This is a serious question that I'm dealing with.
Current conservative ideology seems to be mostly composed of ideas that deny reality. The problem isn't that conservatism's opinions and policies are disagreeable - it's that those opinions are FAR out of touch with known facts. Evolution, global warming, economic theory (tax cuts for the wealthy are proven to NOT fix much of anything), Gay marriage (how exactly can it hurt straight marriage again?), Contraception education (proven by studies to work far better than abstinence education), the Founding Fathers (proven by their own words to be Deists not Fundamentalist Christians), Saddam (proven *before the invasion* not to have WMD), etc. etc. and on and on, ad nauseum.
Not only do I have family and friends who are committed to a worldview that is in conflict with reality - but my country is being held back because millions of voters are similarly deluded.
And when I discuss the facts with conservatives in the hopes of having them realize their facts are wrong, the discussion nearly always follows the same pattern:
conservative: (anti-factual statement)
me: (factual refutation, with citations)
conservative: (change of subject, with new anti-factual statement)
me: (new factual refutation, with citations)
....
conservative: (THE SAME ORIGINAL anti-factual statement)
I'm being serious when I say: this is a pattern of thinking that borders on mental illness. Perhaps the only difference is that this way of thinking is chosen, whereas full insanity appears to be more involuntary.
Along with this pattern, is an aversion to comparing different abstract groupings based on what they have in common. Minorities are not the same as "us", even though they live in the same country and work the same jobs. Union people are not the same as "us", even if they're white and live in the same towns and make the same money. People on the East Coast are not the same as "us", even if they pay the same taxes and their sons die in the same wars. And when I've tried to connect these different groupings with arguments by metaphor, many conservatives literally don't get the metaphor. It's not like they even understand it and reject it - they don't seem to grasp the notion of the metaphor itself. But all human beings need metaphor to function. So in this one area of their thinking, many conservatives seem to show a subconscious resistance to connecting the sets of information. Maybe because even considering the metaphor could cause a conservative to empathize with "them".
Conservatives also are showing an amazingly convenient memory of history. There is a similar lack of connection between sets of facts. Their view of history becomes deeply compartmentalized. As only one example, Reagan is considered a conservative hero - a great tax-cutting, militarily-strong, Constitution-loving President. Even though he raised taxes, got Marines killed in Beirut for a photo op and then ran, and violated the Constitution with Iran-Contra.
More recently I had the amazing experience of reading a conservative straight-up declare that Bush never said Saddam had WMD. When confronted with direct quotes that showed Bush had, he gave no response. Of course pride would prevent him from admitting he was wrong - but why would he say something that provably wrong in the first place? The only answer I can see is that he was mangling his own memory. Huckabee just performed a similar action with a flat statement about Obama's "growing up in Kenya" - which he must know by now is factually provably wrong.
So that appears to be the psychic landscape. Looking over it, the landscape seems composed of different strategies with the same purpose: denial.
With that working against us - and them - how can we show them their facts and the theories that rely on them are simply, provably wrong?
Facts don't seem to work. At most, at an individual level, some of the worst nonsense can be brushed back. But that's it. And a few months later the same nonsense comes out again.
Arguing of course goes nowhere.
So....? Anybody have any thoughts, for how can this be treated?
How do you change people's minds when they don't want to be changed?
How can this possibly be dealt with?
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