Senator Ted Cruz tells us that net neutrality would slow down the Internet like the Affordable Care Act is slowing down health care. (Two responses to Cruz's absurdity: net neutrality is not the ACA, and one survey finds appointment wait times for five health care specialties in 15 markets decreased from 20.4 days in 2009 to 18.5 days in 2013.) Senator John Thune argues the EPA is overreaching with proposed water rules that would regulate fewer bodies of water than Reagan-era rules did. Senator-Elect Mike Rounds and his friends spew ever varying yet equally bogus estimates of the investment capital and jobs produced by South Dakota's EB-5 program. Pat Powers bleats that "liberal" politics caused the Democrats' defeat last week, when a majority of South Dakotans embraced liberal politics by raising the minimum wage.
Republicans have profoundly disconnected themselves from simple truth. In a Tweet-essay (my stars, what is 21st-century language becoming?) Grist writer David Roberts calls this attitude "postmodern conservatism." America's conservatives have "systematically and progressively destroyed the very notion of a nonpartisan arbiter of information." Conservatives, says Roberts, have accepted a notion that liberals cannot: there are no facts, just competing arguments, and every dispute not a search for truth but a "contest of power" in which the "loudest, best funded, most persistent voices win."
More than twenty years ago, when I was waging rhetorical war against my multiculturalism-peddling Human Relations professors at SDSU, I thought it was liberals and Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton who would destroy America with their sinister value relativism.
I was wrong. It is Republicans who are shedding their commitment to any absolutes other than absolute power. It is Republicans who are undermining America's moral compass. It is Republicans whom we must defeat to preserve the Republic.