Village denial: they want to believe that everyone is wrong but them.

Village denial

by digby

If you need proof that the Village consensus exists, just ponder the fact that this is the only Sunday show that has booked these two highly respected, establishment political theorists:

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These aren’t crazy partisan bloggers or talk radio hosts flogging ghost written books. These are people who are usually all over the TV with their projects talking to the likes of Andrea Mitchell and Fareed Zakaria and Charlie Rose and Wolf Blitzer. They have sterling reputations and have always been taken seriously.

This time: crickets. They can’t get booked.

Anyway, the above discussion is good, as is this piece by Chris Mooney who is getting much the same reaction from the Villagers for his new book The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality. He explains:

The so-called “mainstream” media—the CNNs of the world—have shied away from the subject.

What’s up with this? Well, a book with conclusions closely related to mine—Norman Ornstein’s and Thomas Mann’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism —seems as though it is being handled similarly by some in the press. And perhaps there’s a reason: Centrist (aka “mainstream”) journalists might well prefer that the findings of these books not be true.

You see, if I’m wrong, then the press can happily go on doing what it has always done: Splitting the difference between the political left and the political right, and employing “on the one hand, on the other hand” treatments that presume we’re all equally biased, all equally self-interested…just in different directions.

The trouble is, I’ve presented a substantial body of scientific evidence suggesting that this simply isn’t the case. More specifically, the science I’ve presented suggests that the political right and left are quite different animals; that they perceive the world differently and handle evidence differently; and most importantly, that the polarization and the denial of science in modern American politics are fundamentally the fault of the authoritarian right. (Mann and Ornstein argue something very similar about today’s Republican Party.)

In other words, if my book is right, we have to discard much that we thought we knew about politics. If the science of political ideology is right, then the ground shifts beneath us.

It is very natural, then, that a lot of people—centrist journalists perhaps most of all–don’t want to accept what I’m saying. The problem is, where is the scientific counterargument to what I’m saying?

There isn’t one, I’m afraid. And that makes the he said/she said/both sides do it Villagers very uncomfortable. So uncomfortable, in fact, that they are figuratively putting their fingers in their ears and singing “tell me lies, tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies”.

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