The Republican Party has been wrong for a long time - wrong on any number of issues, for the most part because they steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the primacy of community in the machinery of the nation - but with the rise of the Neoconservatives, who for many years now have both defined the Party and been its public face, they have slowly slid into a complete abandonment of fact, logic and reason. Their position has become so Orwellian as virtually to defy analysis, and worse yet, that position continues to dominate the electoral and governance systems in this country.
"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death."
- Orwell's 1984
Lies told publicly in a rational system do not survive except in the near term. They are found out, debunked, and eventually become a closed matter. But lies told in an irrational system can live forever. In an irrational system, simple, basic facts - objective, concrete, verifiable - have no permanency or independence. The facts are only what the Party says they are, and only for the moment in which they say them. It is not possible to construct a refutation of a lie when the facts on which the lie is based are shifting sand. Thus the lie that Barack Obama supported sex education for kindergartners has taken on a life of its own, because the underlying fact - that the legislation he supported was about protecting children from sexual predators - is denied, obfuscated, or simply ignored. In the mind of the believers, the facts don't enter into it.
The biggest mistake we Democrats can possibly make (and make it we have, in abundance) as adversaries of the GOP is to accept the notion of facts as shifting sand. In doing so we undercut our own arguments, because their foundation can then be so easily blown away. We must first insist on stipulation as to the facts, if we are to have any hope of stopping the Neocon hegemony.
For decades we have failed to do this. In the 1980s we failed to correct the notion, advanced by the Reaganites, that the counterrevolutionary forces in Nicaragua were "freedom fighters" who were seeking to overthrow the Sandinista dictatorship. The consequences of this failure - first to identify the "Contras" as former members of the military in the old Somoza dictatorship, and second to publicize the fact that the socialist Sandinistas were in fact a popularly and freely elected government - were the destabilization of Nicaragua and all the suffering that went with it. Also in the 80s, we stood by while the GOP externalized the "drug abuse" problem as the fault of the drugs themselves, and then successfully promoted their misguided and wasteful "War on Drugs" (still with us today). The consequences of this inaction were to ignore ("Just Say No") the reasons people use and abuse drugs, thus creating a vast underclass of drug users while doing nothing about the problem, such as it may be; and to create, perhaps inadvertently, a proven model for today's "War on Terror," an equally misguided and wasteful enterprise that is based on very little fact and a great many lies.
We have failed to counter the argument advanced by the GOP that the only acceptable members of the judiciary are "strict constructionists" who follow the "original intent" of the Founders in interpreting the Constitution and applying the law in general. The strict constructionist argument is as vacuous as Scalia's claim that the Constitution is not a living document but a dead one. The Founders clearly, demonstrably intended otherwise, providing as they did the amendment process. The document has been successfully amended 27 times, as recently as 1992. Original intent could not be more unmistakable when it comes to the First Amendment's wall of separation between church and state, but that doesn't stop the Neocons from advancing and promoting notions of creeping state religion.
When it comes to dealing with our current economic woes, we find ourselves busily arguing whether there are in fact economic woes, as opposed to the idea that we're just whiners and our problems are only of our own imagining. If we manage to get beyond this falsity, we are scolded for attempting to interfere with "the invisible hand of the Market," another externalization. Why are none of our Democratic leaders pointing out that the autonomy of the "invisible hand" seems not to be such a concern when large financial firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns are in trouble?
We don't like people who stand in our way
Awareness is gonna be redundant
And ignorance is strength, we have God on our side
- Paul Weller, Standards
We as a society clearly have much demand for lies - as if the Enlightenment never happened and the Age of Reason never dawned. It is the offspring of anti-intellectualism, a phenomenon in this country that has been well-documented since the early 1960s. When we find the truth uncomfortable or inconvenient, many of us turn against the truth-tellers, labeling and demonizing them, in favor of those who lie - because if the truth makes us feel bad, then lies will make us feel good. Reason is supplanted by political hedonism, and the future looks like this, like Sarah Palin's "opposition" to the Bridge to Nowhere:
"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
Or is it this?
"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated."