Reason or folklore?

In the New York Times this week, columnist and Nobel prize winner, Paul Krugman, looks at the Republican Party's recent behaviour and wonders if or when they will grow up and stop being crazy.

The Republicans have been holding anti-taxation "tea parties" because it looks like the new Obama Administration will allow the Bush cuts of 2001 to expire on December 31st, 2010 and return to their former levels. The Bush tax cuts, which mainly benefited the top 1% of taxpayers, were never sustainable and lead immediately to huge fiscal deficits that have grown more or less year on year. Besides, as Krugman points out, the pre-Bush, 2000 tax rates were still 10% less than top taxpayers were paying when Republicans' beloved president, Ronald Reagan, was in the White House.

Krugman cites several other examples of apparent craziness: evolution denying, Rush Limbaugh toadying and Republican claims that President Obama is a "socialist" who wants to destroy capitalism.

Krugman ends by hoping the Republicans will get past this crazy phase before they see power again.

I think that is a forlorn hope. Krugman himself acknowledge and provides examples of Republican craziness going back 15 years. I see no reason why their supporters, already beyond the  reach of verifiable reality, should return to its embrace.


I've learned that you can't argue rationally with belief. Belief is emotional, not factual. There would be no religion if people were rational about believing things without any evidence and reality. Republicans, as the party of belief and evolution and many other things  that fly in the face of verifiable reality, will not be changing and Krugman's hopes that they will are almost certain to be disappointed. 

The era we are in now is a contest between verifiable reality and folklore. Reason is in danger of being overturned and we risk being cast backward into some new Dark Age, whether Islamic or Christian or both. Bot are the enemy of reason and seek to overturn reality.