The strangest thing, to me,
about this presidential election is the fact that many on the right wing of the
Republican Party actually thought that Romney was going to win by a landslide. I had a conservative friend who predicted a 54
to 46 percent victory by Romney, with about 340 electoral votes. This is not an uniformed person, nor a dumb
one. He is very political and almost
obsessively followed the campaign. So,
how was he so wrong?
One answer, of course, is that
his hopes overrode his good sense. But,
the real reason seems to be that his sources of information were very limited. That is to say, his window to the political
world is Rush Limabaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Fox News, Rassmussen
polling, Carl Rove, Dick Morris, etc – the right wing echo chamber. So, his view of reality was not a view of
reality, but rather it was a view of the spin by the right wing spinmeisters.
Conservatives are not the only
victims of spin, the left wingers whose view of the world is through the lens
of MSNBC don’t see reality either, they see the left wing spin and believe it
to be the world as it is. It has been
humorously said that MSNBC is Fox News for vegans.
I have written many times before
that I have been a left wing whacko and a right wing whacko, and I am now
trying very hard to be understanding rather than polemic. As a result of my experience, I know for a
fact that I was a good man when I was a lefty and I was a good man when I was a
righty, and there are good, decent people on both sides of the aisle. There are idiots and jerks on both sides of
the isle as well, of course, but I try to see the goodness in the people, and see
the idealism in the ideas on both sides.
Another thing that I know for
a fact is that once you are inside an ideological bubble, whether in the left
wing whacko bubble or the right wing whacko bubble, all you see is the reflections
of the beliefs of your bubble bouncing back at you. Everything, everything proves to you that you
are right and that your ideology is correct.
It takes a lot to break out of
that bubble. What broke the left wing
bubble for me was the plight of the Vietnamese after the communists drove the U.S. out of Vietnam U.S.
war in Vietnam was based
upon a trumped up false view of communism as a threat which was just to justify
capitalist and imperialist greed of the U.S.
What broke the right wing
bubble for me was the collapse of the housing and finance industry bubble in
2008. My view that markets could be
trusted to self-regulate and create wealth for all ran aground on the rocks of
the realities of Wall Street greed, government indifference, and
corporate-political corruption. I
decided I was wrong about deregulated free markets, and I decided that markets
can only exist in the environment of regulation and governmental and legal
restraints, otherwise they become corrupt enterprises that harm rather than
empower society.
So, during the elections, I was aware of what both the right wing and left wing propaganda wings were pumping into the body politic, and tried to find a view that I considered to be fairly close to reality rather than too much influenced by the True Believers of either side. As a result, the election came out pretty much as I had expected: an Obama win, a Democratic Senate, and a Republican House.
My biggest hope from this election
is that the fanatical, Rigid Right will lose their grip on the Republican Party
as a result of this election – Romney lost and I believe a number of extremist
senatorial candidates also lost. I hope that the Republican Party can regain its
sanity, see the world as it is rather than as being distorted by the extremist
echo chamber of talk radio, Fox News, Carl Rove, etc., and become engaged in
governing the country rather than trying to create some kind of bogus
revolution that is supposed to establish a Libertarian or evangelical utopia on
us all.
That is my hope for the
country.
