Dispatch from inside the bubble: Tim Duncan on the impossibility of reality

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Greensboro Guardian columnist Tim Duncan prior to the election, in predicting defeat for President Obama:

These polls [those showing an Obama lead] also serve another purpose — which is to support the meme-in-waiting among those on the Left that Romney "stole" the election.

Greensboro Guardian columnist Tim Duncan after the reelection of President Obama:

Make no mistake – this election was defrauded, and stolen, by the Democrats on a massive scale.

How does Duncan know this? Because of the polls that showed Romney with a lead. His predictions could not have been wrong, he says. They were actually, he says, based on "pretty solid" data—those being the inaccurate polls.

Information that backs up one's wishes but doesn't match reality is not pretty solid data. It's the opposite. Fool's gold. Yet, this is where Duncan plants his flag: Those polls that were wrong—those that predicted a Romney win—were reallyright and those that made accurate predictions were wrong.

To explain the incongruity between the information he really, really, really wanted to believe and reality, Duncan reaches the only possible conclusion: the election was a fraud and "Obama is not legitimately the President of the United States."

Welcome to the inside-out reality of life inside the Bubble.

Ensconced in his womb of denial, Duncan finds himself exactly where he predicted "frenetic and desperate" Democrats would be after the election, using bad polling data to justify claims of fraud. Pathetic (and frenetic and desperate).

Life in the Bubble goes beyond just being wrong a lot about a lot of things, however. It fosters a threat to American ideals. With an incomplete and inaccurate view of the world, it's easy to suppose there are two kinds of people, "us" and "them." Failing to grasp the empirical truths of the world, it's easy to remain blind to the mockery made of self-determination and to the footnotes appended to "all men are created equal" that result too often from the opinions of those immersed in intentional ignorance.

America needs better. However many good ideas one political party may have, America depends on a vigorous competition of ideas. That cannot happen if one side is sliding into intellectual atrophy. Republicans have four years to realign their party. There are steps they can take to have broader demographic appeal, but none of them will work if they continue to accommodate stupidity. They should issue an ultimatum: Think or leave.

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Related: The right wing Bubble is not an abstraction. It is manifested clearly and forcefully in the conservative media. Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic does an excellent job of explaining in How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File. An excerpt:

It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thinking; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear.

But guess what?

You haven't just been misinformed about the horse race. Since the very beginning of the election cycle, conservative media has been failing you. With a few exceptions, they haven't tried to rigorously tell you the truth, or even to bring you intellectually honest opinion. What they've done instead helps to explain why the right failed to triumph in a very winnable election.