The fact that we even need to have a march for science is absurd. It’s like having a march for mathematics, or a march for language – these are things that we kind of need to have a functioning modern society. And yet here we are. It was officially non-partisan, and rightly so, but let’s face it: we didn’t feel like we had to have this in 1987, or 1992, or 2001 or even 2008. There’s a reason people feel like they have to be in the streets.
But.
Let’s not forget that the famous “we create our own reality” interview was in October 2004, before Dubya was elected the second time. In fact, let’s have the block quote, which is generally understood to have come from Karl Rove himself:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Basically that’s taking a shit on the entire concept of empirical fact. That’s pissing directly in the face of the Enlightenment. That’s an argument that says we can believe whatever we want and you can’t stop us. It’s the functioning basis of Fox News, of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones, of five straight GOP Presidential campaigns. It’s not a Trump phenomenon, it’s not even Tea Party. It is what the Republican Party has stood for now for over a decade: who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?
This is why there has to be a reckoning. This is why Obama was wrong to try to work with the GOP, to try his whole “come let us reason together” shtick, to desperately try to negotiate with the other side. You don’t negotiate with a five year old having a tantrum. You don’t negotiate with a lunatic screaming on a street corner. You act quickly and decisively to put them out of harm’s way – their own and others – and carry on having an adult society while doing what you can to see that they get the help they need.
The mythical white working class needs help. But so do a lot of other people. And the MWWC frankly needs to be made to sit out politics for a while, because they’re only going to hurt themselves worse. And that means breaking the GOP. The Republican Party has to be read completely out of power as a political force in America.
They have nobody but themselves to blame. Nobody made them take sides against reality.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.