Political Realities and the Immaculate Idea

Ron Suskind introduced the term “reality-based community” to the world in an October 2004 New York Times magazine story on the Bush administration. The context was an exchange between Suskind and an unnamed “senior Bush advisor” that took place in mid-summer of 2002, and the gist of it was the Suskind and other members of the reality-based community — pretty much everyone outside the White House, as it turns out — were about to eat the dust of those who operated in a realm beyond reality.

At the time, the anecdote triggered considerable astonishment and amusement among those of us who saw a good bit of evidence that reality was kicking the crap out of Bush and his fellow demigods. Lots of liberal blogs began sporting banners reading “A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community,” and it’s fair to say that many of us thought reality was on the verge of administering what in professional wrestling parlance is known as a match-ending signature move; maybe something like Big Show’s chokeslam. (He’s a nice guy but you wouldn’t want him falling on you even without malice.)

A recent correspondence with someone well-placed to both comment on and perhaps inadvertently reflect the various outcomes of the conceit that informed Suskind’s source, who I think was probably Karl Rove, brought the story to mind. We were talking about whether “political realities” demanded what my correspondent describes as a move toward the center by Democratic presidential candidates and I describe as bailing out on or diluting Democratic positions in order to tag along behind an increasingly out of the mainstream Republican party. And it occurred to me that in this realm, he’s a member of the reality-based community and I’m in the position of aspiring to that extra-territorial position Rove, or whoever it was, claimed in the Suskind story.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from Suskind:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

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.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”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.”

That’s a pretty radical position, and one you wouldn’t think had been manufactured from whole cloth even by an administration high on an overdose of “911 changed everything.” So where did it come from? What gave Rove the confidence to think that the administration could create reality?

One possibility is that they’d tried it already and it worked; that the global success would be modeled along the lines of a more local one. And if there’s one arena in which Republicans have unquestionably succeeded in changing reality, or at least disguising it so thoroughly that it’s no longer recognizable as reality, it’s politics.

An entire political industry has been built around the notion that a century’s sometimes headlong and sometimes halting movement toward a more progressive society was slowed and then reversed beginning with Richard Nixon’s election because Americans have grown more conservative and no longer support the traditionally Democratic party policies that would continue the progressive trend.

Well, it ain’t so. The Republican party has become more conservative, radically so, but their electoral success arises from a combination of organizational strength, propaganda expertise, Democratic party disorder and the structural advantages enjoyed by Congressional incumbents of both parties rather than from a national embrace of conservative principles or values.

The evidence for this is pretty clear. Pick any two issues, one from the “values” column and one from the policy column, and the odds range from good to overwhelming that the Republican position on both will poll less strongly than the traditionally Democratic one. Americans, for instance, still support legalized abortion and still prefer higher taxes to cuts in social programs despite thirty years of Republican yowling on both issues. Gay marriage wasn’t even on the gaydar thirty years ago; now, the prospect has culture warriors so worked up that they want to amend the Constitution to prevent it, they’re using their own vice president’s lesbian daughter as a fundraising gimmick and they can’t even get a majority of their own party to go along with it.

Look at the polling on “values.” Majorities say that sex out of wedlock is morally acceptable; that having a baby out of wedlock is morally acceptable; that divorce is morally acceptable. The country remains split on the morality of abortion but continues to support the legality of it. A substantial minority (44%) think homosexual relations are morally acceptable. A substantial majority say the “overall state of moral values” in the US is either fair, good or excellent. Republicans invented the culture wars, they’re losing them, but they’re widely perceived to be the moral arbiters of our time.

Take another example, health care: a majority of voters support some form of universal health care coverage and are willing to pass up tax cuts to pay for it. 100% of Congressional Republicans oppose such a policy. Who’s out of the mainstream? Is it even remotely rational to suggest Democrats need to move toward the Republican position to capture the votes of people who reject that position?

Yet that’s what’s happening. Republicans have created a reality in which the party most closely associated with positions supported by majorities of voters is the one widely thought to be out of the mainstream. And Democratic leaders, along with the press, are studying that reality — “judiciously, as you will” — and reacting to it.

All of that isn’t to say that Democrats don’t suffer from an inability to make a convincing case to 51% of voters that theirs is the party most likely to do best by the country; just that the problem isn’t the result of fringe positions. Anyone who works for a living and eats, breathes, grows old or gets sick will benefit more from Democratic governance than from Republican.

So it’s no wonder Suskind’s official thought the administration could create new realities abroad. They did it here, and we’re still living in it.