Because the people in my life know I pay a lot of attention to politics, I frequently have the experience of someone sending or mentioning an alarming news article or editorial or clip from cable news to get my opinion on whether it’s something to be concerned about. Frequently, I have to tell them that it’s not.
The bill passed one chamber but it will never become law. Or it will be vetoed. The court ruling will get overturned. Yes, even the conservative Supreme Court of the United States is never going to go along with that bullshit. Actually, that’s not what was said in context, or it’s not what was meant. The politician actually did say that, but they didn’t mean it. And so on.
My point is that I have a lot of experience with people on the left buying into bad analysis, clickbait, and rage politics. They can be talked down, but only by people they trust. And there’s a subset that can’t be talked down. They’re happier believing the worst.
This isn’t to say that I’m always purveyor of reassurance. In recent years, I’ve frequently been far more alarmed about things than most people you see on MSNBC. In a lot of ways, the absolutely fucked condition of the country is something I foresaw and predicted, and I did it for a long time feeling very isolated and alone. It’s a weird feeling to look at the news today on the climate, on reproductive rights, on Russia, on the United Kingdom, on the Republican Party, and see articles and analysis that five years ago I had to fight to convince editors weren’t unhinged Chicken Little rantings. Hell, Hillary Clinton just noticed that MAGA rallies are indistinguishable from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi rallies.
So, it’s not that things aren’t really so bad. It’s that people aren’t that great at figuring out what’s a real threat and what’s not, and they’re susceptible to believing bullshit so long as it’s bullshit slung from their own side of the political aisle.
I don’t mention this to make another “both sides” argument, but people are people. On the right, the problem is worse and the reason is twofold. The first is that there are many fewer rich people than non-rich people, and many more ordinary workers than executive workers. This means the billionaires who fund the Republican Party are constantly trying to find ways to bullshit people into supporting the policies they want because they’re at a natural disadvantage. It turns out the shortest way for these elites to get low taxes and the right to pollute the environment is to rile up a bunch of conservative Christians about prayer at football games. The thing is, in the process, a significant segment of the right that is supposed to know better actually winds up believing the bullshit that was intended only for the rubes. They’re uncritically consuming the crap that the Mighty Right-Wing Media Wulitzer churns out, and it’s rotting their brains.
The second reason the right has a worse bullshit problem than the left is that a critical mass was reached during Trump’s candidacy for the president where the rubes actually expected action rather than the mere promise of action. A wall was actually supposed to be built at the southern border. Abortion was actually supposed to be outlawed. Elections really were rigged, and violently challenging the fraudulent results was a duty. Some people call this Frankenstein’s monster, where the inventor loses control of his invention. The Democrats do not have this problem.
This is in part because the alarmists on the left were correct. That’s why the mainstream of the Democratic Party impeached Trump twice. It’s why the Justice Department raided his home. It’s why the New York attorney general just sued the entire Trump family for fraud. These are the kind of actions that the fringe of the left might have demanded in the past, only to be dismissed as extremists. So there’s an alignment now on the left between the establishment and the fringe, at least with respect to the threat represented by the Republicans and how to react, that’s pretty rare. And, for the most part, this alignment is based in reality. It’s not a matter of gullible partisans on the left believing a bunch of hype, but more a matter of the Democratic establishment (really, the whole establishment) finally understanding that the left fringe was right and they were wrong.
It’s easy to see this if you just look back to early days of the blogosphere when left-wing bloggers were completely antagonistic toward the mainstream press and the party leadership. We were trying to get them to wake up and they thought we were unruly children. But today we have basically everyone in agreement that the Republicans are completely out of control, that Trump must be imprisoned, and our very system of government is in grave peril.
I’d like to call that progress, but it feels more like futility.
Just this morning I plopped my ass down at a table in a local event center and sat through the first annual Southwestern Ohio Republican Pancake Breakfast. The event was well attended and the speaker list was pretty damn impressive. Our state Treasurer, Auditor, Attorney General, three State Supreme Court Justices, and the cherry on the Ohio GOP Sundae, J.D. Vance. The event was capped by the most red-meat keynote speech I’ve probably ever heard in person, delivered by former Trump Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gridley. The audience was littered with all manner of local officials and judges, and even the legendary Mean Jean Schmidt was there. I ended up sitting at a table with some very amiable folks; including an attorney from the prosecutor’s office, a local union representative, and a local county Auditor. As far as they were concerned, I was just another middle aged Republican white guy. But, of course, I wasn’t. I was from the dark side. I am the enemy, and I was right there in their midst.
I am still kind of processing what I heard and experienced this morning. Over the last decade I have been on numerous organizing committees for similar functions for our local Democratic Party. We have never hosted anything that felt as dark as what I was in the middle of this morning. The larger tone of all of this was that they are in a spiritual battle for the heart and soul of the country. They sit on one side of the divide, with God as their copilot and ally in warfare. On the other side sits “the radical left”, led by a doddering and senile old fool, Joe Biden, who is really just a pawn being controlled by the most evil and godless person on the planet, Nancy Pelosi. She is the archangel of Satan’s brigade that is trying, day and night, to bring this country down, and to turn it into a socialist haven, where everyone will bow to the will of “the government”, and no one will be able to do anything without first getting the permission of their government overlords. All of this was laid at the feet of the “radical leftist Democrat Party.”
One after another, the speakers reiterated this theme, with the audience enthusiastically clapping their endorsement of the message. Knowing smiles were exchanged with others sitting around them, heads nodded in silent confirmation, jaws clenched in involuntary reaction to the anger that was roiling inside them as the fuel of rage was fed to them from the dais. My table mates, who only an hour earlier were just regular folk, talking with me about work, family, and personal interests; were now in full thrall to the message of fear and mortal threats to their personal well being that was being directed at them. It was, at the same time, an astounding and a profoundly disturbing transformation.
Once the keynote speaker stepped up to the microphone, the audience was already well primed for the reddest of red meat, and he simply hit the ball out of the park. He did not disappoint his audience. Afterwards, I texted a friend of mine from the parking lot and told her I fully expected at the end of his 25 minute keynote that the event would adjourn outside so we could all stand around while a fatted calf was sacrificed in honor to Donald Trump, while at the same time Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi were burned in effigy.
I’m not really sure how I feel right now. In my ears are echoing all these calls I hear for us all to try and find common ground, for the good of the country. But honestly, I just don’t see how it is possible, in any sort of significant way. Sure, we can have personal dialogues, one on one, with people we know. But the institutional GOP is locked into the narrative and the reality that I witnessed just today. We; Democrats, non-Republicans, and moderate Republicans, are mortal threats to the culture and the very life that they truly believe is their God-given right and privilege. There was no discussion today about policies that will help lift all boats. It was all about preserving their place of privilege, and quashing the threats to “their way of life and their children’s future.” It was all about fear.
I left there today kind of shell-shocked. As I sit here tonight writing this, and digesting what I experienced, I feel overwhelmed with pessimism that this can be resolved without a very serious national crisis.
Thank you, so much, for sharing your thoughts and emotions in such a detailed and heartbreaking and true way. That does sound like a frightening, and deeply sad thing to have witnessed. I hope you are able to find a renewal of hope. I know I certainly am looking. Thank you, again.
Had a similar experience and can relate to those feelings, during and after what was supposed to be a dedication to a veterans memorial wall. You’d think it would have been a rather dull affair, honoring those whose names are placed within this monument with a few generic, boilerplate patriotic speeches. It started out that way, but no. Instead it turned into one of the most disgusting, disrespectful political rallies I had ever witnessed. If a family name wasn’t on that wall I would have walked away. I have since been back yet can not get the bad taste out of my mouth. That shameful display has tainted what should have been a fond remembrance and I will never forgive these assholes for ruing that. This was a few years before the orange menace even declared he would run, sometime during the Obama administration.
How do we get to the completely, systematically, brainwashed? I don’t know, we probably never will. But prosecuting, suing, and putting away white collar criminals, like we should have when we were lied into Iraq and we can go back further than that, the point being. You break the law you pay. No more free passes and slaps on the back with a wink. Martin, you are completly correct, it has to end, and Trump is a good start.
On Labor Day 2021 we were at an event at a local airport, where a lot of WW2 aircraft had flown in. It was a pretty neat event. The Ohio Honor Flight group was there and mid-day they had a color guard and moment of silence in honor of all veterans who had served and those who had given their lives. Just prior to the start of the ceremony, the emcee went on a crazy rant about how Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats had blocked the public reading of the names of 13 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan just a week or so prior. I muttered out loud to my wife, “That’s not true.”, and quite a few people standing around just stared at me. Well by god, this emcee wasn’t going to let the “Pelosi Demonrats” get away with it, because “this is still America and if they don’t like it then they can just get the hell out!!!” And he proceeded to read the 13 names, to riotous applause from the crowd that started chanting, USA! USA! USA!
I probably should have made a complaint to the organizers, but around here that would be the equivalent of pissing in the ocean and trying to measure the sea rise.
In times like this it’s hard to hold onto the fundamentals of small ‘d’ democratic politics: “the solution to bad speech is more speech”; “the solution to bad politics is better politics”, etc.
It may well be that there’s a ruling pro-fascist majority here in the US (as it appears there is or soon will be in Italy, at least for the next election). If so, we’re in for tough times…which may last a long time.
That said, the slow-forming alignment of pro-democracy leftists, centrists, and conservatives does finally seem to be having an impact. We see it in the Jan. 6 House Committee hearings, the steadily growing bodies of evidence and conviction emerging from the Jan. 6 DOJ prosecutions, the startling (to those of us who recall the 2009-10 Democratic party) concerted action by congressional Democrats in repeatedly passing major legislation on party line votes, the faint but unmistakable signs of life (nurtured insistently by Biden) for bipartisan politics seen in legislation (infrastructure) and judicial appointments. And we see it in the multiple direct legal assaults (Fulton County Georgia, New York state, DOJ) on Trump and his family/cronies.
One valuable reminder from re-reading Jimmy Breslin’s Watergate book, How the Good Guys Finally Won, was how precarious and slow-moving it all felt at the time. It’s only in retrospect that it seemed inevitable that a president re-elected with 61% of the popular vote would resign in disgrace just 21 months later with an approval rating below the crazification factor.