Today’s topic: the conservative war on truth, facts, and common sense.
Welcome to the Daily Sausage.
I’m trying something a little different today, where I’m only going to write about a single topic. In this case, it’s the Republican Party’s war on truth.
Our world, in the physical sense, is based around laws of nature, which scientists have spent literally the whole of human history constantly refining and improving and occasionally throwing out as our tools and understanding of the world around us increases. This is truth: a hypothesis, which is then tested, and either proved or disproved.
The National Review’s Josh Jordan posted an article, titled “Nate Silver’s Flawed Model” over the weekend. In it, he goes on to attack Nate Silver, formerly of FiveThirtyEight and now at the New York Times, for being biased simply because he believes President Obama will win re-election in the face of Mitt Romney’s “Mittmentum”.
FiveThirtyEight is notable for its explanation of how it arrives at its results, using a combination of national and state polls, which it crunches into the odds a certain candidate will win. Now, what’s gotten Jordan’s dander up is the idea that Silver defines some polls as either Republican or Democratic-leaning, and adjusts their results accordingly. So, polls like Rasmussen and Gallup, which have over time demonstrated themselves to be biased toward Republicans, get a stat correction. The same is true for Democratic leaning polls. Jordan believes that because Silver’s number’s don’t sufficiently reflect the media’s perception of the race, where Mitt Romney is surging toward victory over President Obama, he’s demonstrating ideological bias. Mitt Romney was always going to have a tough time winning the White House due to President Obama’s personal popularity, his incumbency and the advantages thereof, and a shifting demographic map that would give Romney very little room for error. These facts were never in dispute; they are Political Truth.
This rejection of truth and facts isn’t limited just to the political realm. All across the world, conservatives are rejecting lines of thought that disagree with their own worldview, simply because it doesn’t agree with their own worldview. Take a look at this article from Ed at Gin and Tacos, “Setting The Baseline”. Ed uses an example from MacLean’s, a conservative Canadian publication, which as he notes is roughly equivalent to The U.S. News and World Report. And yet, the article on the front cover accuses teachers of pushing a political bias on children. They call it brainwashing.
I’ve talked quite a bit about the Texas Board of Education, which had been taken over by a number of fundamentalist Christian Dominionist and Tea Party zealots. They introduced a radical plan for literally rewriting history; Jesus-riding-on-a-Velociraptor, 6,000-year-old-Earth style. They wanted to throw out global climate change, evolution, and a host of other scientific facts, simply because they contradict the Bible. Paul Brown, who serves on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, called evolution, embryology, and the Big Bang Theory (the actual scientific theory, not the TV show) were lies “straight from the pit of hell”. That’s just nuts.
Along with Scientific Truth, Economic Truth is out the window as well. In fact,, as noted by The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, basically all of conservative economics for the last thirty years is complete and utter crap, littered with broken promises to lower taxes and the deficit and reducing government spending. This year’s GOP Vice Presidential nominee, Paul Ryan, has a voting record positively gushing with red ink; a Murderer’s Row of unpaid-for wars, government spending, corporate giveaways, massive upper class tax cuts, and nary a single serious deficit reduction vote in sight. In fact, when you go back further, it’s been Republican Presidents who have jacked up the Federal Debt and Deficit. Even today, Mitt Romney’s plan of multi-trillion dollar tax cuts and planned spending increases for the military would gut the rest of the federal government and send the deficit skyrocketing.
A lot of times, politicians talk about “common sense”. This is the idea that all of our country’s problems are solvable through relatively simple means that your average citizen of average intelligence could come up with, and that somehow there are a bunch of eggheads in the way with fancy numbers and facts preventing us all from moving forward. As Libertarian Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson so ably demonstrates, the idea of “common sense” in politics is a media-created fallacy. If common sense were really so common, why would we need experts that spend their entire lives studying economics, law, science, or anything else?
So, we have Political Truth, Scientific Truth, and Economic Truth. What’s left to wage war on? These are the foundational columns of our society; when you start knocking down the big pillars keeping the roof up, pretty soon the whole damn thing will cave in.
