Posted on 07/30/2015 8:34:03 AM PDT by Aspenhuskerette
At a recent 11,000-strong Netroots Nation conference, irate protestors booed presidential candidate Martin O’Malley for proclaiming, “Black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter.”
That O’Malley’s echo of “all men are created equal” — the self-evident truth that fueled America’s civil-rights movement — was jeered reflects a disturbing phenomenon, one social critic Aldous Huxley called the propagandist’s purpose: “to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
By emphasizing differences and distorting reality, propagandists incite mistrust and hostility, compelling followers to line up dutifully behind partisan agendas, never to Think Again.
Yet as Adolf Hitler understood — and history proves — blind partisanship is dangerous. “What good fortune for governments that the people do not think,” observed modern history’s greatest propagandist and destroyer of humanity.
A 2013 experiment conducted by pollster Mark Mellman for the Bipartisan Policy Center confirmed Hitler’s insight, revealing how partisanship often overrides informed policy preferences, blinding people to their choices’ consequences.
Two groups of respondents were asked to select between Republican and Democrat education plans, with the labels on each plan reversed in each group. Rather than choose a plan based on policy preferences, Republicans and Democrats in each group overwhelmingly opted for their party’s plan.
“The evidence suggests that parties have considerable latitude to alter their positions without losing voters,” Melman concluded, “driving voters further apart on the issues if they choose.”
Consider how the Obama administration is wedging apart the long-standing bipartisan consensus to use all elements of American foreign policy — diplomatic, economic and military — to prevent Iran’s theocratic regime, and the world’s most lethal terrorist state, from acquiring nuclear weapons.
“all men are created equal”
Exactly! All men are CREATED equal. After that ‘creation’ all bets are off and it puts the onus on the created one to be responsible for his own life, not some gov’t entity.
"The issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution".
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