When Wingnut Prophecy Fails
As polling shows McCain falling farther behind and his campaign’s message floating farther and farther off any track which resonates with the American Public, Wingnuttia is awash in cognitive dissonance. Wizbang:
The polls are wrong this year, very wrong. I have been saying this for months, and I have backed up my claim with both statistical and anecdotal support. The claims I have made have inspired some, caused others to laugh in derision, and brought others to test their assumptions and revisit the hard data. Along the way, there have been a lot of questions about how and why the polls could be wrong. The most common complaint, is that for all of the polls to be wrong, there would need to be some sort of conspiracy, or else an incredibly stupid decision made across the board. Well, I am not a big believer in conspiracies, but I do think that the polling groups have fallen into a groupthink condition. I wrote earlier about the fact that of the major polling groups handling national and state polls, all of them are based deep in pro-Liberal, anti-Conservative territories.
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What I think is happening, is this - the polls’ headquarters were based deep in liberal territory, where the assumption was that Obama’s candidacy would actually create a groundswell of pro-democrat voters unseen in the country since 1932. That McCain is more experienced with the key issues than Obama was ignored, that the historical significance of the debates shows that the effects appear several weeks later was also ignored. That the economy could be as reasonably blamed on the democrat-controlled Congress as on the republican President was never considered. That character would be a salient factor in the decisions of voters was rejected out of hand.
The polls are wrong. Make your own mind up, because your vote will matter.
From the Wikipedia entry for When Prophecy Fails, the classic study of emerging cognitive dissonance in a UFO cult where its belief system grew stronger even as massive evidence of the failure of the cult’s belief system and all it’s predictions accumulated.
Festinger stated that five conditions must be met, if someone is to become more fervent in a belief even after its disconfirmation:
* A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.
* The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
* The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
* Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
* The first two of these conditions specify the circumstances that will make the belief resistant to change. The third and fourth conditions together, on the other hand, point to factors that would exert powerful pressure on a believer to discard his belief. It is, of course, possible that an individual, even though deeply convinced of a belief, may discard it in the face of unequivocal disconfirmation. We must therefore, state a fifth condition specifying the circumstances under which the belief will be discarded and those under which it will be maintained with new fervor.
* The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence we have specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or to persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.
The Batshit Crazy Right has had 8 years to indulge in the various fantasies of Republican neoconservatism: a) ushering in pro-Western democracy in Iraq via military intervention, b) defeating al Qaeda decisively by expanding military conflicts in the Middle East, c) making America’s economy prosper beyond our wildest dreams through deregulation coupled with tax breaks for top income levels, d) the unbridled triumph of American militarism and neo-colonialism abroad, and e) the decisive capture of power by a permanent majority of radical social conservatives in American national politics.
None of the above things have occurred or are even remotely likely to occur under neoconservative policies, and yet the BCR cannot admit the failure of its ideology, even amid a Tsunami — or a category 5 hurricane — of disconfirmatory evidence.
Even as the McCain campaign degenerates into fit of off-message name-calling, robo-calls and $150,000 Nieman Marcus/Saks bills for its putative middle-class hockey mom of a Vice Presidential candidate, the mounting evidence of epic failure — the growing disaster looming in polls — has to be somehow refuted by the flimsiest of arguments: if the large polling companies, even those largely funded by Republicans, would only move their offices from New York to Wasilla, the polls would all show the impending McCain victory and reaffirm the efficacy of patently disastrous Neoconservative policies.
