The first day I teach a class, any class, in politics, I have to define paradigm for my students. The concept paradigm first hit the big time in a book by Thomas Kuhn in 1962, The Structure of Scientfiic Revolutions. Boiled down it means your world view. It’s the cognitive filter that you use to make sense of the world. Kuhn talks about it in terms of scientific models. Since I teach politics, I talk about the paradigms that let us make sense of the social world around us.
Paradigms are sticky. Once one is good and adhered in your head, changing your paradigm is like scraping barnacles. You can’t do it in one cocktail conversation, which is why talking about politics over martinis usually just resembles crows arguing about who gets the prairie dog road kill. Just to dislodge one, not even thinking about establishing a new one, takes at least one semester of college. Either that or parachuting into a war zone or refugee camp.
They are so sticky that most people never change theirs. It’s also why in a class of about thirty students at least two will liken me to the anti-Christ in their course evaluations. (Note to those students: I know who you are.) So how is it that they change? What might dislodge the Zeitgeist?
When asked the above, at first students offer up Reason. Sure, reason gets the ball rolling, but the reasonable often get tossed into the hoosegow. See Galileo and Socrates for pertinent examples. People just don’t give up their world-views that easily.
Death. Death is what does it. Birth helps too. The younger generation seems to recognize new truths first. Kuhn observed that great scientific observations tended to be made by younger minds. Einstein is only one of his examples. Then they get tenure and try to keep the younger minds from figuring more things out. (Movie reference: Happy Feet)
This is what is most striking about the race between McCain and Obama: older folks tend to support McCain and younger ones tend to support Obama. The actuary tables don’t only suggest that being 72 years old, McCain has a relatively high probability of passing the baton to Sarah (pitbull-not-a-pig) Palin, but that many of the people who support him will also pass on. (Of course there are exceptions: neither of my parents support McCain. Just felt I had to mention that here in case they were to read this.)
And if you were to extrapolate this tendency for the next twenty to thirty years, my prediction would be that the Republican Party will either change dramatically, just to survive, or it will whither away. Who knows, it might disappear because we pass a law that makes it illegal to lie during campaigns.
Along with age, ethnic demographics predict a Republican withering. Did you notice all those white folks at the Republican Convention? Sure there are some anomalies (to wit the “Log Cabin Republicans”—by the way, I really believe that mainstream Republicans think that they are referring to Lincoln), but trends show that white Americans will be in the minority by 2042. Combine that with the generation gap, and I’ll go on the record here saying that Republicans will be out of the game by 2030. I’ll be only 70 then so if I’m wrong, you can email me an “I told you so.”
If it does disappear, then the Democratic party would split, with economic policy being the constant, and the social issues dividing the two new parties. It also might split on green issues--one side being light green and the other dark. It could resemble the 90s under Bill Clinton, except instead of staunchly believing in free trade and the overwhelming power of the market, both parties would believe that government can do good. That makes sense. Why would anyone vote for a president if they believe a federal government is inherently inept? (See Bush.)
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