2012: The Year Republicans Lost their Alternative Universe

The big political news story of 2012 was not that Obama won the presidential election or that the Republicans lost. That was fairly predictable.

Think about, if you were a strong Republican contender for the highest office of the U.S. would you rather run in 2012 against Obama and inherit a weak economy or would you wait it out until 2016 when you were facing Joe Biden? And even if Hillary had the energy to run, Americans will be too tired of eight years of a Democratic White House to vote her into office.

It’s a no-brainer:  strong contenders sit this one out. So who did we get? We go the Republican psychos Santorum and Gingrich and the unelectable Mitt Romney. Unelectable? Come on, did you ever really think that Americans would elect an elitist millionaire Mormon candidate who pays less than 14% income tax when he’s been transparent about, makes $20 million a year without having a job, hides his wealth in offshore tax havens, and has taken every position imaginable on each and every issue at some point in the last 10 years.

No. Romney’s loss was not newsworthy. What was news worthy was that the GOP’s alternative universe – the one brought to you courtesy of Fox News with the support of the mainstream media insistence on giving equal weight to each side’s viewpoint no matter how absurd – finally unraveled.

So if it shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone when Romney lost, then why was Romney so “shell shocked” at his defeat?

Why was it that Republicans so vehemently attacked Nate Silver (including calling him too effeminate) who was incredibly successful in 2008? I thought it was the Democrats who hated success and merit based praise?

But in the GOP alternative universe, modern science must never trump the GOP worldview on taxes, the economy, healthcare, Climate Change, marriage equality, marijuana, immigration, or even statistics.

And as Paul Krugman has described,

. . . the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence.

The most obvious example other than evolution is man-made climate change. As the evidence for a warming planet becomes ever stronger — and ever scarier — the G.O.P. has buried deeper into denial, into assertions that the whole thing is a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists. And this denial has been accompanied by frantic efforts to silence and punish anyone reporting the inconvenient facts.

The GOP’s insularity has led them to such an isolated place that even the numbers guy Mitt was clueless of his own loss. The fact that most Americans are either living in the same isolated place is the biggest tragedy in our modern politics. We are no longer able to honestly and scientifically address the real issues that face our nation in any constructive and effective manner.

Nevertheless, the results of the elections not only validated science as practiced by little Nate Silver, they also showed that Americans were less and less susceptible to the right-wing information bubble. Same-sex marriage swept every ballot it was on as did Marijuana, and Americans didn’t buy the GOP’s argument on taxes. With Hurricane Sandy, Americans started to question the logic of digging your head in the sand on Climate Change. And everyone who bet big on Romney: Grover Norquist, Sheldon Adelson, the NRA, and even Benyamin Netanyahu all have lost big.

The jury is still out on Netanyahu – who spit in the face of comity and very publicly campaigned against the sitting President of the United States – as to whether he will pay a political price. And it appears that he has already.

So while it now seems that the GOP’s fictional tale of taxes, climate change and being in the moral majority is coming to an end, it also looks like the other shoe — guns — is also about to drop.

It’s hard to make the argument to the American people that nothing can or should be done when our kids are slaughtered in the schools when we are so quick to react to a single failed shoe bomber or in how we regulate cough medicine stronger than guns, but refuse to react after 62 mass shootings during the last 30 years with seven alone this year.

Americans may have had enough, and no matter how the GOP or the NRA want to spin it (the NRA has just called for armed guards at all schools), their days are numbered. As Timothy Egon explains:

When the Berlin Wall fell 23 years ago, what started with a couple of hammer swings against an irrational barrier quickly became an irresistible force. At such moments in history, the impossible is self-evident.

So it is in the first cracks in the two most formidable obstacles to progress on guns and taxes. Every valid poll shows that a majority of Americans favor bans on high-capacity ammunition clips and military-style assault weapons. A huge majority — 74 percent in a recent Washington Post/ABC News survey — also say it is “acceptable” to raise taxes on those making more than $250,000 a year. Yet the will of the people has been consistently thwarted. Why? Because, for a representative democracy, we’ve ceded an inordinate amount of power to a pair of unelected lobbies.

By threat and force, the gun and anti-tax extremists have been able to stop every sensible plea for reform. And by sensible, I mean a tax increase that is still less than the one Bill Clinton put through to great prosperity, and gun restrictions favored by presidents like Ronald Reagan.

Bullying is the favorite tactic of these political thugs in K Street suits, but as the last week has shown, they are also cowards. Wayne LaPierre of the N.R.A. was quick to rush to the airwaves a few weeks ago after a pro football player shot his girlfriend and himself.

“The American public is disgusted,” he said. “The American public has had their fill of what happened last night.” The violence? No. He was condemning the sportscaster Bob Costas for daring to suggest that we have a conversation about what it means to live and die in the most armed society in history.

If only, he said, gun victims had weapons of their own. Sadly, Nancy Lanza was armed to the teeth, but it couldn’t save her from her own son. The Greek tragedy of Ms. Lanza’s supplying the weapon for her murder proved once again what all the empirical evidence shows: that if you have a gun at home it’s most likely to be used on a family member or someone you know.

The N.R.A. went dark in the week after the school massacre not out of some respect for the dead children, but because it could not make, with a straight face, the absurd argument that if only little kids had been armed they could have saved themselves.

It was left to the politicians owned by the gun lobby to have us view the carnage as the price of freedom. “There’s nothing you’re going to do to prevent evil from occurring,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, a Republican of North Carolina.

So the first things to go in the crumbling of these two special-interest titans are their core arguments. Newtown is wretched proof of the utter vacuity of the gun lobby’s excuses, but every comparison to other industrial nations makes the case as well.

So 2012 may go down in the history books as the year the GOP lost more than an election: they lost taxes, moral values, climate change, statistics, and even guns. Good riddance!