Delusional Thinking in Action

This week presented an excellent example of delusional thinking in action: the U.S. Presidential election. Many Republican strategists and conservative pundits predicted not only a Romney victory, but a landslide. This delusional reality was so strong that it led to such embarrassments as Karl Rove’s live meltdown on election night (watch John Stewart’s treatment).

This is an excellent example of how a culture can create its own reality, and the members of that culture will believe in a truth even when the evidence is against it.

In the days leading up to the election the right-wing true believers accused the polling companies of bias because the numbers didn’t fit their beliefs. (Even though this didn’t make any sense: if the pollsters were biased towards Obama, predicting a Democratic victory would mean liberals would be less motivated to go to the polls. I believe one of the reasons turnout was so high is because liberals believed Obama might lose. But this is typical of delusional thinking: it’s not rational.) The conservative media spent those days discussing the liberal machinations of the mainstream media and how the liberals were conspiring to create misleading polls, instead of facing the true situation of their presidential candidate.

But it turned out that the people who statistically analyzed those polls using facts and not wishful thinking, eminently including Nate Silver at the New York Times, were extremely accurate.

Of course this is just one more example of the delusional thinking that fills the right-wing airwaves. As Conor Friedersdorf wrote in his blog at The Atlantic:

Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. WorldNetDaily brought you birtherism. Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a "Grand Jihad" against America. Seriously?

It’s easy to think of plenty of other elements of the right-wing delusional reality: global warming doesn’t exist, tax cuts increase government revenue, there’s a conspiracy to hide wrong-doing in the Benghazi attack, etc.

This seems like a good moment for conservatives to examine their beliefs, doesn’t it? But a quick scan of the FOX news website makes it clear that’s not happening; here’s two articles that appear on their home page two days after the election under the heading “BIAS ALERT”: An opinion piece lists five ways the mainstream media “tilted the scales” in favor of Obama. Another article attributes Romney’s loss entirely to media bias:

But the political bloc that most helped push Obama to reelection was the American media.

All throughout election night, pundits and reporters were talking about the economy and how that had impacted the campaign. That was seldom the story the news media told throughout the election.

…

Networks that hammered President George W. Bush for high gas prices and high unemployment gave their candidate almost a complete pass – blaming Bush more than twice as much as Obama. On Election Day, unemployment was 7.9 percent, actually higher than it had been when Obama took office. Debt, deficit and underemployment were off the charts.

Obama didn’t win despite the numbers. He won because the media didn’t report them. They spent an entire campaign promoting social issues – abortion, gay marriage and more – where journalists near 100 percent support. The onslaught against GOP candidates was huge. The left/media strategy was merely to link Romney with any social conservative they could and hype what that candidate said.

…

Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were savaged for being out of the mainstream by the press. However, journalists yawned as Democrats continued their massive leftward shift with Fauxcahontas candidate Elizabeth Warren and the first openly gay senator, Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin.

It was more than that. Pick an Obama scandal and the media skipped it, covered it up or buried it beneath some bogus outrage about the right. "Fast and furious," Libya, jobs, the collapse of Arab Spring, the failed trillion-dollar stimulus, the cost of ObamaCare, the attack on religious rights and even bowing to foreign leaders – none of them got the press that made-up scandals about Romney received.