Here’s me about a month before the segment above aired, sort-of-coining the term “Paracosm: The Elaborate, Ongoing Improv Act That Is Republican Politics”:
It's been compared to Orwellian doublethink (War is Peace, 2+2=5, and all that). Cognitive dissonance is another phrase we often hear and read. ... The best description I've been able to come up with is that the whole thing is an improv act, an elaborate and ongoing production of improvisational theatre that's run constantly for two decades. When Republican politicians and their various media enablers talk in public, on the radio, on television, in speeches and in interviews, they're performing an improv act in which ... all of the things they're required to believe in order to validate their political preferences, are self-evidently true and form the basis of the performance[.] Although politics has always been performance art to one degree or another, this is something else. This is a live, real-time, 24/7, never-ending, constantly-evolving improv act. It's like "The Truman Show" in reverse, with the audience in the role of Truman.
Here’s me in 2014, elaborating on that last point:
The difference between "The Truman Show" as portrayed in the movie and what we see on "Fox News" every day ... is that Truman himself is not on the show. The audience does not tune in to watch Truman and see what happens; the audience is Truman. They don't know that they're watching improv. Just as Truman can't tell the difference between actors/characters and real people, Fox's audience in large part can't tell the difference between an improv act called "News," and news. And like Truman, they're actually unwittingly performing the act on behalf of the producers and directors, taking to the Internet day after day to write, argue and rant about whatever the actors are presenting to them, treating and regarding it as if it were actual reality, and of course, voting Republican (viz., voting for the economic interests of the act's producers, directors and performers).
(emphasis in original). A year before that, I wrote and wondered why the “denizens of Bullshit Mountain,” as Stewart would describe them, work overtime to create this alternate universe for themselves just to make themselves miserable:
...they'll give you a whole narrative filled with 35,000-foot-high-level abstractions about "big government" and "freedom" and what-not, gross distortions and mischaracterizations of reality, whatever justification they think they need, reverse-engineering the world to make them feel exactly how they want to feel. Time after time I read and listen to this rhetoric and think to myself, WTF are you talking about? What world are you living in? This aggressive and relentless misery, resentment, fear and loathing is just grotesquely out of proportion to anything that is actually happening or that anyone could reasonably believe.
Speaking of which, from the same week in 2013:
[T]he greatest disservice that Fox does to its viewers is not that it lies to them, misleads them, or pretends to be something it's not. It's that it makes them believe they live in a universe that not only doesn't exist, but cannot exist. To believe it's even possible for such a world to exist, for one party or one ideology to be self-evidently right about absolutely everything, everywhere, always, now and throughout history, is simply unreasonable.
In February 2013, I did a little thought experiment:
Arguing bullshit that you don't really believe or agree with is a lot more fun than trying to convince a crazy person to accept something reasonable that doesn't validate his fears and prejudices, partly because there's less frustration involved.
...
One of the reasons I know that right-wing politics is naught but an elaborate, ongoing improv act is that I can do it. I can act the part without a trace of irony, without the kinds of exaggerations and distortions that would necessarily give me away, and it's really not that hard. All you need is a couple of basic principles or made-up "facts" (i.e., "talking points") and then all you have to do is say things that are consistent with those points; you don't have to actually know or understand anything.
A month later, after a conservative actually told me (I wish I was making this up), “It was the Democrats who talked Bush into attacking Iraq, not the other way around,” which must have been a thing that week, I wrote:
The idea that there are so many people out there living in a fictional world, for whom fiction is their reality, and who are absolutely convinced that the fiction is real and that their "facts" "prove" it, is unsettling to say the least. The frustration comes from not being able to do anything about it, not knowing if anything can be done about it.
Which brings us back to David Frum, last week, bemoaning the “universe of untruth” that the rest of us have known about and been describing for a decade:
This closed knowledge system entraps millions of Americans in a universe of untruth, in which Trump is a victim and the allegations against him are “fake news.” The prisoners and victims of this system live in a dreamworld of lies.
...
The price paid for this achievement is that the communications system lacks any means to convince nongroup members. How can you convince people when they cannot understand what on Earth you are talking about?
I will give Frum credit for not taking a paragraph of his piece to gratuitously attack Democrats, liberals, “the left,” &c., as so many of his fellow purported ex-travelers have reflexively done when praising themselves for “leaving” the GOP, even when acknowledging their own role in creating and telling the lies, distortions and exaggerations behind those attacks. As such I won’t bother going down a list of Frum’s pre-Trump transgressions as a purveyor of the “fan fiction” that he now decries.
But as gratifying as it is to read someone other than myself using the term “fan fiction” to describe what’s going on in the minds and on the teevees and radios of Republicans and their fans, there’s still a part of me that says: Yes, we know. We’ve known for a long time. Where were you when it mattered?