Cargo Cult Conservative Politics

I am increasingly thinking that we (and by “we” I mean those of us Americans who believe in individual Liberty and in Fair Play and Rule of Law) are a Cargo Cult.  At least those of us who are politically active.

For those who don’t know what a Cargo Cult is, Infogalactic (https://infogalactic.com/info/Cargo_cult) explains:

The most widely known period of cargo cult activity occurred among the Melanesian islanders in the years during and after World War II…The vast amounts of military equipment and supplies that both sides airdropped (or airlifted to airstrips) to troops on these islands meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders, many of whom had never seen outsiders before. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons and other goods arrived in vast quantities for the soldiers, who often shared some of it with the islanders who were their guides and hosts… With the end of the war, the military abandoned the airbases and stopped dropping cargo… In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. Cult behaviors usually involved mimicking the day-to-day activities and dress styles of US soldiers, such as performing parade ground drills with wooden or salvaged rifles.^[14] The islanders carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses.  In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw and cut new military-style landing strips out of the jungle, hoping to attract more airplanes.

Conservatives observing only the publicly visible Leftist Political activities and trying to succeed by emulating them are like the islanders emulating only the parts of the air-logistics operation they could see.  In the case of the islanders, the far larger and more important parts (from inventing the airplanes to refining the fuel to training the personnel) were invisible because they were far away across an ocean.  In the case of the conservatives, the far larger and more important parts are hidden mostly because they are immoral, illegal, or they just wouldn’t work if the rubes (which includes most conservatives) knew to pay attention to little man behind the curtain.

For example, a Leftists mob protests a Columbus statue in Chicago as racist and the very next day the city government removes the statue.  What do Conservatives see?  Leftists get out in the street and protest vigorously and they get what they want right away.  What do Conservatives conclude?  That they should also get out and protest the same way if they want their political desires acted on.  But when Conservatives organize vigorous protests it not only doesn’t work, but sometimes results in the same government agencies that carefully protected the Liberal protest coming down on the Conservative protestors like a ton of bricks.  The reason the Conservative protest doesn’t work is the same reason the islander’s airport doesn’t work.  The statue was never removed because of the protest.  Rather, the protest was the last and visible step in much larger invisible process of the Left spending decades “marching through the institutions” of the bureaucracy, getting its people elected to the right local offices (or else gaining leverage on the people who are in them), deciding among their power brokers that they want the statue gone as part of some larger social effort, perhaps even negotiating who will get the kickbacks from the ‘last minute’ no-bid contract to pull down the statue, and a thousand other efforts that started decades ago.  Having the local Community Organizers get out the usual suspect local agitators for a protest (perhaps even deciding to bus in some help either for numbers or specialists from other areas) and making arrangements for the proper coverage of the protest in the press is only the last step done to give plausible deniability to that long invisible chain of Leftist work, so the local voter will think their representative “gave in to pressure” instead of realizing they are actively working to tear down the myths and monuments of normal Americans (among a host of other hidden goals).

Even when we do manage to capture some important political victory, the Left realizes that we don’t know what to do with it.  A Tea-Party or MAGA Conservative somehow winning a state Secretary of State office is like a cargo cultist islander who found an actual radio that could talk to aircraft.  He may be a diligent caretaker of it, keeping it clean and protected, but he isn’t going to call down airplanes full of cargo with it because doesn’t know how to use it properly and doesn’t have anything to plug it into even if he did.  Similarly, the new MAGA Secretary of State isn’t going to use it to squash investigations into other Conservative candidates, or throw underhanded roadblocks in front of Leftist candidates, or even sneak advanced copies of the upcoming election ballots to his organized crime contacts that will forge fake votes for his allies while reorganizing the mundane details of the vote counting logistics to allow the forgeries to be slipped in.  Heck, the MAGA candidate doesn’t even HAVE a forger or ANY underworld criminal business partners and wouldn’t know where to go about finding them.  Pfft… the Tea-Party or MAGA conservative doesn’t even know to purge all the lower-level staff of ‘honest non-partisan subject matter experts’ who were put in place by his predecessor and will subtly sabotage his efforts at reform while slipping out with a copy of the new ballots to give to the local Uniparty machine.

No wonder the Leftist ‘elite’ (that we naively label as weak-spined and hypocrites) laugh at us “low sloping forehead” flyover types and our attempts to influence politics the way we might laugh at a poor pacific islander’s bamboo airplane.

What can we do?  One thing might be to stop portraying criminal conspiracy as a rare or exotic thing in our entertainment and everyday conversations.  It is all through history, from the bible to today’s headlines.  It is all through our philosophy and fundamental beliefs.  Ever hear of the Sons of Liberty?  Ever read “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public”?  The crooked politician and corrupt political machines are a stereotype for a reason.  And lastly, even if we try to remain as innocent as doves, knowing that it is not worth losing our soul to win an election, that doesn’t mean we can’t be shrewd as snakes when some Leftist, journalist, or bureaucrat smiles and says “trust me”. 

Any other ideas on how we can build a REAL airport?