Bruce Bartlett is a name well-known in conservative circles. He
drafted President Reagan’s notable tax cut legislation, worked for the
Treasury department under the first President Bush, and even wrote the
book on “Supply Side Economics.”
He made the declaration that “Keynesian economics is dead.” He has
worked for the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute. He has written
for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily, the New York Sun,
along with dozens more conservative newspapers. He worked hard for the
campaigns of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ron Paul. He is the
conservatives conservative. And in the December edition of The American Conservative” he came out swinging … against the modern conservative movement and Republican party.
In his article, titled Revenge of the Reality-Based Community: My life on the Republican right—and how I saw it all go wrong”
he dissects, then tears down the foundation of lies upon which the
modern GOP now operate. When he dared raise any criticism against the
second Bush administration, rightly noting that the tax policies and
ballooning spending were the antithesis of conservative ideals, he was
ignored. He ran articles and wrote books detailing out mistakes, which
were widely disseminated in the mainstream media, but none of it sank in
to conservative groups. He kept calling out the warning bells, that
they were going to be handed their posteriors in the 2006 and 2008
elections, and yet, nobody listened. Curious, he began to study why.
What he, and other alarm ringers, found was that the modern conservative
movement, and the Republican party as a whole, are suffering from what
is called “epistemic closure.”
In simple terms, they created an echo chamber, a bubble within which
they could recite and be reinforced by their own comments. Divorced from
reality, think tanks become propaganda machines, no longer developing
new idea, mired with their old, rehashed concepts.
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