the law of attraction

Once you’ve read about this quasi-philosophy — subject of How to Be Useful ch. 2 —  you start seeing traces of it everywhere. Like in Christopher Hitchens’ piece on Sarah Palin here:

Walter Dean Burnham, one of the country’s pre-eminent Marxists, used to attract ridicule back in the 1960s and ’70s by saying that Ronald Reagan would one day be president. He based this on various calculations, one of which was what I’ll call the attraction-repulsion factor. Previous candidates of the right, from McCarthy to Nixon, indeed, had expressed powerful dislike and resentment of their foes. That can work, up to a point, but the problem is that if you radiate hostility, you also tend to attract it. Reagan didn’t radiate it and also didn’t attract it. He went on, in a genial enough way, to destroy the Democratic “New Deal” coalition. I don’t think Gov. Palin has quite that sort of folksy charisma, but I am still not sure it’s entirely wise to patronize her.

[emphasis mine] I’d go one further: It’s never entirely wise to patronize anyone. Except for small children.