Basic belief systems, if regularly reinforced by carefully orchestrated advertising campaigns, are enormously difficult things to shift. Paradigms of thought, once established in dominance, are hard to get rid of. We have just lived through 30 years of an orchestrated consensus on the wonders of free-market capitalism. No matter that the business deregulation it served to legitimate triggered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Facts don’t necessarily have to get in the way, when the defense of dominant belief systems is at stake; and in vast swathes of the Republican Party, facts visibly are not doing so now.

If you listen only to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, you could be forgiven for thinking that the United States is not simply in need of strong interventionist leadership abroad. It is also short of military hardware and troops.

Unless the Republican convention in Tampa is swept away by hurricane force winds – itself a fascinating prospect for a party, so many of whose activists claim to be in regular and direct contact with the Almighty – the media will make next week an entirely R week. Monday through Thursday, it will be a Republican week, a Romney week, a Ryan week, a right-wing week, a week dominated by Republican talking points and talking heads.

It will, that is, unless those of us who are not Republicans get out into the public conversation too. The question is how?

Probably not by getting down and dirty, tempting as that is.