Conservatives concoct their own creepy reality

Gerald Caplan, Opinion, The Globe and Mail:

Look at the freak show known as the Republican presidential race, which has finally degenerated into two candidates. One, Newt Gingrich, is a self-adoring serial hypocrite who believes labour laws for children are “truly stupid” and calls for child janitors as young as 9 to clean their school bathrooms. Who can disagree when he argues they would be “dramatically less expensive than unionized janitors”? Mr. Gingrich, whose history PhD mortifies all others of us with one, also describes the Obama administration as a “secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” In the pungent phrase of liberal pundit Eric Alterman, this is “batshit-crazy.”

It is really only by appreciating the concept of creating your own reality, described by Mr. Suskind, that the deranged – yet frighteningly effective – escapades of the Republican Party over the past decade can be remotely understood. From the war on an enemy called terror (can terror surrender?) to the invasion of Iraq to transforming John Kerry from genuine war hero into a cheat, liar and coward; from Sarah Palin to the Tea Party to the wholesale proliferation of firearms; from the present Republican presidential candidates to denying Barack Obama’s American citizenship to denying climate change to denying evolution – you can see that the scope of an alternative reality is infinite.

Let me do what seem at first entirely absurd and invoke here in support of my argument David Frum, until now so pugnacious a hard conservative he made the Harper government seem positively pinkalicious. Yet his Republican Party has now sunk to levels even lower than Mr. Frum’s. Writing last month in New York magazine, Mr. Frum seemed to be elaborating on the Suskind revelations:

Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority…Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

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