I enjoy reading Ruy Teixeira, even though he is engaged in a project I hope will fail. He so ardently wants the Democratic Party to pull its head out of its ass and get back to fighting for working people.

He’s identified a behavior he calls The Fox News Fallacy:

The Fox News Fallacy is having a dire effect on many Democrats. This is the idea that if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often. The problem is that an issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it.

[…]

Democrats who embrace the Fox News Fallacy are inclined to believe there is no real issue here other than voters, whipped up by Fox News, who are simply opposed to teaching students about slavery and the like. That is a mistake and blinds Democrats to a real problem that is emerging.

Of course, people on the right display their own brand of Oppositional Defiance Disorder, and I agree with Teixeira that it is all unhealthy.

An idiotic corollary to this is people on the left slapping the ‘rightwinger’ label on good liberals like Russell Brand, Matt Taibbi, and Glenn Greenwald when they dissent from the progressive orthodoxy.

How do we break this cycle of insanity?