Reagan started the slur against the "reality based community". Great Thomas Frank article.

[Hamlette]

. . . here are the words of Ronald Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, as recorded in one of the main Reagan strategy documents from 1980: "People act on the basis of their perception of reality; there is, in fact, no political reality beyond what is perceived by the voters."

The context of Wirthlin's reality-denial, according to the historian Kim Phillips-Fein, who unearths his statement in her forthcoming book, "Invisible Hands," was the larger Republican plan to woo blue-collar voters.

The mission was a success. It worked because Republicans wholeheartedly adopted Wirthlin's dictum. Reality is a terrible impediment when you're reaching out to workers while simultaneously cracking down on unions and scheming to privatize Social Security. Leave that reality to the "reality-based community," to use the put-down coined by an aide to George W. Bush.

The "perception of reality," on the other hand, is an amazing political tonic, and with it conservatives have cemented a factproof worldview of lasting power. It is simply this: Conservatives are authentic and liberals are not. The country is divided into a land of the soulful, hard-working producers and a land of the paper-pushing parasites; a plain-spoken heartland and the sinister big cities, where they breed tricky characters like Barack Obama, all "eloquence," as John McCain sneered in last week's presidential debate, but hard to pin down.

snip (he explained how odd Joe the Plumber is as GOP supporter considering his income and how poorly his town/state have fared under the GOP economy and he ends with:

Here is the key to this whole strange episode: Government is artifice and imposition, a place of sexless bureaucrats and brie-eating liberals whose every touch contaminates God's work. Markets, by contrast, are natural, the arena in which real people prove their mettle. After all, as Mr. McCain said on Monday, small businessmen are just "Joe the Plumbers, writ large." Markets carry a form of organic authenticity that mere reality has no hope of touching.

This is not a good time for market-based authenticity, however. It now seems that those real, natural Americans who make markets go also cook the books, and cheat the shareholders, and hire lobbyists to get their way in Washington. They invent incomprehensible financial instruments and have now sent us into a crisis that none of them has any idea how to solve.

If that's nature, I'm ready for civilization.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122463199532056477.html

[No Elephants]

1. Sounds a little like Goebbels and Dr,. Phil at the same time. One of the chapters

in Dr. Phil's book is titled, "There's No Reality, Only Perception." Or something very close to that. Thanks. Good article.

[kenny blankenship]

2. K&R

Imagine how you'd feel if you'd been asleep in a coma for 30 years. Bewildered? Cheated of life? Angry? Now imagine a nation of 300 million emerging from a 30 year coma...

[bluedawg12]

3. I read it as a slam against secularism. They made hay with that

whole notion, calling the former counter culture youth movement as being based on the "me" generation.

The other side of that coin was "faith based" in contrast to "my own reality based."

They are great at this game....or were...like the "blue sky initiative" or "friendly forests initiative" all doing the opposite of their repig name--fouling skies and clear cutting forests.

Remember shrub one's thousand points of light, that was an exhortation to play on private philanthropy instead of government to help those in need.

In another words, get rid of social safety nets and go begging to "faith based" groups who would in turn be the gate keepers of private donations.

Nice. One would have to pass a litmus test with Falwell for social welfare.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. In the Wall Street Journal, what's more

Are they deserting the sinking ship too? That last highlighted paragraph in the excerpt isn't exactly standard WSJ editorial stuff.