Rightie Fantasia

Krugman:

Younger and/or foreign readers may not recall how big a role the alleged moral superiority of small-town America used to play in conservative politics (and still does, to some extent). Republicans portrayed themselves as the party of the “real America”, of family values, as opposed to the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts. Defense of traditional values played a big role in the 2004 campaign.

You always knew that there was plenty of hypocrisy here, that the heartland had no monopoly on virtue and the coast no monopoly on vice, and that surely some of the loudest family-value types had skeletons in their closets. But what we’re now learning about the Speaker of the House during those years is beyond anything one could have imagined.

I’ve encountered intelligent and thoughtful young people who were certain liberalism encourages sexual permissiveness, which was never what political liberalism was about. Rather, it was the simple idea that what consenting adults do in private is not anyone else’s concern, especially the government’s. And for all we know, political liberals may be less likely than political conservatives to do anything, um, remarkable. All we know is that the people screaming about family values and God’s laws seem at least as scandal-prone as anyone else. Maybe more so.

As I wrote in The Book, there is copious data showing that populations that are religiously and politically conservative have more divorce, more unmarried pregnant teenagers, and usually higher abortion rates (even if abortion is illegal) than people living in more secular, liberal and “permissive” cultures. And I concluded,

It appears that when absolutist morality is publicly enforced, actual human behavior — heterosexual behavior included — is driven into the closet, leaving actual humans with no practical guidance in their actual circumstances.

I say the absolutist approach to morality gets everything backward. It creates too wide a gap between public righteousness and what people are really doing in their private lives, so that the moral rules are not really guiding anyone. And when we cede the presumed moral high ground to the absolutists, too often we squelch open and honest public discussion of our real-world circumstances and moral decisions.

So it is with the Duggars; the conservative reaction overall has been to try to pretend nothing happened, or if it did happen it’s been dealt with and we should all just get over it. One rightie screeched

“‘Abuse’ is the new ‘racism,’” Boyer, who also sits on the board of the Home Educators Association of Virginia, wrote. “As soon as you’re accused of it, you’re considered guilty. Just what would you like the Duggars to have done? Turn all their kids over to a godless psychologist? Maybe one supplied by the local public school system where ‘abuse’ is so unheard of? Should they have skinned Josh alive, rolled him in salt and hung him on a meathook?”

Translation: The cognitive dissonance is hurting my brain! Everybody shut up about Josh Duggar so that I can go back to believing only secular liberals do depraved things!

Of course, righties live in fantasy land about other things, too. Krugman again:

Menzie Chinn notes the continuing failure of the Kansas experiment with supply-side tax cuts. And yes, it is an experiment — Gov. Brownback said it was, and by cutting taxes radically on the basis of ideology rather than any compelling event, Kansas in effect provided us with a natural experiment on exactly what such cuts accomplish. Menzie uses business indicators; I just look at employment growth since Brownback took office, compared with the nation as a whole (red line). No hint whatsoever of a supply-side boost, and of course a terrible fiscal crisis.

So how will this change GOP economic ideology? You know the answer: not at all. We live in an age of right-wing derp, of doctrines that just get repeated (and indeed strengthen their political hold) no matter how wrong they prove. Gold bugs and Austrians are more dominant in GOP circles than they were before seven years of wrongly predicting runaway inflation. Supply-siders are more dominant than ever despite the boom in California and the bust in Kansas.

This is not to say that liberals are always right. But most of the time, when presented with real-world evidence our ideas aren’t working as predicted, we adjust.