Research has supposedly shown that conservatives are more loyal than liberals. I suspect that the problem is a bias in the object of loyalty. Conservatives may be more loyal to their tribe, while liberals are more loyal to their ideals.
In any case, conservatives have certainly proven loyalty to their favored lies and the liars who continue to propagate them long after they've been conclusively refuted:
Not long ago, if you told a whopper like [Sarah] Palin's and it was as thoroughly debunked as hers was, that would have ended the discussion. These days, it is barely even part of the discussion. These days, facts seem overmatched by falsehood, too slow to catch them, too weak to stop them.
Indeed, falsehoods are harder to kill than a Hollywood zombie. Run them through with fact, and still they shamble forward, fueled by echo chamber media, ideological tribalism, cognitive dissonance, a certain imperviousness to shame, and an understanding that a lie repeated long enough, loudly enough, becomes, in the minds of those who need to believe it, truth.
That is the lesson of the birthers and truthers, of Sen. Jon Kyl's "not intended to be a factual statement" about Planned Parenthood, of Glenn Beck's claim that conservatives founded the Civil Rights Movement, and of pretty much every word Michele Bachmann says. It seems that not only are facts no longer important, but they are not even the point.
Rather, the point is the construction and maintenance of an alternate narrative designed to enhance and exploit the receiver's fears, his or her sense of prerogatives, entitlement, propriety and morality under siege from outside forces.The strangest aspect of persistent lying is that it exacts no penalty from the credibility of the liars. In a nation with truth as a social norm, Palin, Beck, Kyl, and Bachmann would long since have been laughed out of the national conversation.
Because wingnuts clamor to be lied to and the media no longer care about anything other than eyeballs on their ads, we are a nation on the path to failure. It may already be too late to rescue the greatness of America from its self-professedly loyal destroyers.
Living a lie will do that to you.
