Free Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce Page B

Reagan and, ultimately, the consolidation of power under George W. Bush from 2000 to 2008 depended in everything on how tightly the movement fastened itself to popular irrationality from economics to fringe religion. The movement swallowed whole the quack doctrine of supply-side economics, adopting it with almost comically ferocious zeal.
    The movement lapped up Reagan’s otherworldly tales, such as the famous one about how he had helped liberate Nazi death camps, even though he’d spent most of World War II defending the bar at the Brown Derby. It was thereby prepared to buy whole hog the notion of George W. Bush, the brush-clearingcowboy who was afraid of horses. It attached itself to the wildest of religious extremes, sometimes cynically and sometimes not. On one memorable occasion in 2005, just as the controversy over intelligent design was heating up generally in the media,
The New Republic
polled some of the country’s most prominent conservative intellectuals concerning the theory of evolution. The paleoconservative pundit Pat Buchanan stated, flatly, that he didn’t believe in Darwinian evolution, but a number of others confessed a thoroughgoing fondness for it. Jonah Goldberg, for one, despite his heavily footnoted distrust for priestly experts who use science to discredit traditional notions of faith, was notably lucid on the subject. But once intelligent design—with its “scientific” implication of a deity—was thrown into the discussion, an exhibition of tap dancing erupted the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Gene Kelly in
On the Town.
    Norman Podhoretz, the godfather of neoconservatism, told the reporter that the question of whether he personally believed in evolution was “impossible to answer with a simple yes or no.” And Tucker Carlson, the MSNBC host, seemed to be chasing his opinion all around Olduvai Gorge. Asked whether God had created man in his present form, Carlson replied, “I don’t know if he created man in his present form…. I don’t discount it at all. I don’t know the answer. I would put it this way: The one thing I feel confident saying I’m certain of is that God created everything there is.” In June 2007, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of the Republicans surveyed said that they did not believe in evolution at all. And this was the ascendant political power of the time.
    Movement conservatism was so successful that it drove its own media, particularly talk radio, and conservative media fed back the enthusiasm into the movement, energizing it further. The movement’s gift for confrontation was ideally suited to mediain which controversy drove ratings, which then drove the controversy, and so forth. The more traditional media joined in, attracted, as they always are, by power and success. The more the movement succeeded politically, the tighter it was bound to the extremes that helped power it. The September 11 attacks functioned as what the people on the arson squad would call an accelerant. Even popular culture went along for the ride. The vague, leftish conspiracies of
The X-Files
gave way to the torture porn of
24.
    It was a loop, growing stronger and stronger, until a White House aide (rumored to be Karl Rove himself) opened up to the journalist Ron Suskind in 2004 and gave him the money quote for the whole era. Suskind, and those like him, the aide said, “represent the reality-based community,” which is to say, the kind of people who believe “that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernable reality…. That’s not the way the world works anymore.” If this book seems to concentrate on the doings of the modern American right, that’s because it was the modern American right that consciously adopted irrationality as a tactic, and succeeded very well.
    Which brings us, for the moment, to the two U.S. senators from the great state of Oklahoma, a pair of the most entertaining primates ever to sit in the world’s greatest deliberative body.