GOP is losing its long war against reality

http://jaybookman.blog.myajc.com/2016/08/15/gop-is-losing-its-long-war-against-reality/

Opinion columnist and blogger at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
GOP is losing its long war against reality
By Jay Bookman
August 15, 2016



The post-Trump Republican Party faces a daunting list of challenges, but its most fundamental task will be to somehow re-establish a connection to — and basic respect for — reality. For a long time now, it has trained its base, its entertainment wing and many of its politicians to act as if reality no longer matters, as if their invented reality is as valid as an actual reality.

It is not. And until that problem is fixed, the party has no real hope of resurrecting itself.

In an invented reality, for example, a successful businessman and charismatic speaker such as Donald Trump might be a fine general-election candidate. In actual reality, he is proving to be exactly the disaster that many of us — including a few conservatives — predicted that he would be. And I have to ask: If you get something as important as that as spectacularly wrong as that, shouldn’t that be cause for serious reflection and self-doubt? Shouldn’t you maybe rethink a thing or two?

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One final point: Those who argue that rumors of the GOP’s demise are greatly exaggerated will usually point to the party’s success at the local and state levels as evidence both of its health and of its ability to govern. They have a point. It is also true, however, that politics at the state and local levels is generally free of the type of atrocious myth-making that inflicts the conservative movement nationally, through their highly profitable media outlets and AstroTurf groups. For the most part, governors and state legislators aren’t required to believe impossible things about state politics to get elected at that level; they don’t have to govern on the basis of things that clearly aren’t true.

And in those cases when lower-level Republicans have run aground of reality, it has generally been because they have slipped the surly bonds of pragmatism and tried to import national-level nonsense to the state level. The budget disasters in Kansas and Louisiana are directly attributable to the effort to implement supply-side economics; in North Carolina and Indiana, it was the pursuit of the anti-gay agenda. Here in Georgia, we’ve cost ourselves billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs because GOP leaders couldn’t bring themselves to buck their national party’s anti-ObamaCare hysteria, even though the benefits to Georgia of doing so were overwhelming.

The bottom line is that if you believe that conservatism holds the answers to America’s future, then you ought to be able to make that argument to the American people based on facts and ideas that hold up under inspection and that bear at least some relationship to reality. If you are reduced to conspiracy theories, invention and gross exaggerations to defend your ideas, then your ideas are in need of serious rehabilitation.