Today's Conservatism Has Lost Touch with Reality

Fareed Zakaria has a piece in Time magazine that looks at today's conservative and analyzes how it has lost touch with reality. A situation that is in stark contrast to the old school type of conservatism that I grew up with and which used to pride itself on objective fact and reality. Personally, I attribute part of the decline in rationality to the rise of far right Christians within the GOP. Their entire "Biblical world view" is untethered from objective reality and scientific fact. Throw in the more ignorant elements of the Tea Party and the problem becomes exacerbated. The other factor, of course, is the fact that those in leadership positions in the GOP - who certainly knew or should have known better - chose short term expedience over what was best long term for the GOP and the nation. Now, ignorance and wild theories that sound almost drug induced are embraced and fact and reason are flushed down the toilet. Here are highlights from Zakaria's article:
*
Conservatism, he [George Will] explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.
*
Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.
*
The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.
*
[R]ight now any discussion of government involvement in the economy — even to build vital infrastructure — is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad. Meanwhile, across the globe, the world's fastest-growing economy, China, has managed to use government involvement to create growth and jobs for three decades. From Singapore to South Korea to Germany to Canada, evidence abounds that some strategic actions by the government can act as catalysts for free-market growth.
*
Of course, American history suggests that as well. But that history has been forgotten. When considering health care, for example, Republicans confidently assert that their ideas will lower costs, when we simply do not have much evidence for this.
. . . . We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don't bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience.
*
Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals.
*
Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?
*
We need conservative ideas to modernize the U.S. economy and reform American government. But what we have instead are policies that don't reform but just cut and starve government — a strategy that pays little attention to history or best practices from around the world and is based instead on a theory. It turns out that conservatives are the woolly-headed professors after all.