Reality-based community is a derisive term for people who base judgments on facts. It was first attributed to a senior official working for U.S. president George W. Bush by the reporter Ron Suskind in 2004. Many American liberals adopted the label for themselves, using it to portray themselves as adhering to facts in contradiction to conservatives presumed to be disregarding professional and scientific expertise.
The phrase was attributed by journalist Ron Suskind to an unnamed official in the George W. Bush administration who used it to denigrate a critic of the administration's policies as someone who based their judgments on facts. [1] In a 2004 article appearing in the New York Times Magazine , Suskind wrote:
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'. [2]
International relations scholar Fred Halliday writes that the phrase reality-based community (in contrast to faith-based community) was used "for those who did not share [the Bush administration's] international goals and aspirations". [1] Suskind has maintained his refusal to name the speaker, but the source of the quotation was widely speculated to be Bush's senior advisor Karl Rove. [3] [4]
Political scientist and former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski characterized the encounter with the senior White House aide, as reported by Suskind, as exemplary of the "arrogance that swept the Bush White House". [5] Journalist Steven Poole compared the phrase to Hannah Arendt's definition of totalitarian thinking, which she described as having "extreme contempt for facts". [6]
Many American liberals adopted the term as a badge of honor. [3] The words "[Proud to be a Member of the] Reality-Based Community" appeared on blogs [7] and T-shirts. [1] [8] The term was used to mock the Bush administration's funding of faith-based social programmes, as well as a perceived hostility to professional and scientific expertise among American conservatives. [3]
The quote in its entirety was prominently featured in the song "Walk It Back" from The National's 2017 album Sleep Well Beast , and Newsweek asked Rove and Suskind to comment on its inclusion. Rove denied being the speaker, stating that the quote itself was fictitious, and Suskind maintained both the veracity of the quote and his refusal to identify the source. [9] Commentators have also drawn parallels between the 2004 quote and the rise of post-truth politics in the late 2010s. [10] [11]
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński, or Zbig, was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. As a scholar, Brzezinski belonged to the realist school of international relations, standing in the geopolitical tradition of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman, while elements of liberal idealism have also been identified in his outlook. Brzezinski was the primary organizer of The Trilateral Commission.
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Ronald Steven "Ron" Suskind is an American journalist, author, and filmmaker. He was the senior national affairs writer for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000, where he won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for articles that became the starting point for his first book, A Hope in the Unseen. His other books include The Price of Loyalty, The One Percent Doctrine, The Way of the World, Confidence Men, and his memoir Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, from which he made an Emmy Award-winning, Academy Award-nominated feature documentary. Suskind has written about the George W. Bush Administration, the Barack Obama Administration, and related issues of the United States' use of power.
The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, is a 2004 book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind. The book was the first to provide critical insight into the events that led up to the Iraq War. The Price of Loyalty was met with both commercial and critical success, and was the first book by Suskind to be a #1 New York Times best-seller.
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The Rockridge Institute was an American non-profit research and progressive think tank founded in 1997 and located in Berkeley, California from 2003 until April 30, 2008. Its stated goal was to strengthen democracy by providing intellectual support to the progressive community. The Rockridge Institute promoted progressive ideas and values, studied their implications, and worked to provide an effective articulation of those values to shift public discourse.
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The Truth is an American book of political satire and humor by Al Franken, released in October 2005. The book's main focus is on the 2004 presidential election and Franken's research into the Republicans' strategy in their victory—as well as examples of subsequent political overreach which he predicts will be their downfall. Finally, he makes some predictions.
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The Greater Middle East, is a political term, introduced in March 2004 in a paper by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a part of the U.S. administration's preparatory work for the Group of Eight summit of June 2004, denoting a vaguely defined region called the "Arab world" together with Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Turkey, and several other neighbouring countries that have cultural ties. The paper presented a proposal for sweeping change in the way the West deals with the Middle East and North Africa. Previously, by Adam Garfinkle of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Greater Middle East had been defined as the MENA region together with Central Asia and the Caucasus.
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Mayberry Machiavelli is a satirically pejorative phrase coined by John J. DiIulio Jr., a former George W. Bush administration staffer who ran the President's Faith-Based Initiative. After DiIulio resigned from his White House post in late 2001, journalist Ron Suskind quoted him in an Esquire magazine article describing the administration of the Bush White House as follows: "What you've got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." In a 2002 letter to Suskind, DiIulio wrote that the "Mayberry Machiavellis" were the junior and senior staffers who reduced every issue to a simplistic black and white, us vs them narrative.
Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House is a memoir by Valerie Plame Wilson. Wilson is the former covert CIA officer whose then-classified non-official cover (NOC) identity as "Valerie Plame" was leaked to the press in July 2003, after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV, had criticized the George W. Bush administration's rationale for the Iraq War. The outing made her the center of the American political scandal known as the Plame affair. Her public outing led to her decision to resign from the CIA in December 2005, when she attempted to retire early at the age of 42. Being told that she could not collect her pension until the age of 56, she determined to write this book both as a means of telling her own story in her own words and as a means of earning income to replace her deferred retirement annuity. She encountered resistance from the CIA in the course of chronicling her work with the organization.
The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism is a 2008 non-fiction book by Ron Suskind, claiming various actions and policies of the George W. Bush administration. Most notably, it alleges that the Bush administration ordered the forgery of the Habbush letter to implicate Iraq as having ties to al Qaeda and the hijackers in the September 11 attacks. All these claims have been strenuously denied by the White House and all parties involved. The book, published on August 5, 2008, by Harper, met mixed reviews but received considerable media attention and created controversy.
The Habbush letter, or Habbush memo, is a handwritten message dated July 1, 2001, which appears to show a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq's government. It purports to be a direct communication between the head of Iraqi Intelligence, General Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, outlining mission training which Mohamed Atta, one of the organizers of the September 11 attacks, supposedly received in Iraq. The letter also claims that Hussein accepted a shipment from Niger, an apparent reference to an alleged uranium acquisition attempt that U.S. President George W. Bush cited in his January 2003 State of the Union address.
Karl Christian Rove is an American Republican political consultant, policy advisor, and lobbyist. He was Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff during the George W. Bush administration until his resignation on August 31, 2007. He has also headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives.
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reality-based community.
suskind reality based community.