A lot of things came to a forefront during the previous election, but few were as fun to witness as the final moments of Republicans' long war on science and empiricism. Rachel Maddow has the laundry list of various conservatives "issues" that have shown the party's strong opposition to reality.
Followers of this blog should be able to recognize, by now, that I don't believe in being divisive (too much), and I don't believe in belittling or insulting others. But, at the same time, I don't accept, prima facie, mendacity, duplicity or a willingness to hide real problems under an ideological framework. I've spent more time than you can imagine talking to "liberals" about the lunacy of marxist and socialist parties and their ideas. You might find this surprising, given the framework of the national debate, but it is actually true.
But, unfortunately, I see the same commitment to principal over fact in the Republican party. It bothers me deeply, and I am very pessimistic about a party that has committed to denying science, legislating religion and refusing to acknowledge the need for change and modernization. We can be upset about how fractious the current political debate has become, but we can't get anywhere when one side of the argument encourages an echo chamber of things that just aren't true.
And if you think I'm missing something, look at the Republican attack on Nate Silver and other people who use quantitative analysis of the polls (all of whom exactly predicted the outcome months in advance). Look at Karl Rove sitting on camera arguing with Megyn Kelly that you "can't call the election yet."
These are symptoms of an underlying divorce from reality, of a group of people who look me in the face and say that evolution isn't "real" because the Bible told them so. It's the same group of people that deny climate science because some crank they found in some corner of the web. It's the same group of people that will post any nonsense about GMOs or vaccines or agenda 21 or any other pet cause that leaps away from the world because they "believe."
I hope the election might do a bit to purge this instinct. It's bad for the country, and we have serious problems that need to be solved. We have problems from climate, resources, technology, health care cost, inequality, debt, demographics and global power that cannot be addressed by simple ideological answers. And yet, one party bases most of its messaging about how most of these things aren't even real. How can we solve a problem when they talk like that?
Pretty much all of this can be summarized in the discussion by Joe Scarborough and David Frum, both Republicans, that echoes the same points I'm trying to make about the Republican party. David Frum's conclusion: "Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by the conservative media complex." They've stopped talking about reality, and we all need to fix it.
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