Preview

I write a great deal about political lying, together with the failure of the members of the mainstream media to deal effectively with its current epidemic proportions. This is in part because I’ve written two books and a dissertation on the topic. (This one is still sort of new.) But to be honest, the fact of the now near-pathological lying emanating from today’s Republican Party is only a part of the problem facing the future of our country. Even more worrisome is the character of their content.

The Times offered up a mini tour of Republican crazyland in a piece focusing on Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, who became famous when six of his siblings banded together to warn the rest of the country never to vote for him. The Times notes that Gosar “falsely suggested in 2017 that the deadly far-right rally in Charlottesville was planned by liberals and funded by George Soros. More recently, he has questioned whether federal law enforcement officials planted agents in far-right groups that stormed the Capitol.”

Deeper in, things grow in size and scope. The lunatic league’s leader, per usual, is Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom Donald Trump picked recently as his warm-up act for one of his Nuremberg-style hate fests. Greene, the piece reports, has “endorsed executing Democratic lawmakers, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She was also an adherent of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy movement that holds that a corrupt cabal of Democrats, global elites and career government employees who run a Satan-worshiping child sex-trafficking ring will soon be rounded up and punished for their misdeeds, and that Mr. Trump will be restored to the presidency.” If that’s not nutty enough for you, there’s the fact that she has repeatedly compared COVID vaccinations to the Holocaust: “We can look back in a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens—so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.” Even after admitting that she may have gone a little far in the above, and even after a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Greene returned to the very same analogy by characterizing the officials in the Biden administration’s push to encourage all Americans to get vaccinated against the coronavirus as “medical brown shirts.”

I am almost always tempted to fill up this space with similar lunacy, both in sympathy with the journalists who have to figure out how to cover it, but also to illustrate just how much more serious is the threat these people portend for our republic than our media has so far been willing or able to portray. Take a look, if you have not already, at the Times’ incredible 40-minute video about the events of January 6 if you imagine that next time, we can expect an opposition that respects a peaceful presidential election, democratically arrived at, and accepted by the likes of Trump and his increasingly violent-minded foot soldiers.

For all the ink that has been spilled on the grievances of Trump supporters—no coffee shop in central Pennsylvania was safe from a horde of skinny-notebook-wielding reporters for much of 2017—most of us remain confused as to what drives Trump supporters to embrace so obviously fraudulent a figure, spouting not only lies but barely coherent nonsense syllables and yet earning football-style cheers from enthusiastic crowds. Given the logical incoherence and barely concealed dishonesty that characterizes literally every one of the conspiracy theories that make up Trumpist ideology, it can be difficult to get a handle on any underlying consistency that provides the foundation for any or all of it. New York’s Eric Levitz makes a decent attempt to get to the bottom of a part of it with a focus on the snake oil sold every night by Tucker Carlson. For a deeper look, however, I’d turn to Thomas Edsall’s investigation of what he nicely terms Trump’s “cult of animosity.”

Edsall quotes a number of scholars to support his thesis that what he calls the “‘schadenfreude’ electorate”—that is, “voters with the highest levels of animosity toward African Americans” and “voters who take pleasure in making the opposition suffer”—“continues to dominate the Republican Party, even in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.” He quotes a series of scholars who, based on research undertaken during the past four years, find
animus towards marginalized, Democratic-linked groups was a good predictor of future support for Trump, regardless of party;
a wellspring of animus against marginalized groups in the United States that can be harnessed and activated for political gain; and
the “Trump voter profile” [reveals an attraction to] relatively explicit appeal to xenophobia, racial prejudice, authoritarianism, sexism, conspiracy thinking.

One aspect of Republican ideology that gets insufficient attention, I would argue, is its attachment to imaginary victimization of white males. This is not to say white males do not experience discrimination in certain circumstances—just as I would not argue that left-wing “cancel culture” is entirely made up. Both are real. In terms of both depth and breadth, they are minuscule in comparison to the discrimination, and its effects, regularly experienced by women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ communities. One of the most ridiculous expressions of this particular form of almost comically undeserved whining can be found in Eric Kaufmann’s recent essay in National Review, in which the author bemoans the fact that most educated young women want nothing whatsoever to do with male Trump supporters when it comes to sex and romance. The author blames this on a “predilection among many young elite Americans for progressive authoritarianism, a belief system that justifies infringing rights to equal treatment or free speech in the name of the emotional ‘safety’ of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexuality groups. In this left-modernist worldview, conservatives’ resistance to racial, gender, and sexual progressivism mark them as moral deviants.”

But here’s the thing, Eric. The problem is that they are “moral deviants.” It is literally impossible to support Trump and the current Republican Party without being either a) stupid, b) ignorant pretty much beyond belief, and/or c) morally deviant. Why would any person of any age want to date, marry, or reproduce with someone who espouses crazy cultish conspiracy theories laced with racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, ethnocentrism, and a dedication to anti-democratically maintained white supremacy based on easily disprovable disinformation? The piece quotes another writer who insists that “those who politically discriminate are acting in precisely the same manner as those who justify prejudice against Muslims or Jews.” Got that? “Precisely.” In other words, Trump supporters were born that way, just as they are born with superhuman immunity from imaginary pandemics that were either cooked up on purpose inside a lab or in China or were a total hoax in the first place made up by Dr. Fauci.

The Democratic primary is over in New York and its counting, everyone agrees, was a catastrophe. There is no question whatsoever that the responsibility for this failure belongs to the city’s Board of Elections, which has long been a cesspit of patronage and corruption. But the city chose a new way of electing people via the eminently sensible “ranked-choice voting,” and therefore we are getting a few extremely foolish pieces attempting a “whataboutist” turn to blame RCV. This dishonestly headlined Politico article, for instance, admits that “last week’s fumble by the city Board of Elections … was not specifically related to the ranked-choice system,” even though Politico decided to go with its deliberately misleading headline and thrust anyway. The piece even includes this quote: “‘So much of the challenges that we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks have been linked to ranked-choice voting incorrectly,’ said Sara Eskrich, executive director of Democracy Found, an organization pushing to incorporate Final Five Voting—an alternative voting method similar to ranked-choice voting—into Wisconsin elections. ‘There’s a lot of election administration problems that have happened that are not the fault of the electoral system itself.’” So why the headline “New York’s ‘Head-Swirling’ Mistake Puts Harsh Spotlight on Ranked-Choice Voting” when it’s so obviously the BOE, not the voting system? Did Pod People eat Politico’s brain?

In a similar vein, the Times reports “Why New York’s Election Debacle Is Likely to Fuel Conspiracy Theories.” But again, its author admits that “[t]he disinformation fueled by New York’s mistake may not end up being compelling to Americans who haven’t already bought into the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.” It nevertheless goes on to speculate that “it is very likely, especially among New Yorkers, to undermine overall trust in public institutions—and that sort of distrust creates fertile ground for disinformation to grow.” Like so much of the coverage of “disinformation” and the lack of “overall trust in public institutions,” its authors fail to note that almost all of it comes from the Republican side of the aisle. Democrats, unlike Politico reporters and Times headline writers, can tell the difference between a bad count and a bad voting system.