Rashomon Republicans
Paul Waldman's "No Country for Strawmen" notes that "One of the foundational precepts of political deliberation is that when we debate, there is at least the possibility, however slight, that I might convince you that I'm right and you're wrong." He continues with the caveat that
That possibility exists only if we agree on the basic facts. Then we can argue about which are more important and what the implications are. But if you've taken up residence in an alternate universe, then we have nothing to talk about.
Our contemporary political discourse seems to have much less factual agreement than alternate reality, however. Waldman describes this cognitive construction process:
Pour a foundation out of imaginary concrete, erect joists and beams of speculation, place a thousand bricks of tendentious conclusions, and before you know it, the structure is impervious to any assault by facts. You will have made your own imagined Barack Obama, in whatever shape you like.
Conservatives' alternate reality mostly centers around the imaginary construct of Obama's "radical" Nazi/Communist/socialist/Muslim presidency, and fake birth certificates, death panels, FEMA concentration camps, and gun-grabbing Czarist dictators are the bogeymen in their fantasy world. Joshua Holland lists many of these phantasms in "10 Things That Terrify Right-Wing Nuts" at AlterNet, which I find interesting for their creative variety. It's easy to lose track of the logical fallacies involved in such a dense skein of paranoid ravings, and--although the Psych 101 concept of projection explains a great deal of this attitude toward reality--pointing out the fact-free nature of these fears does little to alleviate them. As I noted two years ago, there is a "backfire effect"--more pronounced among conservatives than among liberals--that militates against changing one's mind when the data conflict with preconceptions.
I'm going to coin a phrase for the most extreme examples of this phenomenon: Rashomon Republicans. (The phrase isn't perfect in its precision, as the classic Kurosawa film has an "emphasis on the subjectivity of truth and the uncertainty of factual accuracy" whereas the wingnut obsessions are demonstrably false, but I think it has a nice ring to it.) Google had no results for "Rashomon Republicans" before I posted this piece; it will be interesting to see if this neologism goes anywhere...