High five for Crooked Timber

 What we seeing now, is not a shift in the Overton window, but a challenge to this whole approach to determining what views should be taken seriously, a challenge that started with the appropriation by the left of the “reality-based” label pinned on us in Karl Rove’s famous interview with Ron Suskind, and has continued (though very imperfectly) with the rise of fact-checkers. The new approach is based on the shocking idea that objective truth, rather than political acceptability, should be the criterion against which factual claims are tested.

If this view is right, then the most important single development was probably Nate Silver’s successful prediction of the 2012 election. Silver was up against both the pseudo-science of the Republican “unskewers” and the faith of centrist pundits (historically exemplified by Broder) that their deep connection with the American psyche was worth more than any number of least-squares regressions. Given the centrality of horse-race journalism to the pundit class, their defeat by relatively straightforward statistical analysis of opinion polls was a huge blow.

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