Vox, derp, and the intellectual stagnation of the left

Several long winters ago, when President Obama was thunderously elected amid Messianic fervor, and much of the right was in the throes of apoplectic confusion, some liberal writers warned of a phenomenon among right-wing intellectuals, which they called "epistemic closure." The charge was that conservative thinkers had lost the ability to process the idea that the world of 2008 was not the world of the Reagan Era, and more generally to consider new ideas or, really, reality. The word "derp" entered our lexicon to mock forehead-slappingly stupid statements, defined by the liberal blogger Noah Smith as "the constant, repetitive reiteration of strong priors."