untethered from reality

It all started with Julian Sanchez, Research Fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, hardly an advocate for the left. In the first of several posts, he reflects on David Frum’s recent ouster from the American Enterprise Institute, and the less formal excommunication of Andrew Sullivan from the conservative movement. See "Frum, Cocktail Parties, and the Threat of Doubt." Some of this strict enforcement of orthodoxy, Sanchez concedes, is simply people following the money. But he's also worried about a trend, as he sees it, in the conservative movement toward "epistemic closure." He compares conservatism's intolerance of dissent to China's efforts to censor the internet. Nothing can be allowed to challenge its closed world.

Sanchez then elaborates on his theme with "Epistemic Closure, Technology, and the End of Distance." Here, he suggests that, while group think and confirmation bias are present among every clique to some degree, today these phenomena are not left-and-right symmetrical, although it's easy enough to point out this sort of thing on the left. Sanchez goes on to blame the conservative circling of the wagons on the collapse of geographic closure. To use his example, it's no longer possible to live in a geographically contained world where a ban against gay couples attending a prom -- so self-evidently justified to the local community -- will go unchallenged from the wider world.

Finally, Sanchez posts "A Coda on Closure" wherein he explains what he meant by "epistemic closure," after confessing that it really wasn't the right phrase anyway. It's not so much that the right is incapable of new ideas, that it's advocates are particularly closed-minded, or that they are not aware of other points of view. What he meant is that the conservative analysis is more and more impervious to actual facts -- in his words, the right has "become worryingly untethered from reality."

His quick review of the crazy yet unshakable beliefs from the right: "the obsession with ACORN or the idea that the “Climategate” e-mails were some kind of game changer in the larger AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming] debate." And again: "Bill Ayers’ potential authorship of Obama’s memoir, the looming threat of death panels, the president’s crypto-Islamic background and allegiances, his attempt to create a “private army” via the health care bill, his desire to see America come to ruin, the imagined racism of Sonia Sotomayor." No need to even mention the birther people. And now, just hot off the press, we have Fox news, former Bush officials and Rush Limbaugh making veiled accusations of sabotage of the BP oil rig -- maybe by the administration.

Since then, the web has come alive with various responses from all sides. One chronicle of the debate is here: " 'Epistemic Closure'? Those Are Fighting Words." Even my people, the philosophers, weigh in claiming that Sanchez misused a technical philosophical term. See "More From the Frontlines of the Epistemic Closure Debate." (John Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland in Australia, suggested, instead, the use of the word “agnotology," coined by the historian Robert Proctor “to describe study of the manufacture of ignorance. ”)

Finally, where I came in: Marc Ambinder's post in the Atlantic website "Have Conservatives Gone Mad?" Ambinder argues that, if you want to read genuinely cogent criticism of this administration, look leftward. The Republican base has abandoned all pretense at serious analysis and, instead, "seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking." And by the way, it seems clear that Ambinder means to answer his title question in the affirmative.