The Bush White House referred to many of its enemies as "RBCers". We were their enemy, the Reality Based Community. To the right, reality is an enemy. What matters to their world is Faith, and the ability to believe something in spite of increasing evidence to the contrary. The more it is contradicted by reality, the more pure the faith.
Sure, we have openly religious myths, which lead to poll results showing that more Americans believe in guardian angels than in evolution, dumb stuff like that. This is folk religion and while it tends to impede education and scientific progress, its harm is contained by its general confinement away from the halls of power. Okay, some members of Congress are stuck in faerieland, but these myths are easy to recognize.
But it's not just the Bushies who stick with faith over reality. It's endemic in America on both left and right, including nominally-secular communities. We do stupid things because we ignore the obvious when it doesn't fit the public faith. I'll bring up a few current examples.
This week's radio program This American Life had a good story about State College, PA and Penn State University, voted America's Number One Party School by the Princeton Review. It's not a serious ranking, just an online vote, but the radio show pointed out that State College's culture is very heavily focused on drinking. Football games and tailgate parties are huge. And while the drinking age is of course 21, underage students routinely get plastered. The most popular brands of alcohol are a dirt-cheap beer that nobody likes (Natty Lite) and the cheapest brand of rotgut vodka (Vladimir). The vodka gets mixed up into sweet concoctions like Jungle Juice. Binge drinking is rampant, and they don't know what to do about it. But they keep trying.
Okay, I'm old enough to have gone to college when the age was 18. And we had on-campus beer parties. We kept wine and beer in our dorm rooms, openly. Beer was served in a campus eating/drinking establishment. Local bars had lots of happy hours and the like, and students took the campus bus downtown to them. Now, here are two words that I never heard together in college: Binge Drinking. Yes, we occasionally got on a good drunk. But nothing like today. Most college drinking was social drinking, not to real intoxication.
The myth that we live with is that higher drinking ages lower teenage drinking. Quite the opposite is true: Prohibition moves the drinking into less-supervised settings, and its furtive nature leads to quick binges rather than long evenings of modest-rate imbibing. MADD has, frankly, worsened drunk driving. And nobody wants to admit it. The myth is that drinking ages work and that kids can be discourage from drinking that way.
Addressing the problem in a faith-based manner is like treating disease with prayer cloths and blood-letting. If the cure doesn't work, give the preacher more money for prayer cloths, and have Alaric of York, Mediaeval Barber, let out even more blood. If the patient dies, not enough blood was let out. That's Faith. And so is the MADD way of dealing with drinking, today's law and the only approach that Penn State or other colleges are really allowed to take. But nobody wants to admit it in public. At least nobody in politics. It's too politically dangerous. Supervised, legal teen drinking was far less risky. I was in major Canadian city the week the students arrived, and there was open, legal drinking on campus. I strongly suspect they have less binge drinking and fewer drunk drivers.
We have another myth, one about health insurance. The public position is that individual mandates for buying insurance are needed, or else the insurance companies can't give up recission and refusals to insure because of pre-existing conditions. The myth is that people don't buy insurance when they're healthy, and mostly sick people willingly buy it. This sort of adverse selection would be problematic if it were true.
But insurance isn't mostly bought by the sick. It's bought by those who are risk-averse. Those who like taking risks don't buy insurance. Yes, the latter may think themselves healthy, but they may not even know if they're the one about to get a heart attack or some other problem. Who can really predict the future or one's health? Mothers who don't let their little darlings walk three suburban blocks to school because John Walsh reminded them of snatchers are obviously very risk-averse. They don't need a mandate. They just need availability. Same with most people. Some people crave risk; most dislike it. The myth of who buys insurance is a marketing tool for AHIP, forcing Congress to do their bidding. That doesn't make it reality.
Another set of myths is a touchstone of the Republican side of the aisle, but accepted by the "mainstream" media as well. It's that Saint Ronnie accomplished much good in his term. These myths begin with the economics. Reaganism was based on certain economic myths, basically those that validated a laissez-faire capitalism tinged with socialism for the rich. (Hundreds of billions for S&L bailouts? Just a sad coincidence. Yeah, right.)
The efficient market hypothesis is the economic notion that a free market is an efficient way to made decisions, and that the crowd of investors together will coalesce around the right answer, even if individuals may guess wrong. This has never been true; almost everyone but The Villagers and the paid rightist "think tanks" understands that people make decisions irrationally, or based on complex factors not directly tied to markets. Sometimes it even involves the way that risk is valued, not the way a mathematician would do so in the abstract. Yet the myth persists where it does the most harm.
Along with that was the hypothesis that higher income inequality was somehow necessary for investment to occur; if the CEOs and yacht club crowd did very well, then everyone would benefit. The trickle-down myth. Not true, of course, but any attempt to tax the wealthy is called out as a drain on the economy. The self-serving nature of this myth is obvious. But public opposition is dampened by the lottery myth: the dream that "I'm going to be rich some day", so policies that harm the rich could come back to harm everyman when his day comes. We feed this in most states via the Tax on Stupidity, the lottery. Playing on people's misunderstanding of probability (and thus relying on the fact that the efficient market hypothesis is wrong!), states both take in this voluntary tax revenue and at the same time promote the myth that anybody can be rich some day.
Another part of Saint Ronnie's legacy is that he allegedly "won the Cold War". Yes, the Soviet Union fell shortly after his reign of error, but crediting it to Reagan's nuclear buildup is cargo cult history. The USSR fell because its economy could not compete in an increasingly globalized economy. It always was resource-dependent; a large part of its hold over eastern Europe was its delivery of cut-price oil and gas. Oil prices were high in the 1970s but fell in the 1980s as world supplies grew. At the same time, Japan became an economic powerhouse, redefining the way world markets for manufactured goods worked. While China has eclipsed Japan in most high-volume manufacturing, Japan in the 1980s showed the world that a top-to-bottom emphasis on quality, and paying attention to customers, was profitable. That just didn't work with the USSR's command economy. It was always creaky; the combination of rising Asian might and low oil prices put the nail in its coffin. Reagan just wasted hundreds of billions of American dollars in a corporatist potlatch of Pentagon acquisition.
These are just a few of the persistent myths that still have hold over American policy. Solving problems requires that we set them aside and squarely face reality. It's time for the Reality Based Community to rule for a change.
PS - Thanks for the rescue!