Blindness on The Right

The week of course was dominated by the election. Obama’s stunning win has set the pundits alight. That it came highly and accurately anticipated by the polls has, apparently, caused conniptions on the right.

And this is the feature I want to focus on.

The key question is how did the right so evidently miss what was going on?

After all the evidence accumulating in the publicly released polls was very clear: Obama was headed to a good sized win. Perhaps not in terms of total vote, although that too has transpired, but certainly in terms of America’s quaint electoral college based system. The result really wasn’t in doubt. All you had to do was follow any of the many poll tracking websites – Nate Silver’s gets the most coverage, but there are others – and you would know what’s going on.

So why the stunned look on the right as the results came in?

My answer is simple, and salutary.

The right created an information bubble for itself so tightly sealed off from reality that it prevented any penetration by bad news. Inside that bubble people were constantly told that Obama was weak; that the public wanted change; that no matter how extreme the Republicans became the rejection of Obama’s socialist ways would hand them victory. There was no cost associated with extremism. Indeed that extremism wasn’t even recognized as such. Inside the Republican bubble Americans really were perceived as wanting to end Medicare and Social Security. They really didn’t mind the wealthy getting all the breaks. Inequality was just fine. And the lack of jibs wasn’t due to Republican obstructionism, but to Obama’s massive run up in the size of government. A government, by the way, that cannot create jobs because only the wealthy can do that. Oh, and big business, despite bloated profits and piles of cash, were being beaten up by Obama’s anti-business stance.

This realm of disinformation was so deeply self delusional that no one on its inside had any idea of what was about to happen.

They reacted with scorn when the polls said Obama was ahead. Those polls, they trumpeted, were rigged. They were based on outdated analysis. They undercounted the enthusiasm of the public’s embrace of the right wing message. And they undercounted Romney’s advantage amongst independent voters.

The problem turns out that the polls were spot on. That they weren’t rigged. That they correctly measured the enthusiasm of the public. And that they revealed that many of the erstwhile independent voters were simply Republicans who had shed the party label out of disgust of Romney’s – to them – centrist tendencies.

This chasm between reality and the right wing’s alternative world grew exponentially throughout Obama’s first term. They rejected his legitimacy from the outset. They saw his election as an aberration facilitated by the rejection of all things Bush. Once Bush was forgotten the public would revert to its pro-right ways. There was no need to accommodate Obama. The only thing needed was obstruction. Weaken him and he would inevitably fall.

Nowhere in this was there any sober analysis of the outcomes of the right’s past policies. Inequality, rising debt, the privileges accord Wall Street, the damage of outsourcing and other scourges of recent capitalism, rotten wages and so on were dismissed as global phenomena not as consequences of right wing policy making. It was taken as read that the public had bought into the Reagan era’s worldview and thus there was need to question it. Indeed the goal was to complete the revolution.

Similarly things like shifting demographics were dismissed as non-factors. As too were the impact of the right’s seeming total rejection of civil and equal rights – women and minorities were viewed through a 1950’s prism as if those events never happened. That the Republican Party has become a bastion of stuffy outmoded country club prep school and church going opinions never dawned on anyone inside the bubble precisely because that’s who they are. Their mistake was to assume that the outside of the bubble was the same.

Then there is Fox News.

It’s relentless attack on Obama and its selective distribution of news reinforced the asymmetry of the alternative world. Republican supporters were fed a steady diet of ‘truths’ that they thought were real. Fox thrives on the ‘them against us’ syndrome. On the war on Christmas and other supposed attacks on traditional America. The givers and the takers became a mantra during the election. The steady theme that anyone who supports Obama is automatically a ‘taker’ – someone mooching off of real Fox-viewing Americans – sank in deeply.

The problem with this is, naturally, that it prevents the right ever addressing the causes of poverty or of the needs of those so-called moochers. The subliminal racism of the message doesn’t help either.

The torrent of news pumped out by Fox actually stopped the Republicans from treat in the issues of whole swathes of the voting public seriously. In spreading such disinformation so effectively Fox throttled any innovation and thought inside the right wing bubble.

So, conservative America has had a prolonged conversation with itself. It has lost contact with the rest of the nation. Thus, when that other part turned up and voted, and asserted its existence and its desire to be treated with respect, the right was stunned. It had no way of reacting other than through apoplectic outbursts about how America has become a nation of graft-loving freedom-hating government-aid-loving layabouts. One Fox talking head after another was reduced to decrying the end of America and its decline into a pseudo European welfare state disaster. America has become, in their eyes, Greece.

That the Romney campaign was wrapped up in this is even more odd. Election campaign teams are supposed to thrive on getting a feel for the nation’s pulse. Romney’s didn’t. It took the pulse of the right and ignored the rest. Or, rather, whenever confronted by alternative news, it either ignored it as trivial, or it re-interpreted it through a lens designed to align incoming information with its right wing interpretation of reality. Thus the enthusiasm of the right’s zealots was interpreted as the general public’s enthusiasm. The hoopla over the infamous 47% comments was dismissed as left leaning bias in the media. No one seemed capable of getting an objective reading. Facts were created to fit opinions, not the other way round.

Then the real reality intruded.

The bubble burst.

And the recriminations began.

It has been quite a spectacle. What happens next will help determine America’s fate. Right now we are lacking a constructive contribution from America’s conservatives. We need one, if only to test the left’s mettle.

The Reagan era has ended. The right needs to move on. Whether it will is another matter.