One of the causes of the economic and Constitutional crisis unleashed by House Republicans is their utter failure to grasp how Democrats would perceive their behavior. Conservative reporter Byron York perceptively, and alarmingly, describes a discussion with an influential Republican, who explains that the GOP stumbled into the shutdown war without a plan and repeatedly expected Democrats to bail them out by capitulating, only to be shocked when they refused. The GOP’s strategic failure has grown out of its intellectual insularity (or, to reprise a once-hot term, epistemic closure) leaving them so unaware of the principles motivating the other side that they couldn’t anticipate the Democrats’ obvious response.
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