First a bit of housekeeping. This blog has attracted no comments at all in the past two months! No real ones (which come in once a month or so) and no spam ones (which used to come in a few a day). The volume of spam had been bothersome enough that I set the period for allowing comments to a new post to 3 days. As of now, I’ll expand that window to… well, more than 3 days. And see what happens.
Nothing extraordinary today. I’ve done some maintenance updates on Locus Online, I’ve been reading another book by John Allen Paulos, and I’ve been updating my planner spreadsheet (which I do every couple months anyway) for 2022. Cardiac therapy today, with only two or three sessions left, I believe.
Two or three timely links for today.
NYT, Rebecca Solnit, guest opinion essay, 5 Jan 2022: Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies
About the gullibility of those who support right-wing conspiracy theories.
When called upon to believe that Barack Obama was really born in Kenya, millions got in line. When encouraged to believe that the 2012 Sandy Hook murder of twenty children and six adults was a hoax, too many stepped up. When urged to believe that Hillary Clinton was trafficking children in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor with no basement, they bought it, and one of them showed up in the pizza place with a rifle to protect the kids. The fictions fed the frenzies, and the frenzies shaped the crises of 2020 and 2021. The delusions are legion: Secret Democratic cabals of child abusers, millions of undocumented voters, falsehoods about the Covid-19 pandemic and the vaccine.
While much has been said about the moral and political stance of people who support right-wing conspiracy theories, their gullibility is itself alarming. Gullibility means malleability and manipulability. We don’t know if the people who believed the prevailing 2012 conspiracy theories believed the 2016 or 2020 versions, but we do know that a swath of the conservative population is available for the next delusion and the one after that. And on Jan. 6, 2021, we saw that a lot of them were willing to act on those beliefs.
This I think is exactly the key: it’s about community identity, no matter how ridiculous the binding beliefs.
Distinctions between believable and unbelievable, true and false, are not relevant for people who have found that taking up outrageous and disprovable ideas is instead an admission ticket to a community or an identity. Without the yoke of truthfulness around their necks, they can choose beliefs that flatter their worldview or justify their aggression. I sometimes think of this straying into fiction as a kind of libertarianism run amok — we used to say “you’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.” Too many Americans now feel entitled to their own facts. In this too-free marketplace of ideas, they can select or reject ideas, facts or histories to match their goals, because meaning has become transactional.
The other factor: people who are pushing these lies have an agenda, to make money, or stay in power. (The fossil fuel industry; the NRA; the right-wing politicians themselves.) Last para:
Authoritarians don’t just want to control the government, the economy and the military. They want to control the truth. Truth has its own authority, an authority a strongman must defeat at least in the minds of his followers, convincing them to abandon fact, the standards of verification, critical thinking and all the rest. Such people become a standing army awaiting their next command.
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NYT, Francis Fukuyama, guest opinion essay, 5 Jan 2022: One Single Day. That’s All It Took for the World to Look Away From Us.
You could point out to Trump supporters that the US has become the pity-case or laughing-stock of the world, and they not only wouldn’t care, they’d think that just fine, I suspect. Fukuyama points out the US’ decline has been going on for decades.
The Jan. 6 attack on Congress by a mob inspired by former President Donald Trump marked an ominous precedent for U.S. politics. Not since the Civil War had the country failed to effect a peaceful transfer of power, and no previous candidate purposefully contested an election’s results in the face of broad evidence that it was free and fair.
The event continues to reverberate in American politics — but its impact is not just domestic. It has also had a large impact internationally and signals a significant decline in American global power and influence.
The essay goes on about the rising number of global democracies in recent decades, and the decline since 2008. And the rise of authoritarians.
The decline of democracy worldwide is driven by complex forces. Globalization and economic change have left many behind, and a huge cultural divide has emerged between highly educated professionals living in cities and residents of smaller towns with more traditional values. The rise of the internet has weakened elite control over information; we have always disagreed over values, but we now live in separate factual universes. And the desire to belong and have one’s dignity affirmed are often more powerful forces than economic self-interest.
…Ending thus:
The single greatest weakness of the United States today lies in its internal divisions. Conservative pundits have traveled to illiberal Hungary to seek an alternative model, and a dismaying number of Republicans see the Democrats as a greater threat than Russia.
The United States retains a huge amount of economic and military power, but that power is not usable in the absence of domestic political consensus over the country’s international role. If Americans cease to believe in an open, tolerant and liberal society, our capacity to innovate and lead as the world’s foremost economic power will also diminish. Jan. 6 sealed and deepened the country’s divisions, and for that reason it will have consequences echoing across the globe in the years to come.
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Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan, 3 Jan 2022: If American democracy is going to survive, the media must make this crucial shift, subtitled, “Journalists stepped it up in 2021, but now we need a concerted effort”
What could this be about? The essay points to several examples of journalists in NYT, the Atlantic, NPR, and AP, who have pointedly described the past year’s history of the “Big Lie” and its threat to democracy.
But it’s not enough, the writer claims.
But, in general, this pro-democracy coverage is not being “centered” by the media writ large. It’s occasional, not regular; it doesn’t appear to be part of an overall editorial plan that fully recognizes just how much trouble we’re in.
That must change. It’s not merely that there needs to be more of this work. It also needs to be different. For example, it should include a new emphasis on those who are fighting to preserve voting rights and defend democratic norms.
This doesn’t say what I thought it would say: that the mainstream media is too preoccupied by “balance” without taking sides, and for some that’s an existential threat to democracy as all this, maybe the media *should* take sides.
Or: to the article at face value into the context of a larger issue: it’s about how most of the media focuses on the bad, the unusual, the “newsworthy,” and in effect promoting the anti-democratic forces, without giving corresponding coverage to those fighting those forces.
