Confirmation bias, magical thinking and ignorance of glaringly obvious reality don’t just exist inside the GOP.

The oh-so-smart people in charge of the Democratic party are all listening to studies like this one, produced by the Third Way quacks, who are dogged in their determination to prove that the Clintonian way of governing as Republican-lite WILL WORK DAMMIT, JUST GIVE IT TIME!

You don’t have to handle the truth if you squeeze your eyes shut and stop up your ears.

They traveled around Western Wisconsin. This is an area I know well. I grew up there. My relatives still live there. I talk to them every goddam week.

And yet … and yet … the researchers for Third Way went there, talked to the angry, embittered people, and emerged with glowing kumbaya happy-talk that all was well, and everyone is just itching to hug each other and shake hands across the aisle.

A sample:

The researchers I rode with had dived into the heart of America with the best of intentions and the openest of minds. They believed that their only goal was to emerge with a better understanding of their country. And yet the conclusions they drew from what they heard corresponded only roughly to what I heard. Instead, they seemed to revert to their preconceptions, squeezing their findings into the same old mold. It seems possible, if not likely, that all the other delegations of earnest listeners are returning with similarly comforting, selective lessons. If the aim of such tours is to find new ways to bring the country together, or new political messages for a changed electorate, the chances of success seem remote as long as even the sharpest researchers are only capable of seeing what they want to see.

This article in the Atlantic talks about how the researchers were smacked in the face by the facts. That people are angry, and getting angrier. That nobody wants to work with people who they consider to be the Scum Of The Earth.

Fantasy. Pure fucking wish-on-a-star fantasy. It will kill us all.

There is even a scene in which this realization hits the researcher … who then conveniently chooses to ignore this obvious revelation in order to churn out $20 million worth of fantasy that comports with what the rich, entitled Donor Class of the Democratic party so very much wants to believe.

It was after this exchange that Hale, after she and Watson got back into the Yukon to debrief, as they did after every session in order to compose their eventual after-action report, had to stop and vent. Her problem wasn’t that people were wrong. She had managed to maintain her equanimity while hearing other groups express opinions she disagreed with. It was that they didn’t want to get along.

“I have so much hope, and it’s gotten kind of shaken from both ends, you know?” she said. “There’s an, I don’t know, blue-sky part of me that was like, ‘I’m going to go traveling around the country and see that we’re more about commonalities than differences, that we’re more about our desire to be together than to be separate.’ And I’m not saying that isn’t true. I’m just saying every once in a while it gets kicked in the ass.”