Reality Deficit

This is a subject that I've meaning to write about for a while but haven't because I want to open up a kind of dialogue, but I realize that vast majority of my friends and relations are in agreement with me, so I won't get the kind of critical response I want. However, I was prompted to write after reading an article that appeared in the American Conservative by a man, Bruce Bartlett who once worked for the Reagan and GHW Bush presidencies.

While he covers a lot of his criticisms of the current Republican Party, he touches on one subject in particular that interests me, that Republicans have seemed to escape to their own reality. Bartlett talks about how he wrote an article for the New York Times only to find out later while attending a reception for right-wing organizations "not one person had read it or cared in the slightest what the New York Times had to say about anything." From Bartlett's perspective, the NYT might be bias, but it was still an important newspaper.

This is basically what I've started noticing, that Republicans have started to flat out reject anything that even approaches a differing opinion. Of course, conservatives and liberals tend to group together, forming their own echo chambers, which is why I have been reluctant to criticize Republicans, because I was sure Democrats did the same thing. What got my attention though was when I was visited Quora, a website where people ask questions for others to answer. Someone asked, "Does Quora aspire to displace Daily Kos in the USA as the fever swamp for liberals and progressives?" Up until then, I had found the Quora community surprisingly open-minded and cordial, I hadn't considered that it might have a bias. Of course, websites are going to attract a certain demographic, but still Quora was open to everyone. Anyone could go the website and pose any question they wanted or offer any answer they wanted.

That's when I realized a pattern. Back when it first started, Wikipedia, a site open to anyone to edit, was criticized for having a liberal bias and being unamerican. In response, Conservapedia was created. Conservapedia didn't attempt to balance out what it saw as bias, it specifically sought out to present a single viewpoint and banish anything that opposed that viewpoint. It stuck me then that these conservatives weren't upset because their thoughts and ideas were being repressed, but that Quora and Wikipedia, by virtue of being open to everyone, where presenting thoughts and ideas that they opposed and wanted nothing to do with them.

I had also noticed how websites that specifically cater to conservatives appear to be the only ones that attract a large conservative community. Websites that are open to everyone and don't overtly express any political opinion tend to have a fairly liberal active user base, but there are still a few conservatives. Conservative websites however don't appear to have any kind of liberal minority. It makes me wonder if general websites seem to express a bias not because they attract liberals but because conservatives have sequestered themselves to their own websites.

This could be considered an internet phenomenon, but the election showed how much of an effect this is having on American politics. Looking at another media source, there is the constant attacks on liberal "mainstream media". While a case could be made for this, it is still a questionable position. For one, Fox News, despite being the most popular cable news source, somehow escapes the label of "mainstream media". Also, Fox News doesn't attempt to a balanced news source, if anything, it is the media outlet that is most overt about its partisanship.

To quote Bartlett again, "[Republicans] were genuinely shocked at Romney’s loss because they ignored every poll not produced by a right-wing pollster such as Rasmussen or approved by right-wing pundits such as the perpetually wrong Dick Morris. Living in the Fox News cocoon, most Republicans had no clue that they were losing or that their ideas were both stupid and politically unpopular." There was a pretty substantial Republican attack on pollsters this year for under-representing Republicans and doing other things to boost Obama's numbers, culminating in an attack on Nate Silver, a guy who might be a Democratic, but is first and foremost a statistician. In the end though, Obama and Democratic senators outperformed the polls and Nate Silver managed to predict every state correctly.

This wasn't just an issue for pundits and news consumers, the denial of the changing demographics of the US had a real impact on the outcome of the election. Romney's strategy for election assumed that 74% of voters would be white, the same as in 2008. This was an absurd assumption as the percentage of white voters has declined every election since 1992. The strategy also assumed that Obama wouldn't improve on the 80% of minority votes he received in 2008, but he did.

There is one last fact that makes me comfortable in saying that Republicans are unique in their level close-mindedness, I don't see this kind of behavior from conservatives from other countries. I mentioned how general websites tend to show a liberal bias, but this is starkest only when considering US politics. When politics for another country comes up, the debate is much less one-sided. In both the criticism of Quora and Wikipedia, the US was mentioned. For example, one of the criticisms of Wikipedia was that it adopted the more internationally-recognized British English as the standard for the English pages. The fact that the question on Quora that got me started on this analysis specifically mentioned the US struck me as odd given that a huge number of Quora's users live in India. Apparently Republicans aren't just escaping from other viewpoints, but from the rest of the world.