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How many times have you had this conversation?
Conservative: "9/11 was Bill Clinton's fault!"
Liberal: "Uh, Bush was in power then"
Conservative: "Yes but Bill Clinton let it happen because he didn't tackle Osama! It always takes until the next president's term for policies to have an effect"
Liberal: "Ah, so Poppy Bush was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombings?"
Conservative: "No, no, that was Clinton, it happened on his watch! Watch The Path To 9/11"
Liberal: "That movie's been debunked by pretty much everyone and you just said..."
Conservative: "Why do you hate America?"
The exact order of the arguements varies and you could insert several things in place of 9/11 there, such as the "Clinton Recession" or the claim that Reagan won the Cold War but I'm sure the process is relatively familiar to most of us. Personally, I've had conversations like that so many times that I feel like I'm reading from a script and have to surpress the desire to punch the conservative somewhere around line 3 just to save time. You point out facts and logic and recorded historical record and it's simply drowned out by a tirade of spittle-flecked verbosity. Everything good was created by a conservative or a Republican, everything bad is the fault of a liberal or a Democrat.
I think I may have discovered the problem. This is a fledgling hypothesis and there's probably a few weak spots and gaps, nothing a good research grant couldn't cure (Harvard, call me...) but here it is: They're not lying to you. They honestly believe all of this stuff and it's not because they're stupid (although some are), it's because they are sick. John W. Dean, in his excellent work Conservatives Without Conscience applies the work of a psychologist called Altemeyer to the political arena. What they discovered was that conservatives tend to be divded into leaders and followers (I'm heavily simplifying. If you're interested, Google Altemeyer's work, it's fascinating). What I think they failed to point out was that the follower group has the ability to edit their internal recollection of reality to concur with approved sources. To you or I, the facts about what came before 9/11 are fairly simple: Bill Clinton wasn't entirely blameless but left the incoming Bush team a through blueprint of how to tackle al Queda and the bulk of the blame is on Bush. To the conservative though, nothing is true unless it comes through approved sources: Their pastor (or televangelist equivelent), Fox "news" and so on.
I don't think it's co-incidence that the proportion of fundementalists (in the sense of Biblical literalists) in the population is roughly the same as Bush's surviving supporters. To believe that the earth was created in six days less than ten thousand years ago by a god who seemed to suffer from multiple personalities, that evolution never happened and the evidence is a conspiracy by godless scientists and/or the devil, that Christianity is under constant assault in the USA; it is this kind of internal editing which allows someone to still support Bush. In many ways, it operates like a cult. It has it's high priests (Rush Limbaugh, Shaun Hannity), it's prophets (Ronald Reagan who they are coming vanishingly close to outright worshipping), it's holy books (Jerry Falwell's edited Bible, Atlas Shrugged) and it's articles of faith (oh, pick one) and just like a cult, truth can only come from the lips of Dear Leader or his approved surrogates. All else is lies sent to tempt them from the true faith or just unimportant. It's also not a co-incidence that Republicans tended to accuse Obama supporters of being a cult. That's called projection.
I think most of us probably remember the conversation recounted by David Kuo (I think, if someone knows different, please correct me) where a collegue of his said something to the effect of Kuo still belonging to the "reality based". He muttered something about enlightenment principles and observation and then his collegue responded "You don't understand how the world works now. We make our own reality". Although it probably wasn't meant as such, that's a very good summing-up of the mind of the conservative follower; that reality is not an unbiased, verifiable, external truth but something which can be internally constructed from whatever fits one's pre-existing views. To an extent, we all do this. Humans are an instinctively conformist species for the most part (see Milgram). What makes the conservative follower different is that their conformity to accepted truth is wholehearted. Since most of us here are liberals, I presume that most of us are opposed to torture. Perhaps some of us struggled with the issue and then decided. Some conservatives did the same, they struggled with the issue and for whatever reason, came down on the side of allowing it but to the conservative follower, no such struggle was required. As soon as the president said "We do not torture", that was good enough for them and whatever Americans were doing to prisoners obviously wasn't torture since the president just said that we don't torture. Like a cult, whatever Dear Leader says is gospel. Also like a cult is that anything negative said about Dear Leader cannot possibly be true. I'm sure by now, we've all heard the endless excuses: The speaker is biased, a liberal, suffers from Bush Derangement Syndrome (projection again), is a whacko or, in the most extreme cases, the incident never happened, even if there is tape of it. And remember, they're not lying, they genuinely believe that.
Reality is, to an extent, defined by consensus. If you look up and see no sun where the rest are enjoying the rays on a balmy day, it's pretty likely to be you that has a problem. If you think you're being pursued by man-eating hedgehogs while everyone else says not, chances are you need therapy (although I suppose we could just give you a chair to stand on and a stout stick and let you get on with it). Oh, it's possible for one man to be right while all others are wrong but it's exceedingly rare that happens and the names of such men tend to be recorded in history books. Men like Churchill and Galileo. Here, the conservative follower will proclaim that Bush's name will be recorded in such a fashion and nothing and no-one will convince them otherwise. The possibility that they could be wrong, have been fooled, never enters their heads. Bush will be vindicated by history because that is what will happen. Possibly a truly world-class psychiatrist could get through, break down that self-reinforcing screen in their head but that's far beyond the scope of this essay.
For the rest of us, all we can do is pray we outnumber them.
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