User:Viriditas/Conservative alternate reality in the United States

The conservative alternate reality in the United States is a form of epistemic closure associated with the conservative movement in the United States during the early twenty-first century. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum argues that three major factors contributed to the creation of this alternate, politicized reality, including fiscal austerity and economic stagnation, ethnic competition, and Fox News and talk radio. Scholars have found close parallels between the methods used by the conservative movement in the United States to suspend reality, employ propaganda techniques, and use "opinion to subvert, transform, and replace fact" with that of methods used by totalitarian movements in the past.

Democrats have not been immune from the conservative alternate reality in the United States. In many respects, the conservative movement built their alternate reality along with the willing participation of the Democratic party, as the continual movement of Republicans farther to the right resulted in Democrats also moving from the left and center to the right, as the conservative alternate reality bubble grew larger to encompass their base. As a result, most Democrats today, including Obama, take political positions once held by moderate Republicans, and bear little to no resemblance to liberals of the 20th century. The idea that Democrats support Democratic principles is neither reflected by their voting records nor by their actions.

This new, alternate "reality" is best exemplified by the leading front runners for the United States presidential election of 2016, Hilary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Regardless of who wins that election, or what position they hold, the fundamental policies of the United States will remain unchanged. Law professor Michael J. Glennon argues that this is because democracy in the United States has trended towards mere symbolism as the constitution and the rule of law have been eroded by national security concerns. As a result, the true power of the United States no longer resides in the electorate, but in unelected bureaucrats partnered with private industry who run the national security state behind the scenes, regardless of any incoming and outgoing administration and with no apparent accountability for their policies.

The conservative alternate reality, therefore, has led to the purposeful dismantling of government by the people and for the people in the United Sates. Republican Grover Norquist once dreamed of shrinking government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub," and in its place, conservatives have built a vast national security state that answers to nobody but itself.

Description

Author Jonathan Schell describes the phenomenon as one where

Republicans have exhibited a strong desire to take up residence in an imaginary world, an alternate reality—one in which global warming is found to be a fraud perpetrated by the world’s top scientists, Obama turns out to be a Kenyan-born Muslim (and a socialist), budgets can be slashed without social pain, firing government employees reduces unemployment, tax cuts for the wealthy replenish government coffers, and so forth.

Defeat of Barry Goldwater and the Reagan "Revolution"

The first inklings of a conservative alternate reality emerged in the 1960s as part of a nascent counterestablishment initiative, a conservative, ideological attempt to counter what American conservatives viewed as a liberal establishment firmly in power and in control after Democrat Lyndon Johnson defeated Republican Barry Goldwater in a landslide presidential election in 1964, demoralizing the conservative movement until the election of Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980. In his address to the Republican National Convention in 1988, Reagan famously misquoted John Adams by saying "Facts are stupid things"; many critics at the time noted that Reagan often ignored facts and acted based on ideology alone. This open disregard for facts likely contributed to the 138 Reagan administration officials who had been convicted, indicted, or the subject of investigation for misconduct or crimes, the highest number in any administration ever.

War against the "reality-based community"

After the presidency of George W. Bush (2001–2009), the alternate view of reality promoted by the counterestablishment came into maturity and received its widest audience. With their ascendancy, the counterestablishment brought their alternate approach to reality-based decision making with them into the White House, altering several democratic principles. Conservatives promoted partisanship over bipartisanship, politicized evidence-based analysis by experts, and ignored contrary evidence which would force them to compromise or change their beliefs.

An unnamed, senior adviser to Bush, thought to be Karl Rove, derided the "reality-based community" and boasted how conservatives have repaced it with their own reality:

That's not the way the world really works anymore, we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Author Charles Pierce argues that this marked a turning point for modern conservatism in the United States, as it "consciously adopted irrationality as a tactic, and succeeded very well."

This new, alternate approach to reality-based decision making led the conservative U.S. government to start several wars based on false premises, contributed to the worst global recession since World War II, ignored pressing environmental issues like climate change, and resulted in the erosion of civil liberties in the United States and an institutional disrespect for the rule of law. In 2008, Kucinich and Wexler introduced 35 articles of impeachment against Bush to the U.S. House of Representatives. Although it was little more than symbolic, in 2012, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission unanimously convicted in absentia Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzales, and others for conspiracy to commit war crimes such as torture.

Later, Rove famously demonstrated his deepest descent into the conservative alternate reality when he denied the projected results of the 2012 U.S. presidential election on live television. This prompted Megyn Kelly to question Rove, "Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better? Or is this real?"

"No terrorist attacks under Bush"

Notable conservative politicians and spokespeople have repeatedly come forward in public to promote their alternate reality, which critics have often derided as delusional. For example, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Bush White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, and Fox News Channel commentator Eric Bolling have all denied on public record that any terrorist attacks occurred while Bush was president. It is a matter of historical record, however, that Bush was president when the September 11 attacks occurred. Even if these conservatives are given the benefit of the doubt, and we argue that they must refer to any attacks after September 11, we discover that there were at least five other terrorist attacks during Bush's term, including the anthrax attacks in the U.S mail (2001), the attempted shoe bomb plot (2001), the Beltway sniper attacks (2002), the El Al ticket counter attack at LAX (2002), and the campus attack at UNC (2006).

The alternate reality created by conservatives omits these facts because it shows that the Bush administration was unable to defend the nation. Furthermore, there is absolutely no evidence that torture nor surveillance helped prevent these or any other similar incidents. If the Patriot Act and similar types of legislation have a documented history of absolute failure and inability to stop or prevent one single terrorist attack, one is forced to question how and why the legislation persists and why elected representatives refuse to repeal it. Unfortunately for the U.S. public, any attempt to examine the efficacy of such legislation has been blocked by the government. Furthermore, congressional committees have failed to adequately investigate and review the evidence for these programs. With no way to actually know if these programs work, there remains little to no congressional oversight, except in name only. Critics have described the review process as broken and "dysfunctional".

Obama and the national security state

With the presidency of Barack Obama in the late 2000s, the strategies and methods of American conservatives continued stronger still, making use of the Internet, the blogosphere, and consolidated media properties to amplify their message as never before possible. In many ways, Obama was a key player in the alternate reality that conservatives had successfully constructed, as he became the central figure conservatives used to mobilize their base and construct new alternate realities, stronger than ever before.

Far from being the socialist conservatives made him out to be, Obama's policies were criticized as that of a center-right conservative who gave lip service to progressivism but rarely deviated from the conservative agenda set by his predecessor. His failure to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the zealous prosecution of more whistleblowers than any previous administration, the continuing use of controversial drone strikes, the promotion of warrantless wiretapping against public opinion, the denial of the importance of the Snowden revelations, and the failure to prosecute Wall Street for any malfeasance beyond large fines -- all of these things led critics to note that previous administrations were far more open, democratic, and liberal than the current one. Some liberals questioned whether they had actually elected a Democrat in the first place.

Strangely, even though liberals strongly supported a single-payer health care solution, Obama's legacy instead hinged on the passing of the Affordable Care Act, a health care policy in part designed by a conservative think tank in the early 1990s, a policy which failed to address the very health insurance reforms (such as controlling the costs) reformers had lobbied so hard for in the first place.

If Obama was a socialist as the conservative alternate reality claimed, then it was socialism for the rich, which is what the Occupy movement attempted to address through peaceful protests. However, it was shutdown by a coordinated police crackdown with the help of a vast national security apparatus that targeted peaceful protesters as domestic terrorists using the surveillance powers of the state. The people had spoken, but were now silenced by Homeland Security. Innocent protesters were often mistreated, thrown into jail for hours at a time, and in some cases, "disappeared" at so-called domestic "black sites" without any charges. Chicago's Homan Square Police Warehouse, for example, "operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site." After years of working to rid the U.S. of liberal ideas and values, the conservative alternate reality appeared to have come to fruition at last.

Totalitarian parallels

Scholars H.L. Goodall Jr. and Seth Wiener found parallels between the way totalitarian movements communicate and the way that conservative movements in the United States "exhibit numerous common characteristics in the sphere of communication such as the suspension of reality, propaganda techniques, and the use of movement opinion to subvert, transform, and replace fact."

See also

• Karl Rove in the George W. Bush administration

Further reading

• Bartlett, Bruce (November 26, 2012). "Revenge of the Reality-Based Community." The American Conservative. Retrieved May 31, 2015.
• Bowman, James (November 2012). "Enter Alternative Reality." American Spectator, 45 (9): 66-67. ISSN 0148-8414
• Cohen, Patricia (April 27, 2010). "‘Epistemic Closure’? Those Are Fighting Words." The New York Times. Retrieved May 31, 2015.
• Glennon, Michael J. (2014). National Security and Double Government. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190206444.
• Greenberg, David (2010). "The Republican Flight from Reality." Raritan. Rutgers University. 29 (3): 45-74. 168.
• Krugman, Paul (November 22, 2012). "Grand Old Planet". The New York Times. Retrieved May 31, 2015.
• Mooney, Chris (2012). The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science- and Reality. Wiley. ISBN 978-1118094518.
• Mooney, Chris (2012). The Republican War on Science. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465046768.