Douthat on the conservative cocoon

Ross tries valiantly to explain reality to Mark Steyn. Excerpt:

Just to clarify: Sarah Palin's Alaska is not the conservative cocoon. Neither is Tim Pawlenty's Minnesota, or Mike Huckabee's Arkansas, or any other place out in flyover country where a populist conservative became a popular and successful governor. The cocoon is the constellation of mutually-reinforcing conservative institutions - think tanks and advocacy groups, talk-radio shows and websites - that can create the same echo-chamber effect that the liberal media has long produced, and that at times makes it difficult for the Right to grapple with reality. The cocoon is the place where it took an awfully, awfully long time for conservatives to admit that the post-2004 crisis in Iraq wasn't just a matter of an MSM that wouldn't report the good news. The cocoon is the place where conservatives persuaded themselves, in defiance of most of the evidence, that the reason the GOP lost Congress in 2006 was excessive spending, and especially excessive pork. And today, the cocoon is the place where conservatives are busy convincing themselves that Sarah Palin's difficulties handling high-profile media appearances aren't terribly important, that her instincts are more important than her grasp of national policy, and that the best way to defeat Barack Obama is to start with the lines that Palin has used on the stump - Ayers, anti-Americanism and ACORN - and take them to eleven.

This is correct, and necessary. I would add that conversations I've had over the past couple of weeks with grassroots conservatives around here are kind of breathtaking in their denial of reality. I have heard conservatives talk about how all the polls are wrong, that the "silent majority" will be heard from, that Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric are evil for making Sarah Palin look bad, etc. And that anyone who claims to be a conservative who disputes any of this is a traitor to the cause. I still get that talking to some conservatives about the Iraq War. When Sarah Palin was interviewed at Ground Zero a few weeks back and said, "We have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here," I would have laughed that people are still using that worn-out cliche ... except I still do hear it from time to time among diehard Bush backers.

We have seen this sort of thing before, among liberals who could not grasp that ordinary people actually liked Ronald Reagan and the Reaganite Republican Party. I know; I used to be one of those liberals. I had so much emotionally and psychologically invested in my politics being true that I could not imagine why people disagreed -- except that they had been bamboozled, or were wicked.

I had a conversation not too long ago with a young Republican Party activist here in Dallas County, which is transitioning to Democratic rule. He was telling me that the county GOP is on life support. Young people like him, this man is finding, really aren't interested in the party, by and large. And the party regulars are aging, and don't see any reason to change their ways or their views. It's like they're frozen in the 1980s, waiting for the resurrection of Ronald Reagan -- this, despite the fact that the world has changed immensely since Reagan first won. The world that produced Ronald Reagan is no longer with us (thanks in part to Reagan's successes). Some of these Republicans today remind me of old-fashioned Democrats when I was younger, who consoled themselves with the false narrative that there was nothing wrong with them and the way they saw the world and reacted to it. That the only reason people weren't voting Democratic was because they were stupid, racist, greedy, or had been tricked. This young Republican Party activist with whom I spoke here in Dallas sees the need for the party to change, and to be rebuilt. He told me, for example, that the older generation has no clue about how much environmental issues mean to younger generations of conservatives. And you can't get the older GOP folks, who are still power-holders, to pay attention. Reality is too threatening to their settled worldview.

The conservative cocoon doesn't just exist inside the activist-opinion journalist-politician-think tank network in the Washington-New York corridor. Still, I wonder from time to time whether it wouldn't do a magazine of conservative opinion good to establish itself in the heartland somewhere, so it wouldn't be so intensely focused on politics -- as if party politics, Congress, the presidency, the judiciary and economic theory were the sum total of all conservative endeavor. I dunno, maybe The American Spectator needs to move back to Bloomington. Maybe National Review should leave Manhattan and relocate to Dallas. Maybe the Weekly Standard should headquarter itself in Denver. What do you think?