Yes really, Doug, at this point it's a no-brainer. We all know how the great Right Renaissance of the last 30 years turned out -- a disaster. Conservative thinking has been in the driver's seat since Reagan, and today:
US foreign policy is in ruins; the economy has been deindustrialized; the middle class has been immiserated; and the nation has been rendered powerless to respond to natural disaster. Only a fool or a knave could continue to maintain that rightwing nostrums hold the answer to any public priority.
[WS:] I think you grossly underestimate the power denial that make people stay in relationships that suck - bad husbands, bad jobs, drugs and alcohol, bad countries. He really loves me, I brought it upon myself, I'll quit drinking tomorrow, it will be different if we vote the right guy in, and so on, and so on.
Jared Diamond nicely captured this spirit of denial in _Collapse_. The world was collapsing around the Greenland Norse or Easter Islanders, and they were denying it until the end. What makes you think that 'Muricans are different.
And then there is the after me-deluge mentality. Many people who purse the right wing policies know darn well what they are doing and what the effect of it will be. They just cynically hope that they will be far away or dead when the time of the payback comes.
Wojtek