be described as libertarian capitalist; Rothbard was an absolute believer in self-ownership and loathed the idea of taxation, believed government was intrinsically evil and was hostile to socialism. Were he alive today he might fit into the Ron Paul camp though he might have had to be brow-beaten into accepting the US Constitution.

Mailer was no angel either: at the time the documentary was made, he was well into his fourth marriage and might have had a mistress on the side. He was known to have been violent to his second wife. He was married six times in total and 1980 was a particularly busy year for him: in that year, he divorced his 4th wife, married his 5th wife on 7 November 1980 and divorced her the next day (this was to legitimise her daughter by him), and then married his last wife the same year.

Quote:
"All in all these things may not look like much, but ive got a feeling we are all in the eye of the storm of something. Perhaps "the on-rush of history" is closer than we think."

I think that's quite likely too. Though I also think it might possibly have to do with something that's not been discussed, I'm thinking of generations. Politics has been possibly since the 60s and definately since the 80s been dominated by one 'group' of people, the baby boomers. Now that generation is recceding from power, and with it their right-wing consumerist ideals. That in turn changes all the instutions that grew up around these ideas as well.

That's not to say the whole thing is dead and buried - there are some in the generations that just preceeded the boomers who tend to stick with some of their ideas; let's call them "baby-boomer groupies" for want of a better expression. But as you go down through the age list and further away from that 60s generation the change becomes a lot more noticable.

I know it dosen't seem like it as these things can take years to complete - the movement of people takes a lot longer than (say) the movement of computer data. Where this leads us to in the years to come I have no idea, however definately some degree of change is on its way.

ljones

If I tried my hardest I couldn't think of a better lead-in to my recommendation of "Stuff White People Like" by Christian Lander. In it and in subsequent writing at the identically named website, Lander identifies and lampoons the hypocrisy pretentiousness and narcissism of the current professional class. It will make you laugh out loud. I'm writing from USA but the book should be available world wide. It is more than a humor book but Lander doesn't really call it ridicule. Ridicule is a word *I* like. But here's the news: recent views of the site and Lander's work has become tepid since he has gotten speaking gigs at places like Google HQ. Thomas Frank has noted in "The Conquest Of Cool" that the corporate world will co-opt anything and everything.

Still, in the little book called "Stuff White People Like" there's plenty of ammunition for writers like Owen Jones (recent author of "CHAVS, the demonization of the working class.") Jones is British but his analysis of the demonization of the working class I could identify with across the board.

Also of note for AC readers. There's a new documentary called "Paul Goodman Changed My Life" the only documentary on Goodman to my awareness. Here, as with the hip Occupy movement, the question "where are the women?" is apparent. It's no different with Mailer. The punk movement in US had a word borrowed from the French language to identify Mailers's so-called hip white negroes in the new era. That word is "poser." And the hypocrisy of being a poseur with the $1000 (USD) chief petty officer coats and Greek fisherman caps and other regalia simply identifies them that much more quickly.

I was speaking to a priest recently. He wasn't at all bothered when I told him I was an Atheist. But he was very concerned when I told him that I didn't believe in romantic love either.

I can't help feeling as if 'love' is the new Religion for our age. People no longer care if you don't believe in God. But they get freaked out when you start questioning recieved ideas about love...

I know people 'feel in love' from time to time. But in my opinion it is a mass delusion promoted by the elite to keep society tied together. That might seem a silly thing to say - but mass delusions are common and powerful. Take the 'vanishing penis epidemics' we see today in Africa:

https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1274235.stm

Personally. A society where every TV show, movie and song is (often) devoted to promoting the ideal of love (and it's triumphs and disasters) is alot like North Korea where the masses are brainwashed into adoring their Dear Leader.

I am sure the love we feel for friends and family would remain the same even if they were never portrayed by the media. But - to me - romantic love is something learned and programmed into us by society. We have a very decadent take on this compared to most other periods in history - and most other places on Earth (where arranged marriages are still common).

Love is a placebo. The belief in it makes it self-fulfilling. I have trained as a hypnotist - and a similar thing takes place in those environments as well. If a person 'thinks' he is hypnotised - then he will act out as if he is. Even though he is not actually hypnotised. He trips himself up into acting hypnotised because he - at an earlier stage implicitly accepted that hypnosis is 'real'. When it fact hypnosis is no more 'real' than the concept of 'ghosts'. The very concept of hypnosis (much like Keyser Soze in 'The Usual Suspects') which he may have first come across decades earlier is the thing with the power. It is the concept - and not the person using it on stage which does the work of 'hypnotising' someone.

Anyway - I think this moment is an interesting one for society. We have cast away our beliefs in god and politics. And we now worship at the altar of 'love'.

What will happen when that goes as well? The idea (and it is an idea) of Romantic Love is only about 600 years old. Funnily enough - it first gained prominence here in England - when poems and stories first started to explore the idea of love over-powering the hearts and minds of men and women. Who then rebelled against the arranged marriages which were then prominent throughout Europe.

And from that - to today. We have an idea which is very useful for a stable consumerist society. More than helping Hollywood sell movie tickets - the idea of love distracts people from higher goals. And keeps them busily being busy worker bees producing economic value which is then extracted by their loving wife and the government.

Or something like that...

I am no opera fan. But from what I can tell - Mozart addressed a smiliar point in his work 'Idomeneo'.

Joe Mckay

@joe_mckay

Interesting read.

I'd question your statement that "the idea of Romantic Love is only about 600 years old," since examples of what you might be describing can be found in many classical texts -- Penelope perhaps being an archetype for this kitsch love you speak of.

At least for me there is a logical dilemma inherent in questioning the objective reality of something which is admittedly abstract and subjective, like love and even God (depending on one's definition, taking any religion literally allows for that "god" to be objectively questioned). Love exists only as symbols, the word 'love' of course being one of them, and these symbols are evidently real things. Therefor to say "I don't believe in romantic love" you must inevitably acknowledge romantic love. Even the rejection of an idea or symbol is a form of belief.

Without claiming that love is fabricated i think your argument still stands, modern media uses the whole concert of human 'emotions' and the ideas surrounding them as a 'placebo.' Perhaps this isn't a conscious act of oppression, but merely a reflection of how these things function on a personal level for many people.

@joe_mckay, @Dubsalenty:

If you haven't already read this, you may want to take a look at Adam's post on 'Learning to Hug' from October last year. It relates quite well to what you are discussing, I think.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/10/the_curse_of_tina_part_two.html

I am, sort of, in agreement with the first post. I'd modify that agreement with reference to the post that mentions poseurs.

Being an 'outsider' has become largely about striking a pose ... whether ideological, aesthetic, based in identity politics, etc. One shows one's commitment by displaying the requisite symbols, and by a sense of outrage.

Ok, maybe that's too harsh. Or maybe not.

I'd suggest the outsiders of today need less Ginsberg, and a whole lot more Gramsci. Which is not to say that I don't appreciate the power of the Beats' cultural critique. But without some notion of engagement, of organic intellectuals building a historical bloc in Gramsci's language, the critique is ever doomed to become simply fashion.

Engage, engage, engage. High youth unemployment. A disillusioned middle class. Environmental crises. Spiritual zerrissenheit. The linkages are there to be made. But what the unifying force?

Sedgley I only knew two of the girls who talked about Mailer's sex operation and King Sized. I was not a client. One of the girls was living in Paris. She was close to my ex there who runs The Musee Roy Adzug. We have not conversed in years. There was a strong political presence,so handle with care.

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EJK,

A fine statement on Obama and his enablers over the past four years. Yes we've strayed away from Mailer but for those interested in EJK's post, there is a very good transcript of a speech given at the Left Forum recently by Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report blog. It quashes the "lesser of two evils'' argument often given by the enablers:

https://blackagendareport.com/content/why-barack-obama-more-effective-evil

It's waaaay better to hear Ford deliver this speech and for that there is an archive program of Five O'Clock Shadow from WBAI in New York City.

https://archive.wbai.org/files/mp3/wbai_120329_170045fiveshadow.mp3

(The Glen Ford segment begins about a third of the way into the stream audio.)

I love being a Metrosexual. And Mailer was right, the unions did discriminate against blacks and hispanics, as well as supporting backwards macho social issues, and have been a marginalised political force ever since.

Interesting for sure - but really how relevant to the London mayoral elections? I think not. You are loosing it Adam. Starkey, Mailer and Curtis are all similar in the sense that when they observe the perceived deterioration of a culture they blame it on outsiders - the 'whites have become black', or the 'new white negro' and 'gay white negro'.
Seriously Adam, who is the gay white negro?

@Agent00Soul:

Yeah a lot of unionists are still socialists who like steel toecapped boots and The Clash and dislike anything effete, and they chafe against those who want to emphasise tolerance and minority interests. This antipathy is not all for obviously wrong reasons though: the metrosexuals really do tend to be atomised self-regarding individualists and the socialists really do have a vision of something greater than themselves. The socialist unionists think that the socialist utopia is a goal that subsumes this or that group wanting its own practices fully accepted.

It's interesting how you summarise their view as 'backwards macho social issues' - are you referring to a strong manufacturing base under worker control? Is that macho? What macho views do unions support?

New York unions are most definitely not socialists. The only tolerance and minority interests they have ever empahsasised with are those of the white male working class. They are atomised self-regarding clans, who have little interest in social justice for anyone but their families. That has prevented them from being taken seriously in their own backyard. Remember the Hard Hat Riot: during a Vietnam war protest in NYC's financial sector in 1970, it was the crew doing construction on the World Trade Center attacked the protestors. It was no spur of the moment act (although I could easily see how it could be), but was deliberately planned by union leaders. And that's 42 years ago - I suspect they are even more socially conservative now. They certainly were Reagan's biggest fans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot

Seriously, I've seen these groups up close and they are the shock troops for any kind of socially progressive movement. Nobody in the urban left trusts them one bit. God help one of their kids if he turns out Metrosexual!

I meant shock troops AGAINST any kind of socially progressive movement. Wishful thinking meets Freudian slip.

" At five minutes to noon, about 200 construction workers
converged on the student rally at Federal Hall from four directions.
Nearly all the construction workers carried American flags
and signs that read "All the way, USA," and
"America, Love it or Leave it." "

Oh dear...

@ Agent00Soul: Trade unions reflect the values of their dominant member groups that founded them. Since most trade unions here in Australia were founded by white working class men, it follows that their stand on most political, social and economic issues has tended to be conservative. In the past, the unions refused to admit women as members and were early supporters of the White Australia policy (which restricted non-white immigration) as far back as the 1890s.

As in the US, union membership in Australia has fallen due in part to the negative blanket stereotyping unions receive in the media as hives of socialist activity (when the majority of them are actually politically conservative) and to general economic changes and restructuring which has meant the collapse of manufacturing in both countries and a greater dependence on resources and service industries.

The only really militant left-wing union we had here that fit the popular stereotype was the Builders Labourers Federation which supported rights for indigenous peoples, opposed Australian participation in the Vietnam war and conducted green bans around inner-city Sydney to preserve heritage and environmentally sensitive areas that are now major tourist attractions. The BLF was deregistered in the 1980s due to corruption charges and now only exists in Queensland. Currently the most militant union in Australia is the Electrical Trades Union of Australia whose Victorian branch left the Australian Labor Party in 2010.

I believe that most if not all unions in the US including the Teamsters (who used to support Reagan and George H W Bush) now support the Democrats so they have changed over the years since the Hard Hat Riot.

Consistently the ILWU in US has supported social causes. But in the main, the writers here are correct: despite the union turnout for the Wisconsin uprising a year ago March, little has changed in spirit or in fact. For this reason and for the fact that the educational establishment has turned over none of the Governor of Wisconsin's plans for them, unions have to be considered socially conservative in the US.

With this in mind what Wisconsin did do was mobilize 30,000 canvassers for a recall election of the Governor which garnered over a million signatures: enough to quash any significant questioning of the total number required. For anyone interested, that election will take place June 5th.

The Republicans must be reading this blog and, perhaps, agreeing with Adam and some of the commenters. A conservative Super PAC plans on attacking Obama by calling him a metrosexual.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/politics/gop-super-pac-weighs-hard-line-attack-on-obama.html?pagewanted=all

Sexualism metro or any other aside (and now we are in American politics with both feet,) I again urge international readers to see post #33 -- the one below the one deleted.

A recent speech by Van Jones to a gathering on the West Coast in Berkeley had VJ loosen up a bit about the trials of being in the Obama administration. I am paraphrasing Jones who said that 'unlike [here] on the West Coast, in DC they think Obama is a Socialist. Obama is no Socialist, he's a Republican.' These are all big laugh lines in the speech. The point is that it has become clear (as it was to Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report years ago and before the election) that the POTUS never had in mind to do anything but standard promise making during campaigns and thus was never a representative of his base.

Here is the recorded speech for those who have interest: It's from a real time radio broadcast last week:

https://soundcloud.com/flashpoints/flashpoints-daily-newsmag-05-4

Texans have a phrase for this (and I think I heard it by Molly Ivins) :

"All hat and no cattle."

Look, using the shapeshifting term 'hipster' as a byword for 'individualism' of any kind is absurd. Yes, Norman Mailer was a colossal egotist and all-round rotter. But Thatcher, Reagan and their supporters wouldn't have had a clue who he was, and he wouldn't have endorsed their policies or cultural outlooks either. There just isn't a connection. This well-worn idea that 'the 60s people' got into consumerist individualism and identity politics in the 70s, and produced Thatcherism and Reaganism: it's utter nonsense. Thatcher's popular support came from bitter Daily Mail types, not former leftists who'd been to university. The strain visible in these conspiracy theories always undercuts the fascinating historical subjects and footage you dredge up Adam.

@loninappleton, I do not know what you were responding to in the deleted post (#32) so I'm not 100% sure of the context; but it struck me in your posts #33 and #43 something I and others have observed among many of those who have attempted to co-op the term "Progressive" here in the U.S; or the "New New Left" as sledgy above calls it, or the "Firebaggers" as they have been derivesively called (referencing Jane Hamsher's Firedoglake)...that is, a kind of anarcho-nihilist hipsterism whose primary focus is to anthromophise all of society's ills into one single persona, that being President Obama.

Of course having been introduced to AC via The Power of Nightmares, it has become crystal clear to me that if you extrapolate the Straussian narrative of Greatest Evil America Must Oppose, our National Bête Noire, from 2004 to 2012, sure enough it would look like: Communism ---> Bill Clinton ---> Islam ---> Barack Obama. My God the treatment of PBO by the right; the levels of purest bile, hatred, rage and venom (not to mention the sublte and not-so-subtle levels of racism via Birther conspiracies etc.) must outclass President Clinton a thousandfold, not to mention the availability of 24/7 right-wing media echo chambers like Fox News and AM talk radio doing essentially nothing but ingraining how Evil President Obama on every issue under the sun, both real and imagined.

What vexes me to no end is why individuals like Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald and others including this guy Glen Ford (who goes all in with calling PBO Evil with a capital "E") have completely and utterly adopted the Straussian narrative hook line and sinker.

Is this just a hipster, cool kids thing? Or classic mirroring (in the Hofstader sense) of the extreme far right? Or just good old fashioned "some people just want to watch the world burn" anarcho-nihilism with the singular goal of destroying the Obama Presidency as the last obstacle that must be removed so as to that goal? Because tactically it makes no sense to cede all 3 branches of government to the GOP forevermore as envisioned by Karl Rove. I just don't get it.