Having an entire political movement "liberated" from reality is, really and truly, bad for America

(Don't forget to click on the cartoon to enlarge it.)

by Ken

The other night I was talking to Howie trying to explain what I mean, and to me what it's a crucial distinction, maybe the most crucial one to be made in today's cultural environment, when I say that the Modern Right-Wing Republican-slash-Conservative Movement now conisders that it has blanket permission to lie.

This is something I've been saying since the thick of the presidential campaign, when I was transfixed by astonishment that with maybe an exception here and there every single word out of every single Republican-slash-Conservative was a flat-out, bare-faced, unmitigated lie. And since there were no referees to say, "Sorry, you've got to take a timeout for flat-out, bare-faced, unmitigated lying," the result was that it's now officially okay. We are now officially off the reality standard.

I've been saying this at intervals ever since, and nobody bats an eyelash, which I take to mean that either it's obvious to everyone else or people just aren't grasping what I'm saying. Maybe it will help if I try to make clear what I'm not saying.

* I'm not saying that nobody ever lied before in politics. Gimme a break! As it happens, after a long hiatus, I've only just resumed my reading of Rick Perlstein's monumental historical reconstruction, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, having left off -- for personal reasons (too painful to relive) with the elder Mayor Richard Daley's 1968 Chicago convention-jamboree-riot -- and going through the ensuing campaign and coronation, er, inauguration -- I was forcefully and nauseatingly reminded just how sick and crazy Nixon was. The difference, though, is that Nixon not only knew but was perhaps the greatest master in history of the difference between reality and appearances. While Rick acknowledges the RMN did actually sometimes believe his own bullshit, for the most part he knew perfectly well when he was lying, and why he was lying, and above all how to make it look as if he wasn't lying, because he understood that there was a steep price to be paid if you were caught telling whoppers in the public arena.

NIXON SIDEBAR: PARANOIA IN OVERDRIVE

Singularly brilliant is Rick's re-creation of Nixon's state of mind on Election Night, when he made clear to the people around him that the calm confidence of victory he had been projecting was just make-believe, that in fact he was quite sure that he might lose. Rick really mines the guy's paranoia, suggesting that Nixon deep down was convinced that once again something that was rightfully his was going to be stolen from him. His deepest paranoia related to the hopelessly stalled Paris peace talks, and the possibility that somehow the Hated Others would bring peace, damn their souls -- even though he knew this was impossible, because as we now knew Nixon himself had rigged the peace talks. He was responsible for the hopeless stalling of the peace talks, having deployed the loathsome opportunist Anna Chenault, the Dragon Lady, to whisper in the South Vietnamese negotiators' ears that they would get a better deal by holding out.

On the other hand, maybe this wasn't so much paranoia on Nixon's part as his sheer crookedness. After all, if he could rig the peace talks to ensure more war, who's to say that somebody equally nefarious couldn't rerig, or counterrig, or outrig his rigging?)

* Nor am I saying that the suspension of all conditions for belief on the Right is brand-new, something just invented for the convention. The obvious fact is that the Bush regime spent eight years test-driving the new model of reality, where reality is some combination of (a) what you think it is, (b) what you wish it was, and (c) what the loudest- and vilest-mouthed right-wing sociopath says it is. You remember, I'm sure, how those of us who persisted in insisting that there was a standard for truth were derided by the acolytes of the regime as "the reality-based community." Clearly, in order to make such a distinction, those people had to be aware that they couldn't actually change reality. They simply followed the opening left for them by the patron saint of Right-Wing Unreality, Ronald Reagan, who preached that reality doesn't matter, all that matters is how you feel about stuff.

I know some people understand what I mean. I think of the Daily Show correspondent several years back who categorically rejected an argument based on "facts," on the ground that "the facts are biased."

What I'm saying is that the Right has become so far unmoored from reality that (a) it no longer feels any obligation, or even the slightest tug, in the direction of any piece of data that interferes with its ideological fantasy, not to mention its daily talking points, and (b) society gives every indication of having accepted this state of affairs. So they're not necessarily more dishonest than Nixon (how would you go about being more dishonest than Nixon?); they're just freed from the shackles of having to pretend otherwise.

TO ILLUSTRATE:
TAKE DICK ARMEY (PLEASE!)

Paul Krugman offered this tidbit on his blog today:

Armey of ignorance

In the midst of a seriously disgusting interview with Dick Armey, the former House majority leader offers his analysis of the financial crisis:

But at what point do we allow the government to order people that you must sell your product to this person or that person, irrespective of any good judgment? We saw what happened in housing when they ordered banks to make loans to people who weren’t qualified. Are we now going to have the same destructive influences in health care because we’re going to order doctors to provide services and so forth?

There’s a persistent delusion, on the part of many pundits, to the effect that we’re actually having a rational political discussion in this country. But we aren’t. The proposition that the Community Reinvestment Act caused all the bad stuff, because government forced helpless bankers into lending to Those People, has been refuted up, down, and sideways. The vast bulk of subprime lending came from institutions not subject to the CRA. Commercial real estate lending, which was mainly lending to rich white developers, not you-know-who, is in much worse shape than subprime home lending. Etc., etc.

But in Dick Armey’s world, in fact on the right as a whole, the affirmative-action-made-them-do-it doctrine isn’t even seen as a hypothesis. It’s just a fact, something everyone knows.

Truly, sometimes I despair.

AND SPEAKING OF PROF. KRUGMAN DESPAIRING

Yesterday's column struck me as an important one. Now that the Republicans-slash-Conservatives have established their untrammeled right to define their own version of substitute reality, we should perhaps concern ourselves with the question of what their build their fake reality out of. After all, Shangri-La was a fantasy too, but that isn't at all the kind being peddled these days by the loons of the Right. Clearly one of the most heavily represented sources for their delusions is paranoia. And yesterday the good professor took as his subject Paranoia Strikes Deep, arguing "that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit," and relating the teabaggers to Richard Hofstadter's famous 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." He concluded:

[T]he party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

Thank you, professor, these are the words I've been groping for: This business of an entire political faction openly divorced from reality, it's very bad for America.

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