But an insistence on purity cuts both ways. It pushed GOP officials into a dialectic with their voters, one that replaced the the Party’s earlier engagement with modern history. As Republican doctrine became increasingly right-wing, so did its support among the electorate. Liberals and moderates largely fled, becoming Independents or Democrats. Each turn of this screw produced a Party more dependent than ever on its most radical elements, which of course simply drove it toward wilder rhetoric and harsher policies. The Southern Strategy worked, if anything, too well. The GOP’s effort to capitalize on the mid-Sixties disaffection of Southern whites made it into a Party largely alienated from everyone else. In the 2012 election, the South accounted for 70 percent of Mitt Romney’s electoral votes.
It also left the GOP at the mercy of the peculiar habits, cognitive and cultural, of its purified, sanitized “base.” For these voters, as the events of the summer made clear — the rise of Trump and Carson, the sacking first of John Boehner and then of his hapless hand-picked successor, Kevin McCarthy — have little if any attachment to the Republican Party as an institution. Their contempt for the GOP “establishment” could not be more obvious. (A generation back, most of them were Democrats.) What matters to them is their ideology, an ideology based on a wholesale rejection of the social changes wrought by modernity. Simply put, they despise the modern vision of a society in which distinctions based on race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, have no place. On their view, these distinctions between persons are etched into the fabric of the world itself by the world’s author, God. To ignore them, to try to build a social world without them, is both hubristic and perverse. It is, quite literally, heresy.
The GOP base no longer looks to history for instruction. It doesn’t ask itself how to adapt conservatism to the modern world; it asks how it can adapt the modern world to its version of conservatism. That world it regards as hopelessly fallen, as so much detritus to be swept away. This is the explanation for the indifference to — if not contempt for — evidence and empiricism that Saletan so clearly perceives. A “fact” about the world ceases to matter when one rejects that world and regards it as little more than a shadow, an unnatural lure contrived by secular-humanist conspirators. Why take an interest in the “evidence” gathered from such a place? What authority could it possibly have?
Doubtless there is a large measure of opportunism behind the Republican candidates’ complaints about the CNBC moderators and the “lamestream” media generally. Given the chance, what politician would not prefer less scrutiny to more? But the chance was created by the anti-modern rage of the GOP base, which is perfectly sincere and not at all opportunist. If a “fact” has no more force than the reality it describes, then a questioner has only as much authority as the facts he or she marshals. The rest of us may regard the CNBC moderators as trying — always imperfectly, but genuinely trying — to speak truthfully about a world we all share. But the Republican base rejects this as a sham. No truths can be dredged from the muck of modernity. What looks like a question is really an attempt to assert a spurious reality, conspiracy disguising itself as objectivity.
After the 2012 election, much was made of the curiously hermetic quality of today’s GOP — its retreat into a “bubble” in which the Republican faithful listen only to themselves. Who can forget the sight of Karl Rove on election night descending into the bowels of Fox News, certain that the election was not really decided in favor of Barack Obama, only to run headlong into the stubborn empiricism of Fox’s statisticians and researchers? Rove’s judgments were mistaken, Fox anchor Megyn Kelly chided, just something “you tell yourself as a Republican to make yourself feel better.” If 2015 has taught us anything, it’s that more and more Republicans are incapable of appreciating the distinction.
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