Tenez-vous le pour dit, le candidat Mitt Romney, prétendant principal à l’investiture républicaine pour la présidentielle de 2012 et vainqueur de la primaire du New Hampshire ce mardi, est unanimement considéré comme le plus modéré des candidats de son parti.

Voici ce qu’il répète à satiété:  “Le président Obama croit que le gouvernement doit garantir aux citoyens l’égalité de revenus. Dans une société des droits acquis, chacun reçoit des gains égaux ou similaires, sans égard à l’éducation, à l’effort ou à la décision de prendre des risques. »

Bref, Obama est un socialiste. Romney n’est pas le seul candidat à travestir ainsi grossièrement la réalité. Mais puisqu’il est le plus modéré, il est intéressant de noter qu’il ne se prive pas de mentir au sujet de son adversaire.

Si vous commencez ces jours-ci à vous intéresser à la campagne présidentielle américaine, que vous écoutez les discours, les débats, les publicités des uns et des autres dans le camp républicain, vous entrerez dans un univers bizarre, parallèle, avec ses propres faits et ses propres règles. Ce n’a pas toujours été le cas.

Pour comprendre comment le Parti Républicain est entré dans cet univers, je ne puis vous recommander mieux que de lire l’article d’un républicain frustré, David Frum, publié fin-novembre dans le magazine New York sous le titre When did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality ? Canadien d’origine, Frum est un chroniqueur de droite et il fut scribe de discours pour George W. Bush. Il fut viré d’un think-thank conservateur le lendemain du jour où il a écrit que les Républicains auraient du tenter de trouver un compromis avec Obama sur l’assurance maladie. Voici quelques extraits choisis:

Sur le fait que la croyance en un Obama socialiste est fort répandue à droite:

Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration.

Sur le fait que la base républicaine a suivi dans la détestation d’Obama:

Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault!

And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief. The Bush years cannot be repudiated, but the memory of them can be discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by ACORN and the New Black Panthers.

Sur la création d’un univers parallèle où les faits conservateurs ne sont pas ceux du reste du pays:

Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority.
Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat.
Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.

Sur les politiques économiques promues par tous les candidats républicains à l’investiture:

It’s the job of conservatives in this crisis to show a better way. But it’s one thing to point out (accurately) that President Obama’s stimulus plan was mostly a compilation of antique Democratic wish lists, and quite another to argue that the correct response to the worst collapse since the thirties is to wait for the economy to get better on its own.

It’s one thing to worry (wisely) about the long-term trend in government spending, and another to demand big, immediate cuts when 25 million are out of full-time work and the government can borrow for ten years at 2 percent.

It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote.

It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that ­middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused.

Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.

Sur l’avenir du conservatisme:

There are good reasons to fear that the ebbing of Republican radicalism remains far off, even if Romney (or Huntsman) does capture the White House next year.

Triste, mais vrai.