Their Own Facts David Frum of “Axis of Evil” fame — who is some kind of distant cousin of mine — has an excellent piece in New York explaining his apostasy from the modern GOP. Best line:
Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”
Frum himself isn’t completely free of this alternative reality. He still insists that Obama is building a much bigger government, which just isn’t true; there’s health reform, which will require subsidies in the vicinity of 1 percent of GDP to operate, but there are no other major expansions of government on the table.
Still, it’s a good piece; would that more old-style Republicans were willing to open their eyes and see that the party they once supported has been transformed into a madhouse.