The Republican war on reality

[NRaleighLiberal]

by Jonathan Weiler

Independent Weekly

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/the-republican-war-on-reality/Content?oid=2700024

"In a recent column in The Washington Post, George Will made the following extraordinary, if unwitting, statement about potential GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney: "Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from 'data' ... Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for THIS?"

As I have argued before, this contempt for fact and reason is reflective of a deep personality divide that now dominates America's political system. Specifically, the Republican Party base has come to be dominated by an authoritarian core whose worldview is deeply informed by emotional antipathy both to out-groups and, perhaps more fundamentally, to uncertainty and complexity. It's not new that Republican candidates would play on those antipathies to attract votes or that such influences would affect lawmaking itself. But perhaps more than ever before, Republican policy proposals are now almost entirely reducible to these same interconnected animosities.

Whereas electoral politics always involve some emotional appeals designed around us-vs.-them frames, and political slogans always, and necessarily, simplify reality, policy debates and lawmaking notionally rely to some degree on facts, interests and trade-offs, requiring something other than gut-level expulsions. But such considerations are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the GOP, which is ever more hostile to data and facts that might upset its preferred view of reality.

Earlier this year, critics jumped on Sen. Jon Kyl when he falsely asserted that more than 90 percent of Planned Parenthood's services related to "terminating pregnancies." The actual figure is far lower, but as is typical of Republican elites these days, Kyl, an Arizona Republican, certainly wasn't going to admit that he made a mistake. Doing so has itself become anathema to the modern right. Instead, Kyl's office clarified that the senator's remark was "not intended to be a factual statement."

snip - much more follows

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Well written, and well worth reading

[Demeter]

1. Not to worry--Romney can't deal with fact, either.

It's just a parlor trick he learned to deal with Harvard and MIT people.

[Obamakarma]

2. The Right's Aversion to Uncertainty & Complexity

I absolutely agree that the right in America today have somehow become allergic to nuance and complexity. Policies need to be simple, black & white, reflexive and assured or they are unacceptable. Such forced certainties easily lead to a detachment from reality in many cases. Wholesale untruths become gospel truth, solely because facing the more complex reality is emotionally too taxing.

It is a sad state of affairs and one that is ultimately to the detriment of the right itself and, indeed, the country as a whole. A well thought out centre-right alternative is always healthy in a democracy. Today's GOP, however, don't do well thought out.

[Beartracks]

3. "Not intended to be a factual statement"?! As in...

... an "exaggeration" meant to be mis-leading but which can be downplayed as an "intentional mis-statement" if called on it?

Wow, what a gutless way to weasel out of one's own words.

Kyl's follow-up to that insulting explanation should have been, "How could it have possibly been factual since I don't know what I'm talking about?"

Or, perhaps more directly: "You can't believe a thing I say."

:eyes:

One might think republicans prefer to shoot first and ask questions later. But most, it seems, just like to shoot.

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