Blame the base

„Widely shared paranoid fantasies existed long before Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, of course, but it’s increasingly clear that the success of news and opinion outlets devoted to counter-factual news in the service of partisan ends has driven a rift between their audience and the rest of the nation. If the rift were merely ideological, it wouldn’t pose a problem for the Republicans: Ideological rifts are the very stuff of politics.

Increasingly, though, the rift between the Tea Partyized Republicans and everyone else comes on the question of empiricism. Watch Fox News or listen to right-wing talk radio long and credulously enough, and you’ll end up believing that Americans found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that sharia law is being imposed on Dearborn, Mich., that climate change is a hoax and that Obama fears revealing the truth about his birth (a frequent theme of Fox’s Sean Hannity).

The authorities at Fox moved back from the brink a bit when they decided to let Glenn Beck go, but Beck was just one among many right-wing talksters whose cumulative effect has been to render rank-and-file Republicans a receptive audience for nonsense-spouting demagogues such as Trump. If the espousal of birtherism truly becomes a necessity for winning the Republican presidential nomination, the right’s war on empiricism will have served not merely to build and mobilize a base, but also to isolate that base from the majority of Americans who still inhabit, at least most of the time, a reality-based universe. Winning the support of crazies, Haley Barbour may have concluded, is no way to win the White House.”