Marc Ambinder: Gingrich Further Enables the Right's Flight From Reality

[Marc Ambinder is the politics editor of The Atlantic. He has covered Washington for ABC News and the Hotline, and he is chief political consultant to CBS News. Follow him on Twitter @marcambinder]

My Friday column weighing in on the issue of epistemic closure on the right, and the flight of conservatives from empirical reality, has provoked fast, angry, and often personal rebukes. So far, the misreadings are legion. Of course there are Republicans with good ideas and conservative leaders with reasonable positions on public policy. But with increasing frequency, even well pedigreed Republican intellectuals such as Newt Gingrich stoop to unhinged rhetoric, either because they fear being marginalized by the base, or specifically because they're trying to curry favor in anticipation of a presidential run. Gingrich's apologetics are particularly powerful, because he lends legitimacy to charges that are, on their face, illegitimate.

Take his response to an April 14 Norm Ornstein op-ed in the Washington Post. Ornstein was befuddled by the notion that anyone with a sense of history could possibly call the collective actions of the Obama administration"socialist." Gingrich's op-ed on April 22 set out to make the case that the adjective is appropriate -- as, he says, are other adjectives, such as"machine" in relation to the type of politics practiced by the White House, and"secular" as a way of describing what Gingrich sees as a pervasive attitude among Obama and his elite pals....

Let's take some of the charges one-by-one....

"Socialist": Creating czar positions to micromanage industry reflects the type of hubris of centralized government that Friedrich von Hayek and George Orwell warned against.

This one is easy. The czars were misnamed by some cheeky White House official early on, and the appellation does not refer to the power of these positions. In fact, it's more accurate to refer to them as program managers. They don't have nearly the authority that Gingrich implies.

Secular: Describing America's promise as a"secular country that is respectful of religious freedom," as Obama did last April, is an act of willful historical revisionism.

So is Gingrich's misquote. The country evolved over 200 years into a secular democracy that contains multitudes of highly religious people, whose beliefs and practices are significant aspects of its political culture.