One thing that seems to me to be a recurring theme:

Republicans, by and large, seem to keep getting caught in scandals that make them seem explicitly hypocritical. “Family Values” types who get caught in illicit affairs, or gambling, or drug habits, say. O’Reilly and Limbaugh come immediately to mind, but Bennett, and a whole host of other right wingers, or evangelical Christians also come to mind. Then there’s the fact that while anti-abortion rhetoric and moral purity is supposedly high in the red states, abortion rates are higher, as is teen pregnancy and such.

And it seems to me that this is a critical distinction between extremists and moderates – and I’m not talking Republicans vs. Democrats, in this case, because moderates in both tend to avoid these sorts of traps, and extremists on both sides fall into them – it’s just the nature of extremism. The reason I use right-wingers in the previous paragraph is that they’re explicitly quite un-moderate. But the point being that the moderates tend to take human nature into account, whereas the extremists seem to think that idealism is all that’s necessary to form an ideology.

I’d love for the world to be a utopia, where there is no upper class, and no poverty. That’d be great. But it doesn’t take human nature into account. We will always want to strive to be better than others – to have someone subjugated, to have some lead. We’re not able, on a large scale, to accept forced homogenaity, and I think that that’s a *good* thing, not a bad one, and one that needs to be taken into account when forming an ideology. We also make mistakes. We also have desires that aren’t going to be controlled by rhetoric.

So… what’s the point? The point is that the less an ideology takes human nature and diversity into account, the more doomed it is to abject failure. And the more radical someone is in buying into an ideology that doesn’t take human nature into account, the more stupid they’re going to look when *their* nature makes them do something that doesn’t line up with that ideology.

Yeah, it’s obvious. I know. But that doesn’t explain why so many people continuously look like morons by falling into that trap.