The Republican Flight into Fantasy

The GOP enjoys real political advantages from ceasing to confront the recalcitrance of reality

US Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida questions Attorney General Merrick Garland during a hearing of the House Committee on the Judiciary oversight of the US Department of Justice, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, September 20, 2023. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

I remember when I first noticed Republican politicians sounding like they hailed from a wholly different reality from the one in which my neighbors, family, and I resided.

I can’t recall exactly what prompted the thought, though I know it was during one of the GOP primary debates of 2012. I had it many more times over the next few years, as Congress devoted countless hours, over months that stretched into years, to investigating an unfortunate but relatively minor breach of the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya that led to four deaths. Then, in the background, testing the waters for a presidential run, there was Donald Trump, insisting, without evidence, that the birth certificate of the sitting president of the United States was forged, making it look like he was born in the U.S., when, in fact, he was born abroad and thus ineligible to occupy the office of the presidency.

At the time, I remember thinking that the Republican Party was going off the rails. More than once I was struck dumb reading the news, left with nothing but disbelief that took the form of a single recurring thought: WTF are they even talking about?

While the Democrats, for all of their faults, struggled to address the country’s problems, respond to the needs and demands of their constituents and activists, and improve the lives of ordinary Americans, Republicans seemed to have decided that they would respond by … simply changing the subject. To what? Anything they could think of that might make the Democrats look bad, Republican voters thirsty for blood, and independent voters panic about the country collapsing into chaos.  

This week I found myself pondering that period roughly ten years ago because several things happening over the past few days confirmed certain things about the political world that first began to emerge back then. Not only do the two parties reside in entirely separate cognitive realities, and not only is the Republican “reality” more accurately described as a fantasy world conjured up and manipulated by right-wing media outlets and the party’s elected officials. (Both of those observations are commonplace by now.) More crucially, Republicans enjoy real political advantages from having taken their leave from the constraints that prevail and the trade-offs that are necessitated by engaging with a recalcitrant material world.   

I will invoke three illustrative examples of what I’m talking about, one a relatively big story, the other two comparatively trivial.   

Example 1: Biden, Trump, and the UAW Strike