Thread:Comments:United States re-elects Barack Obama/A truly terrible day, IMO./reply (11)

A hazard I tried to capture above is that perhaps charisma and ideology should not be treated as altogether independent variables. The memetic twist of perspective is that one thinks not of people acquiring beliefs, but of beliefs acquiring people. There's a saying, that an idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it &mdash; but in memetic thinking, an idea is responsible (statistically, of course) for the people who believe in it. It seems like in this US election cycle a whole bunch of extreme-right politicians said really stupid things (in a generous mood one might say, politically stupid); in the memetic view, one considers that as a property of the ideology.