Selection of Ryan as VP is latest proof of GOP move away from reality.

…More and more, Republicans have exhibited a strong desire to take up residence in an imaginary world, an alternate reality—one in which global warming is found to be a fraud perpetrated by the world’s top scientists, Obama turns out to have been born in Kenya and is a Muslim (and a socialist), budgets can be slashed without social pain, firing government employees reduces unemployment, tax cuts for the wealthy replenish government coffers, and so forth. Perhaps it seems odd to identify such an objective as a political goal, but past ideological movements of the left as well as the right offer many examples of the power of such a longing.

Conscientious fact-checkers in the media have rebutted individual items that make up the GOP’s factitious universe. Such efforts are always worthwhile but are likely to backfire with the believers. When ideology takes over from reality, fantasy is not a disadvantage for the believers; it is the source of appeal. The deceptions are then popular not in spite of their untruthfulness but precisely because of it. When the target of the insurrection is not only some hated rival or establishment but the factual universe, with all its unwelcome restrictions and psychological burdens, then the more flagrant the violation of truth, the keener the thrill.

Often, the will to power and the will to fantasy go together. As the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century discovered, the two can reinforce one another. Such seemed to be the explicit ambition of President George W. Bush’s adviser Karl Rove when, at one giddy moment at the height of the Iraq War, he famously said that the Bush administration had delivered a coup de grâce to nothing less than “the reality-based community,” for “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create reality.” It was a classic statement of the totalitarian logic of the propaganda artist in power. What better way to win support for propaganda than to abolish the reality that contradicts it? Rove’s boast was premature, but his logic was clear: If we don’t like the real world, we can do away with it…