The night of Nov. 6, a powerful schism that has run through the collective American psyche for far too long was shown to run deeper than many of us would like to admit. I’m not talking about the partisan divide of Republican and Democrat. I’m not even talking, exclusively, about the ongoing liberal v. conservative battle for the American heart. I’m talking about the schism of reality and non-reality. This is something one would assume to be a very stark divide but which seems to become embarrassingly muddled when it comes to topics sensitive in nature, such as politics.
As we saw Barack Obama re-elected President of the United States, we also saw the rather comic-tragic denial of this unanimously declared victory by one Karl Rove of Fox News. The footage of Rove’s insistence that Romney was still in the running despite the decisive numbers coming from his own people’s decision desk, with Megan Kelly hilariously accusing him of doing “math that makes you feel better as a Republican,” has since gone viral and has been lampooned tirelessly.
There is a larger issue at stake here, which Rachel Maddow pointed out in her election coverage on MSNBC: the denial of facts, the stubborn refusal to concede when reality has hit you upside the head, is a dangerous quality both for the media and for the American people. Prior to the election, polling clearly indicated that Obama was indeed likely to win.
Despite this, multiple conservative commentators boldly projected a Romney victory and not by a small margin. The words “landslide” and “historic” were used, and with such brazenness you would have thought the pundits to be privy to some secret the rest of the world was too stupid to see. Rush Limbaugh even admitted that his prediction was in denial of hard evidence, stating, “everything — except the polls — points to a Romney landslide.”
The larger issue is the denial of truth as a form of self-medication. What happened on election night is a microcosm of something very universal and very human: the incredible capacity that we have to ignore reality when it makes us uncomfortable. We all lie to ourselves in some way or another.
We do it to make ourselves feel better, but more importantly, we do it to reaffirm our preconceived beliefs that we cling to so tightly. Rather than re-assessing the way we view the world or questioning whether our perception could be slightly off, we would rather distort reality to fit the immovable frame through which we view it.
In some cases, this tendency is relatively harmless. While we may be doing ourselves a disservice by shutting ourselves in a dream world and refusing to confront reality head-on, we’re most likely not hurting anyone else.
When it comes to politics, however, the denial of truth can have negative ramifications, as Maddow pointed out. As individuals with opposing views, we won’t agree on everything. But if we can’t even bring ourselves to recognize facts as facts and allow hard empirical data to be the basis of our reasoning, how can we possibly hope to engage in constructive discourse that could breed compromise and even viable solutions to real problems?
We have all at times made the effort, conscious or not, to avoid listening to anyone and anything that opposes our fervently held beliefs because we are terrified of our worldview being turned on its head.
If we truly care about finding solutions to the problems this country faces, we need to take the first step of holding ourselves accountable for seeing things as they are and not as we would like them to be. If we don’t start taking the responsibility to deal with reality, however painful, then we cannot expect to address the very real issues that may exist outside of our self-built fantasies.
