The survey also found that Bush supporters have “numerous misperceptions” about the president’s positions. Majorities incorrectly believe that Bush backs the Kyoto global-warming treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the treaty banning land mines.
A majority of Bush backers (57 percent) also believe most people in the world favor Bush’s re-election, contrary to the findings of several polls.” (Mercury News )
The conclusion drawn by the pollsters, that partisan positions shape perceptions of reality and that Democrats and Republicans have “separate views of reality”, is fairly trivial and perennial. (“You can’t argue about politics”, the saying has always gone.) To live in the shared reality of a society is always to live in a “cultural trance”, but what is important is the current breadth of the discrepancy. It takes a dramatic extent of self-deception to support the misadministration’s position and, as psychotherapists who believe that self-improvement lies largely in recognizing and countering one’s self-deceptions know, it is important to recognize how we have gotten here. On the part of the believers, the “resistance to information” revealed in the polls has alot to do with the potent need to maintain the emotional bonding forged with the president after 9-11 and the need to avoid the cognitive dissonance which would arise from realizing that supporting him is based on a series of lies. Other trends, of course, have contributed too — including the abdication of their roles by the watchdog media and the contemptible timidity of the opposition until reelection season — to the development of an unprecedented credulity and collective attention deficit on the part of the American electorate. On the part of the misadministration, I am convinced that their willingness to deliberately mislead has been unprecedented in politics during my lifetime. (And, yes, I knows, Clinton deliberately lied about his philandering, but I am talking about the decisions of governance here.) Awakening from the cultural trance, painfully tolerating the cognitive dissonance, reexamining deeply-seated beliefs, and rejecting mainpulation by lies and the politics of terror, are particularly important now. And there are signs that it is happening among enough former Bush supporters to make a difference.
For example, here are 42 interviews famed documentarian Errol Morris filmed with ’00 Bush supporters who are voting for Kerry in ’04. (My friend and sometime FmH contributor abby was behind the camera on Morris’ shoot.)
Related: Sucking America Dry; losing America’s birthright, the George Bush way:
