At this point in time, it has become clear that the decades-long effort by the 1% working through the Republican Party and right wing media to marinate America in absurdities is demonstrating the truth of Voltaire’s observation. It’s hard to imagine anything more absurd than a predatory con-man like Donald Trump as the President of the United States. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the atrocities are now starting in earnest. Voltaire was a prominent figure of the enlightenment; we are now in what is becoming the age of weaponized stupid, engendered by those like Rupert Murdoch for fun and profit.
We’ve been going down this road a long time, and the cliff’s edge is getting closer. It’s no longer that hard to see the possibility of these heavily armed dupes, idiots, and sincerely deplorable people resorting to violence to keep Trump in office. (Or that Trump would be cheering them on.) It’s no longer that hard to see how society can crumble as the worst impulses of human nature unleashed by unreasoning fear and anger rip things apart. Germany under Hitler, Russia under Stalin, Uganda under Idi Amin, China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Ruwanda, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, America in 1860… It can’t happen here — until it does.
The rot is coming largely from the Right; right-wing authoritarianism is alive and well in America. At a time when we need to come together, the decades-long instinct of conservatives to use division for personal gain and to hold power has become a reflex they can’t resist. They have no other tools in their tool box. It’s a simple formula: make their base afraid and angry, promise them everything (but never keep those promises), and provide them with enemies to blame for the inevitable failures.
To do this, they have been peddling absurdities for decades. Killer trees. Welfare queens in Cadillacs. Tax cuts pay for themselves and create jobs. The rich are job creators. Government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem. Deregulation and the free markets solve problems better than government. Climate change is a hoax driven by a world wide conspiracy of scientists and a liberal Big Government agenda. Obama is a Kenyan-Muslim communist. Poverty is a life style choice, driven by bad personal choices. Anyone can become rich if they only work hard enough. Talking about racism is racist. And so on and so on.
Under Donald J. Trump, America has been put on a diet of absurdities on steroids. The pandemic has thrown it into sharp relief. Trump poses as a brilliant scientist even as he spouts nonsense about miracle cures and injecting disinfectant. He contradicts his own experts and downplays the horrors. From 15 cases magically fading away we’ve gone to 100,000 deaths being tremendous success. We’ll have a vaccine at “warp speed” — just around election time. What a coincidence. (They don’t play well with others on this.) But hey, the important thing is to get the economy going again. Never mind the body count.
The Pandemic is now a Culture War
We’re now seeing the public health measures of social distancing and wearing face masks turned into a culture war confrontation. The absurdity peddlers are hard at work. It’s being framed in part as a battle over religious freedom, with a heavy dose of anti-semitism thrown in. It’s being attacked as government tyranny; the people who would deny women the right to choose are now demanding their right to choose what they do with their bodies. They will not wear a mask, and they demand the right to work at the risk to their lives. Public health measures are being cast as nanny-state government overreach. There’s a contingent that isn’t going to let those science elites and Big Pharma vaccinate them either, if and when an effective vaccine finally appears. Viruses don’t care about what flags people fly — but absurd is what absurd does.
This culture war is different though. It’s racking up an actual body count on top of the virus deaths. (Not that there haven’t been casualties in previous culture wars, but Black Lives Don’t Matter to this crowd, nor the casualties from mass shootings.)
What the virus count will be depends on what model is used. Eric Boehlert is looking at a far less rosy scenario; the IMHE model is falling short.
But there’s a signature problem with IHME's latest estimate. Last week it predicted 72,000 deaths by Aug. 4 —72,000 Americans will be dead from coronavirus by the end of this week. Those promised bell-shaped curves, signaling the pandemic abrupt ending, never materialized.
By contrast, a model produced by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which features detailed state-by-state information that includes one-week and six-week forecasts, predicts a U.S. death toll of 100,000 as quickly as the end of this month. And the COVID-19 Projections model forecasts as many as 166,000 deaths from COVID-19 by Aug. 4.
Angry, desperate people can do terrible things — especially if they’ve been led in that direction for decades. What would this country be like if Fox News had never existed? What if Rush Limbaugh had found a less destructive line of work in obscurity? We should take nothing for granted. We’ve seen how the Republican Party will do anything at this point to stay in power. What will they do if they find themselves facing a day of reckoning? Speaking of which...
The silver lining in the cloud?
While New York City has gotten attention as the biggest concentration of US infections to date, the virus isn’t going to stay in the cities. Bill Palmer at the Palmer Report is suggesting this could translate into trouble in MAGAland as the virus continues to spread.
...Reports are beginning to trickle in that people in MAGAland are starting to die, or at least get very sick. Some of them are connecting the dots between Trump’s claim that everybody can now get tested and the reality on the ground. Not only can they not get tested, more often than not they have to get close to death before they are tested. By then it’s often too late.
This was not a particularly difficult thing to predict. MAGAland is composed of inherently selfish people. They hate immigrants and anyone on welfare except themselves. They like to control others and deny them their rights — their reproductive rights, their right to marry, their right to live unmolested by the police — but despise being controlled themselves. The suffering of others means nothing to them so long as they and their families are okay.
It is only when the world they created begins to infringe on their own rights, their own jobs, their own health, their own mortality, that they suddenly learn compassion, they abruptly grow suspicious of the people they once supported...
Sara Robinson’s articles on authoritarianism at Orcinus say that one of the key things that can make authoritarian followers become disenchanted with leaders like Trump is when they experience something that feels like a personal betrayal. (It’s one reason Trump is trying to scapegoat China with the story that the coronavirus was created in a Wuhan bio lab. There’s nastier CT out there too.)
Although their behavior is like a cult where the leader can do no wrong,
And yet, even so: There is one -- and only one -- sin so heinous that it cannot be rationalized away by the authoritarian thought process. It is this: the leader's main job is to protect his abused and terrified horde from personal harm (or, for that matter, any sudden negative change to their immediate status quo). A leader who wantonly allows one of his followers to intimately experience such harm breaks that contract. It is in that moment of betrayal that some followers come to their senses, and start looking for a reckoning.
Reality has a liberal bias
The Universe doesn’t care about ‘rights’. Natural laws have no pity. The Cold Equations always balance. Stupidity is a capital crime.
Will the pandemic prove to be fatal to the right wing cult of death? Let’s hope so; a crisis is a terrible thing to waste and there’s no reason to let disaster capitalism take advantage of this one. (Hi there Jared!) When Nancy Pelosi is willing to talk about Universal Basic Income, paradigms are shifting.
Paul Krugman has spent decades battling absurdity — his phrase for it is Zombie Lies: “ideas that should have been killed by contrary evidence, but instead keep shambling along, eating people’s brains.” (The quote is from his latest collection of editorials: Arguing With Zombies — Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future.)
Zombie lies are largely driven by one thing: they advantage people with lots of money who keep sending them out regardless of the consequences to others. Authoritarian leaders enjoy manipulating people; lies that play to the beliefs and grievances of their base are one of their major tools.
Krugman has adopted four rules in his battle against Zombie Lies:
Krugman explains each of these points in some detail. To summarize, staying with the easy stuff means keeping discussion focused on places where the answers are clear and backed by evidence. Writing in English means using plain language; avoid jargon and buzzwords.
Being honest about dishonesty is tougher in a world where everything is now political. To put it simply, recognize that people making bad arguments may well know better, but refuse to — and never admit if they have been wrong. They are not arguing in good faith. As for the last, if you are going to talk about dishonesty, you should not be afraid to explain why someone is being dishonest. Motives matter. Look at effects, not just words.
This won’t help with people whose minds are closed — but if MAGAland begins to realize it has been sold out, they may be willing to listen if the roots of their belief have been shaken. Krugman’s advice is good; Sara Robinson has some concrete suggestions.
It is telling that it may take the deaths of thousands of Americans to make people realize that they have been fed a steady diet of absurdities for decades, to the point where they aren’t even questioned. The damage to the economy from the pandemic is making clear how badly it serves most people. (You would think 2008 would have been a better learning experience.) Perhaps this latest crisis can make room in the public arena for ideas that will serve us all better. Death on a personal level has a funny way of getting people’s attention…
No guarantees though. Some people respond to crisis by doubling down on the beliefs that landed them there. We’re seeing that on the news and in the streets. Like the pandemic, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and getting better won’t happen by itself.
Never give up, never surrender. Forward momentum.