"A man sees what he wants to see, and disregards the rest."
-- Paul Simon, "The Boxer"
In yesterday's Idiot wind comment section, TravisDisaster wrote:
Congressman Pete Sessions (R-TX) just said on MTP "When I look at the Tea Party movement I see one third Republicans, one third Democrats, and one third independents"That's not just dumb, that's existing in a separate dimensional plane.
Indeed! It's how lots of Tea Partier's see themselves--not only the "real Americans", but also "the majority" that Obama & the Democrats are ignoring. But then there's the latest relevant Gallup poll, July 2, "Tea Party Supporters Overlap Republican Base: Eight out of 10 Tea Party supporters are Republicans":
There is significant overlap between Americans who identify as supporters of the Tea Party movement and those who identify as conservative Republicans. Their similar ideological makeup and views suggest that the Tea Party movement is more a rebranding of core Republicanism than a new or distinct entity on the American political scene.
And it's not just disproportionately Republican, but conservative Republican:
Quite naturally, this is reflected in who they intend to vote for in the mid-terms:
And in how they view President Obama and Speaker Pelosi:
So, yes, indeed, it would certainly please Pete Sessions and all his Tea Party friends to think that they are perfectly representative of America, "one third Republicans, one third Democrats, and one third independents".
This sort of delusional false consensus mindset is anything but unusual in our politics today. Saturday before last, I wrote a diary, "The tortured logic of embracing torture" in which the second point was specifically about this--again with a conservative twist:
(2) Torture supporters vastly over-estimated the number of people who agreed with them, while torture opponents had a far more realistic sense of how public opinion lined up:
And just last Thursday, Greg Sargent responded to Politico's big lie about liberal bloggers in a way that ultimately got down to how Politico helps create a false consensus (just like these exact same jokers did with WMDs & the Iraq War):
Politico's theory: Liberal bloggers don't care if Dems sustain large losses this fallI'm probably a sucker for biting on this attack on the liberal blogosphere from Poiltico top-dog editors John Harris and Jim VandeHei, but this is so divorced from reality that it really shouldn't go unanswered:
The liberal blogosphere grew in response to Bush. But it is still a movement marked by immaturity and impetuousness -- unaccustomed to its own side holding power and the responsibilities and choices that come with that.So many liberals seem shocked and dismayed that Obama is governing as a self-protective politician first and a liberal second, even though that is also how he campaigned. The liberal blogs cheer the fact that Stan McCrystal's scalp has been replaced with David Petreaus's, even though both men are equally hawkish on Afghanistan, but barely clapped for the passage of health care. They treat the firing of a blogger from the Washington Post as an event of historic significance, while largely averting their gaze from the fact that major losses for Democrats in the fall elections would virtually kill hopes for progressive legislation over the next couple years.
In private conversations, White House officials are contemptuous of what they see as liberal lamentations unhinged from historical context or contemporary political realities.
I'm no blog triumphalist, and some of the debate about Weigel was overblown, but the claim about blogospheric indifference to the midterms is just laughably false. The liberal blogs I read have spent months now engaged in deep debate about the midterm elections, the best ways to limit losses, and what the consequence for the progressive agenda will be if Dems don't figure out how to pull themselves out of their doldrums.
Indeed, amusingly enough, the very argument VandeHarris are criticizing liberal blogs for making -- that the White House has remained captive to a Beltway culture that fetishizes bipartisanship and has failed to seize this historical moment's potential to dramatically expand the boundaries of what's politically possible -- has been central to the liberal bloggers' debate about this fall's elections.
This much is obvious, and par for the course: The easiest way to make your enemies look foolish is to make up all their lines for them. So systemically misrepresenting the liberal blogosphere is the obvious lazy man's way to go--and big fave of The Stupids as well.
Sargent goes on to make another obvious point--that lots of bloggers are activists, so it only makes sense to push for more to be done: that's what activists do!
But here's the reason I connected Sargent's comment with the theme of false consensus, because of the following comment on how they help create it:
However, to make the argument that liberal bloggers have their heads in the sand about Dem losses this fall is just flat out false. All VandeHarris are revealing is that they don't regularly read liberal blogs -- and that they know they can count on the fact that the Beltway insiders who will snicker knowingly about this article don't read liberal blogs either. And that's fine: Don't read them! But please don't make stuff up about them and call it journalism.
Why should Versailles read blogs? They don't pay attention to anyone in America. Why should bloggers be any different? And that's hardly the end of it. They don't pay attention to scientists telling them about global warming. Or to experts on Afghanistan telling them its the graveyard of empires. Or to UN weapons inspectors, telling them, "Sorry, no WMDs!" They don't pay attention to anyone who might somehow disturb their false consensus.
And why not? It worked out so well for the original Versailles, now didn't it?
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