Republicans Will NOT Change Period.

by Paul Krugman

November 10, 2012, 8:26 am12 Comments

Delusions of Reason

Brad DeLong sends me where I would normally never go — to an article on RedState, discussing what appears to have been a major case of death by consultant in the Romney campaign. It’s an interesting story — apparently they were drinking their own Kool-Aid, “unskewing” not just public polling but their own internal polls. But what struck me were some of the comments, this one in particular:



THANK YOU for bringing this to light. I’m starting to sound like a broken record here, but : DATA IS KILLING US.



We ARE the party of reason, and logic. We are the ones that actually know what we’re talking about, and stand firm. We need to run these charlatans out of town on a rail, and start over NOW. No more listening to wishful thinking polls ( *cough* Karl Rove, Scott Rassmussen *cough*). No more trusting the “elites”!



This has been a persistent delusion in certain parts of the right. Brad likes to tell the (second-hand) tale of Larry Lindsey arriving at the Council of Economic Advisers in 2001 and declaring that the people who really understood economics had arrived. A lot of 1-percent Romney supporters believed that only the unwashed masses could actually believe that Obama was making more sense on economic policy. And so on.



What’s so strange about this is that everything — everything — that has happened for the past decade has demonstrated the opposite. Modern Republicans are devotees of faith-based analysis on every front. On economics, in particular, they are devoted to supply-side fantasies that keep being refuted by evidence — and their reaction is to try to suppress the evidence. They’ve spent pretty much the whole past four years issuing dire warnings about inflation and soaring interest rates that keep not coming true; they cling to the belief that if only a Republican were in office we’d have a 1982-style recovery even though economists who actually studied past financial crises predicted the slow recovery in advance.



And don’t even get me started on climate change.



The truth is that the modern GOP is deeply anti-intellectual, and has as its fundamental goal not just a rollback of the welfare state but a rollback of the Enlightenment. Yet there are some wannabe intellectuals who delude themselves into believing that they have aligned themselves with the party of objective (as opposed to Objectivist) analysis.



You might think that the election debacle would force some reconsideration. But I doubt it; if the financial crisis didn’t do it, nothing will.



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