Consensus? Groupthink? "Cult" (Fewer Letters)

"It's like Henry Ford's line that you could buy any color car you wanted, as long as you wanted black. Obama is interested in any idea, as long as its peddler starts from the same 'non-ideological' assumption that government experts know best.

There is a huge consensus around the notion that government must do, well, something -- something big,...

It's the consensus that scares me. Chin-stroking moderates and passionate centrists often glorify consensus to the point where they sound like it's better to be wrong in a group than to be right alone -- an example of ideological dogmatism as bad as any.

Obviously, consensus can be good. But it also can lead to dangerous groupthink. Everyone knew that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Everyone at "60 Minutes" knew that those memos about George W. Bush and the Texas Air National Guard had to be right. Everyone knows everything is right, until everything goes wrong. If that's not one of the great lessons of the financial collapse of 2008, I don't know what is."

-- Jonah Goldberg, ruining the party (by being dumb enough to agree with TMR) in The Los Angeles Times.