Wingnuts’ sheltered fantasy: This is the far right’s scary myopic vision

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/17/wingnuts_sheltered_fantasy_this_is_the_far_rights_scary_myopic_vision/



A recent survey of 10,000 Americans from Pew Research Center for the People and the Press was ostensibly designed to provide proof of the increased polarization of our country. (Spoiler alert: “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades.”)

But the poll, due to its large sample size of both far left and far right respondents, provides quantitative data demonstrating something striking: an extreme right wing that not only hates those on the opposite side of the political spectrum, but also desires to be isolated ethnically, culturally and geographically from the rest of the country.

Observing the conservative movement from afar, the products of the intellectual segregation of the right-wing biosphere are obvious: the belief that climate change is a hoax, that racism only exists in the form of the knockout game, that polls in 2012 needed to be unskewed and Mitt Romney was going to win in an electoral landslide culminating in Karl Rove’s televised meltdown.

But, though further study is necessary to determine whether the chicken or egg came first, it’s clear from the Pew study that the right-wing echo chamber is also buttressed by a conservative movement desiring a siloed existence.