The decent thing to do now is to bury the conventional wisdom. Bury it in a marked grave as a reminder and a warning to others. Again and again it has led us up the garden path, again and again it has got it wrong.
The conventional wisdom was wrong about the property boom. It said there would be a 'soft landing'. We got a very hard landing. We were told the Arab Spring would be just that. Instead, Libya and Syria are waking nightmares.
Our home-grown purveyors of the conventional wisdom got our General Election wrong. They told us Fine Gael would fare pretty well and Labour better than the polls.
They said the Government would probably be returned to office, maybe propped up by the Social Democrats and a few others because the 'Keep the Recovery Going' message would work. They didn't predict Fianna Fáil would do as well as it did.
One journalist who did call the election right was the 'Sunday Independent's' Jody Corcoran. He won a journalism award in recognition of this fact last week. But how often do you hear Jody on radio? He is not one of RTÉ's darlings. RTÉ keeps going back to those who get it wrong because it is a comfortable purveyor of the comfortable conventional wisdom.
The Tories weren't supposed to win an overall majority in the 2015 British general election. That was supposed to result in a hung parliament.
The conventional wisdom was famously and disastrously wrong about Brexit. When its purveyors were proven wrong they were outraged and the rage continues.
And now the conventional wisdom has been caught out again. Hillary Clinton was going to win. She was bound to win. She couldn't lose. I believed it.
Then the awful, awful thing happened - Donald Trump won. Cue more outrage. Liberals have been in greater meltdown over his victory than they ever were or have been about Isil, or about Islamic fundamentalism generally, or for that matter about the Soviet Union back in the day.
When the conventional wisdom is wrong this often, we really ought to take pause. It's a sign that those in charge of reading the world for us aren't reading it right. It's like they're speaking the wrong language.
It's one thing to call an election wrong here or there. But to do it again and again should have alarm bells ringing very loudly in newsrooms, in academia, in the corridors of power generally.
It is simply not good enough that almost all of our pundits, researchers, presenters, producers and 'experts' are clearly so out of tune with so many voters. It's one thing to call elections wrong, but what makes it worse, and obviously contributes to all those wrong calls, is that the 'experts' are indeed so out of tune and so out of sympathy with so many voters. Worse than that, they have huge contempt for huge numbers of voters.
We saw this, and are still seeing it, after the Brexit vote, and now that America has voted for Mr Trump the rage has redoubled, the contempt has deepened.
Dwight D Eisenhower, when stepping down from the US presidency, spoke about a "military-industrial complex". Today in America we have a 'Democrat-media industry complex'. The American media (and our media) had an absolutely appalling presidential election. The bias could not have been more naked. In response, Mr Trump made not the slightest effort to appease them. Instead he condemned them as part of the establishment, and won. What will the media do now, redouble the sound and fury? Will that work? It didn't work for this election cycle. Huge numbers of voters don't trust the media anymore. They have lost authority.
The Democratic Party, and the media, is the boy who cried "wolf". When John McCain ran against Barack Obama in 2004, he was accused of inciting racism. When Mitt Romney ran against Mr Obama four years ago, he was accused of wanting to wage a "war on women".
Mr McCain and Mr Romney were totally decent, mainstream politicians but they were still thoroughly and unfairly demonised.
A few days before the election, former communications director for Mrs Clinton, Harold Wolfson, admitted the language employed by the Democrats against Republican presidential candidates in previous elections was "hyperbolic and inaccurate" and "cheapened" the ability of the Democrats to speak with "accuracy and credibility" this time around. So 'post-truth' politics isn't the sole preserve of the populist left and right.
Needless to say, the pundits are still lining up to condemn Mr Trump and his supporters. There is little attempt to understand why anyone would support him or vote for Brexit.
Both Brexit and Trumpism are a reassertion of the local and the particular against the global and the international. There is nothing wrong with this in itself.
Liberalism is very internationalist in scope. It completely underestimates people's natural attachment to what's closest to them.
It regards such attachments as suspect because such attachments (in their view) can too easily turn into bigotry.
But the liberal converse of a bigoted attachment to the local is cosmopolitan contempt for these things - a sort of sneering, self-righteous, morally arrogant dismissal of those who don't share their global, cosmopolitan views and who remain closest to things that are closest to them, whether that be their town or region or country, or even their religion.
Until those who dominate public debate try to understand those they disagree with, instead of merely pouring scorn and contempt on them, the conventional wisdom will continue to get very big things wrong. And, in the end, the public here, like in Britain and America, will simply stop listening to it and its purveyors.
Irish Independent
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