The New England Journal of Medicine delivers a battlefield bulletin from the Trump Wars: Trump is appointing four anti-abortion advocates to positions in government where their notorious and discredited biases will influence policy. It’s one more skirmish in the Administration’s War on Observable Reality, and another in a long series of betrayals of the functions of government, like appointing a Secretary of Energy who disbelieves in climate change and an evangelical to make Federal education policy. The underlying message is that this White House and its party want politics to determine reality itself, and that they have a mandate to do it.
They’re wrong of course, and they know it. They knew it long before Donald Trump. They disclosed their battle plan way back in 2004. Karl Rove is credited with making an historic slip by telling The New York Times,
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”
Ever since they’ve made policy in war, the economy, and their campaigns on that premise: reality is a political construct, and it’s possible to elect one you like. To that end it's a duty to win by any means that work.
Epistemological War
This is the civil war of our time: two sides fight over what knowledge is in the first place, and over how it is acquired, legitimized, and put to use.
Conservatives fight to elevate the right to believe above all other rights. They want belief to have parity with empiricism, to be called knowledge equally, and to be actionable in the public square, business, law, science, schools, etc. They demand that if a person sincerely believes that dinosaurs fought gladiators in ancient times, then that sincerity alone should suffice to underpin the argument. That’s just an example; generally they want belief (their belief, and no contrary belief of, say, a Muslim or a liberal or a social justice warrior) to be the all-purpose full-stop on any question. If they believe life begins at conception, they want it to be the political reality we all must share. If they believe gays are lesser human beings, they want to make that law.
It’s not just about the individual issues--their position requires them to attack the very idea of fact itself. Creating their own reality requires them to make or discard facts as they require, regardless of any evidence that refutes their argument. Evidence is the enemy for these people because evidence erodes their power to claim the self-evident truth of their beliefs, and to wield that self-evidence as a political weapon. Evidence argues against their positions on gay marriage, contraception, evolution, climate change, racial equality, Biblical literalism, and every position they want to be true. So they have to refute the idea of evidence before any evidence appears. They have to demand that people accept and not test, believe and not question, and follow without thinking. Reality is faith-based.
The two sides contend in individual discussions and in organizations, but the battle tactics are consistent. The reality-based community argues linearly and cumulatively until the evidence is plainly irrefutable. Conservatives repeat, circle, repeat, circle, insisting at greater volume without substantiating their position in any meaningful way. They want to start with the self-evidence of their beliefs instead of building the irrefutable case for them that transcends belief. So they argue Creationism by citing the Bible as evidence on the premise of the Bible’s infallibility. Sadly for them, their certainty is the weapon they love the most while it works the least. Their dismissal of evidence blinds them to the evidence. Reality isn’t faith-based. Conservatives who use that all-purpose full stop in pursuit of their Seven Mountains of Societal Influence--religion, family, education, government, the media, arts and entertainment, and business--learn rapidly that it fails in all seven, including in religion itself.
The Limits of Faith
Hence the problems hammering on the Republicans right now. They cannot isolate their faith from any of these other arenas, and sooner or later they come to tests and measurements where observable reality intrudes. They’re arguing positions that have been disproven for anyone with an interest to protect in the real world. They can’t stay in the arena of religion when the fights happen in the arenas of family, education, government, etc. There are no such things as faith-based GAAP accounting, a faith-based Periodic Table, faith-based measurement of audiences; there are few families and even few churches where hard questions never divide the unit and split the generations. And few people in 21st century America can live by faith alone. Donald Trump can dwell in his temple to himself, but even for him the gilt-edged fantasy of unaccountability, delusion, and debt comes with a bill to pay. Circle and repeat, circle and repeat doesn’t pay it. The more one tries, the sleazier the hustle feels. In the end all that circle and repeat does is to separate the gullible from the skeptics.
The Right and Donald Trump are making policy as though no one can read a gas meter or a light bill or an EKG or a spreadsheet. The technology for testing and measurement is exploding, networking and yielding new insights on a scale no one has seen since the advent of the printing press. This is the era of Big Data on smart phones, and they’re behaving as though anything faith-based will escape testing because they say it should. They can talk themselves out, but it won’t work. When the choice is in front of individuals and organizations public and private, solutions must emerge from the judicious study of discernible reality--not because of “belief” but because it works. When the costs and benefits of a decision are explicit it takes a true fool to decide based on politics. Perry’s announcement in this context, for example, is utterly retrogressive considering that what companies “believe” about climate change doesn’t affect their empirical cost-driven decisions to mitigate it because cutting emissions saves money. Any manager who makes this decision as a matter of belief while ignoring the evidence would be fired. Any voter who believes Perry is dumber for it. Any party that bases policy on this is lying, and a lying party doesn’t have a long future in an era of Big Data.
The reality is, the bill comes due. People who believe that politics determines reality or provides some alternatives to it get their bills anyway. Trump and the Republicans are ignoring countless examples from history when generals or battlefield leaders declines the judicious study of discernible reality and sent their men to slaughter, when companies were blind to their situation and blundered into mistakes, and when a husband was thinking with the wrong head.
Pyrrhic Victory
The GOP’s fundamental position that there are alternatives to reality has crippled the party so badly that they no longer function as an effective political entity. Republicans live in desperate revisionism--a Lost Cause rewrite of history in real time. There is a lucrative industry of fantasy behind it, with alternative reality mountains--alternative religions, alternative education, alternative media, alternative entertainment, alternative law, alternative science, even alternative families. The dark secret of them all is that they are all reality-based businesses, making real money in the real world from their fantasy-loving followers because fantasy sells, but there is no such thing as an alternative dollar. That explains why Fox News sneers at climate change but its parent company, News Corp., is carbon neutral; why Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter insists that the Earth is 6000 years old while it built its ark for energy efficiency; and why Donald Trump’s marriage appears to be more about political use than it is about, well, marriage.
Accusing Conservatives of hypocrisy is a waste of time--they’ve seceded from the very idea of intellectual consistency in the first place, so they can’t be hypocrites now. Inconsistency is a weapon that buys time and confuses their hated enemies. Lying is defiant brave nihilism against the false religion of facts. They like the frustration it causes when they disdain civil discourse in places where civil discourse is their obligation. The trouble for them is, it’s all vaudeville if it’s all just politics. It all must be tested in the real world, and it fails under testing. They know it. They feel it happening. And they’re angry at having won the White House and Congress and seeing that their political triumph doesn’t give them any strength in reality. The gutless likes of Erick Erickson want to talk about secession because they’ve lost on every field where reality prevails. In their humiliation they see nothing left but to leave the reality-based community as though they can make a place in the 21st century where their fantasy-based one works. Sorry, but there’s no place for them to go, no time into which they can retreat--and anyway, imagine the world they’d create for themselves given the chance. The fundamental business model of the Right remains addiction: tobacco, fossil fuels, even religion, so picture their nation. Their nation would have a body politic of swindlers and a Congress of liars. Everyone would get to elevate his beliefs to fact, so they’d be at war among themselves. They’d be ripping each other off, making each other sick, selling each other snake oil, and sooner or later appealing to the United States for foreign aid. You can't run a gas station this way, let alone an economy.
The Tragedy of Trump for the Right
The Right’s classic mistake is unfolding: they believed their own beliefs. In elevating Trump they have committed themselves to their absolutist positions and subjected themselves to tests, and they see that they cannot meet their goals, reverse time, create an alternative reality, or displace the real one. It’s a vast scam. They know they’re failing by reality-based measures but the theater of it is still a money maker, and more important, their voters still believe it. Monetized anger is the point now, like Trump's, Erickson's, ad infinitum. Hate is fun, and it pays. Their voters are rage addicts demanding product from cynical dealers. So they can’t stop.
But in the real world, Trumpism has failed. It will get louder and angrier but not stronger. It will make money but it has to fall apart. The people hurt the worst will be the ones who believe it the most. Erick Erickson’s bulletin from the battlefield is the yelp of a man caught in the open with a wooden gun. There is still no alternative to the reality-based community. He's in it. Trump's in it. The Republicans are in it.
There is no escape from an escalation of violence in politics. Repeat and circle.
The only escape is dissolution. Circle and repeat.
We should start talking about secession. Repeat and circle.
As their power peaks, Trump's movement wants out. Their triumph is an end, not a new start. Erickson says there's no way they can stay. That’s not a threat. It’s a surrender.