- A story about the right’s “50-year-plot” to wreck democracy, and attendant thoughts about how conservatives reject one kind of relativism, and embrace another;
- The credulousness of conservatives;
- Notes from the fringe: vaccines; rationalizing Hannibal Lecter; Democrats are wolves; wives afraid of husbands seeing their votes; Trump’s endless false claims.
Here’s a piece today that caught my eye because I wondered if it aligns with other recent pieces about the history of the past few decades — the conservative swing into existential panic ever since civil rights movement in the 1960s; yesterday’s piece about the rise of the “nones,” itself a reaction to conservative extremism. As it turned out, it’s interesting as much for prompting thoughts about ‘relativism.’
Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, 16 Aug 2024: Unpacking the right’s “50-year plot” to wreck democracy — and why it might work, subtitled “Author David Daley on the far right’s long-term “Antidemocratic” strategy, and how we just might beat it”
This is an interview with David Daley, author of a new book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections, just published on August 6th.
Now of course the first thought we might have about this book and its subtitle is: “50-year plot”? Are we talking some kind of conspiracy theory? And if not, who’s behind it, and where’s the evidence?
From O’Hehir’s opening summary:
To boil the narrative down to its essentials, Daley demonstrates that leading conservatives of the 1970s, alienated and scandalized by the increasingly liberal tenure of political and legal reasoning in America, eventually realized they had to build an entire alternative system.
Arguing for their cherished culture-war positions on racial, sexual and religious issues piece by piece, before liberal judges or Democratic state legislatures, led only to defeat. What a few impressively farsighted right-wing thinkers conceived and then created — and it took liberals far too long to notice this — was a new intellectual and political apparatus that would produce well-trained, highly capable lawyers and judges devoted to reframing constitutional law around “originalism” and (as they saw it) redeeming the promise of a white-dominated, overtly Christian nation from the dangerous moral drift of cultural relativism and increasing diversity.
Note the part about how “arguing” their case didn’t work.
The interview goes into some detail of the history of this period, how in a sense it all began with Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell — who is described as “sort of a classic Southern lawyer, a genteel racist” who “never met a Black man as an equal” — and a lawyer named Michael Horowitz, who realized that Republicans needed smarter lawyers, and so set about creating them. Thus our current Supreme Court. (So there’s plenty of historical evidence, right in plain site.)
The interviewer addresses the concern I just stated.
In the book you repeatedly explain that the “50-year plot” you write about is not a conspiracy theory. It’s understandable that people are focused on the proximate threat of Donald Trump, but the Trump administration, as you just said, was a clown show. When you have Rudy Giuliani or Cleta Mitchell or Sidney Powell involved, it’s all going to go south. Those people were not competent, not well-informed, not good with the law. But that’s changed, right? Now there are many people who are competent, well-informed, intelligent and good with the law who have been involved for decades in building for a moment like this.
I think that’s exactly right. …
That’s all very interesting; certainly it’s consistent with my understanding of political and religious history of the past 60 years. But I was struck by the line above about “the dangerous moral drift of cultural relativism and increasing diversity.”
Relativism is a relative word. As used here, it’s the fear of conservatives that their particular mode of life is not the central, unchanging, proper mode of existence, always threatened by the existence of people unlike themselves. They fear that there are other moral standards other than their own, Biblically-derived ones — never mind that Christians are famous for not following their own moral codes. Yet in fact, morality *is*, and should be relative — it changes with circumstances and knowledge, as we’ve seen in books recently read by Joshua Greene and Steven Pinker. We don’t live in small tribes on the Savannah anymore.
It occurs to me that there’s another way in conservatives actually embrace relativism: about reality itself. They embrace a worldview in which the Earth and the universe were constructed for humans and is only 6000 years old, and (some of them anyway) believe in a flat earth and a literal firmament over our heads. Despite the gathering knowledge over the past 500 years — or 3000 years — that these things are simply not true. As I just said yesterday: the supernatural claims of religions have been discredited. Yet a substantial number of Christians cling to them, and reject the understanding of science that has brought them modern medicine (via an understanding of evolution, of e.g. antibiotics) and the GPS system (of relativity) that power modern life. (They even have their own playground website, Conservapedia, in which they claim relativity, and of course evolution, are false. They’re living in a fantasy, theme-park world. Their only defense is to insist that their “beliefs” must be respected.)
\\\
Rejecting the consensus understanding of the world, and living by fables, makes them extremely credulous.
JMG, from New York Post, 16 Aug 2024: GOP Rep Vows Federal Probe Into “Alien Mummies”
\
The Morning Heresy, Jeff Dellinger, 16 Aug 2024: “Indistinguishable From Random Guessing” – New SkeptiLab, an Astrological Faceplant, and the Secrets of Project 2025
This item:
Earlier this year, a group of researchers “ran a small study that attempted to predict 37 facts about people’s lives using their astrological sun signs.” As you’d expect, it did not go well for the astrology crowd. After much online backlash, the team created a new, larger study (with consultation from six astrologers) “so that predictions use a person’s entire astrological chart.”
Once again,it did not go well for the astrologers.
The study then enlisted 152 experienced astrologers who each received a lot of information about twelve real people…The astrologers had to determine the person’s real natal chart — the other four were decoys. […]
Despite their confidence, astrologers as a group performed at levels indistinguishable from random guessing. On average, they got 2.49 out of 12 matches correct, close to the 2.4 correct matches expected by chance.
When I was growing up I read pieces by Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan that easily discredited astrology. Why does anyone still believe this stuff, sixty years later? (Well, because human credulity endures; humans do not live by reality; they reject science in favor of beliefs of tribe and family and friends; and so on and on.)
\\\
From the fringe. It’s like the proverbial car crash; you can’t look away.
Vox, 14 Aug 2024: Trump’s campaign against public health is back on, subtitled “The former president says he’ll block funding for US schools that require vaccines.”
\
Boing Boing, 14 Aug 2024: The media actually discussing how crazy the stuff Trump says is
The example is how MAGA fans rationalize Trump’s incoherent remarks about Hannibal Lecter.
“First time I heard it, I was like, ‘What?’ But after I heard it a couple of times, it was like, ‘Oh I get the connection now,'” said Jim Scandle, 72. “He’s trying to make the point that a lot of these people that are coming illegally in this country are from mental institutions, just like Hannibal Lecter. And so you know, it has nothing to do with Hannibal Lecter except the fact that he was in a mental institution.”
These are not smart people.
\
LGBTQNation, Daniel Villareal, 13 Aug 2024: JD Vance’s foreword to Project 2025 founder’s book says Democrats are “wolves” who must be killed, subtitled “He also suggests that ‘liberals’ have poisoned America’s soil.”
\
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 14 Aug 2024: The big question touching a nerve this election: “Can my husband find out who I am voting for?”, subtitled “November may come down to a battle between controlling men and women who just want their freedom”
\
CNN, 13 Aug 2024: Fact check: Trump made at least 20 false claims in his conversation with Elon Musk
Because, as with the reality relativists above, what is real is whatever you claim it to be, as long as your fans believe it!
