On the brink of the election, most polls are predicting a brutal result for Democrats: majorities likely lost in both chambers, a spring that may feature legislative deadlock and a grotesquely contrived impeachment trial. The Republican legislators cruising into gerrymandered seats promise to be the flakiest crew yet. A majority of them have campaigned on the claim that the 2020 election was stolen and that Joe Biden is not legitimately the president.
This, of course, is properly speaking not a belief at all, but just a shibboleth, something you have to say to be accepted into the club. Stolen by whom, and how, and how do you know? Such elemental factual questions, the first ones a cop asks when called to the scene, have never been aired at all, because even the most ardent deniers understand that they are beside the point.
When a belief is really a “belief,” something said to ensure tribal membership, it is almost better that it be preposterous.That increases its potency as a purity test. You swallow the goldfish to be accepted into the fraternity.You wear that ridiculous hat to show you are a Moose or a Shriner. You proclaim your belief in the unbelievable to show how much you love the tribe.
Of course we all engage in bits of mythical thinking here and there, keeping little bits of crazy cordoned off in corners of the mind where they do little harm. Your neighborhood pastor, with his sensible suit and his Lexus and his 401K, will still tell you yes, Noah really did get all those animals onto the Ark, and yes, Eve really did talk to the snake in Eden. So far no real problem. Those things are not factually true, but they have their own kind of expressive truth, and you can take them figuratively if you like.
We Dems have our myths too, and a cancel culture that can sometimes be nearly as brutal and suffocating as the one on the right.
But when the fantasy becomes literal, when you must repeat it incessantly, when corollaries are drawn from it, when it becomes the pretext for extracting concrete concessions in reality, it becomes something far more sinister. Anyone can understand crying "We were robbed" in a moment of pain and disappointment. It expresses something real, it has that kind of truth. It is only when the pained outcry hardens into doctrine that it begins to oppress and blind and mislead. Then it augurs disaster both for those who (supposedly) believe it and those who know better.
Election deniers are not crazy, exactly. They still know that red means stop and green means go and four quarters make a dollar. They do not cook and eat their pets. When and if they do get in, they will sometimes have surprisingly rational things to say about specific bills, and they will probably not dance naked under the Rotunda.
But the deniers are not honestly mistaken, either. They are deeply cynical, angry, and determined to have their way with the rest of us, no matter what honesty and fairness dictate. They will say anything in order to take power, and they seem to want us to know that, telling their Big Lie over and over but in ever more perfunctory, formulaic terms. They have traded in their intellectual integrity for the mean solace of a terrified mob membership.
That is another reason we have arrived at this absurdist moment in American politics. When the lie you tell is truly Big, something no child could ever fall for, when both you and your opponent see this perfectly well, its very absurdity increases its potency as a threat and sweetens the eventual tang of victory if you get there. Epistemological terrorism, you might call it, or disinformation bullying. The aim is not persuasion, but subjugation and control and ultimate degradation of the losers.The more brazen the lie, the better. Someone who refuses to be ruled or intimidated by truth itself, who looks at you with a straight face and says something like “the sun rises in the west” or “the governors of Texas and Florida are nice people” – that’s a person to be feared. He wants to enslave your intellect, Orwell style, en route to enslaving the rest of you.
In gloomy anticipation of poor electoral results, MSNBC and CNN have lately taken to rank-ordering “voter concerns,” as if each existed in its own neat vacuum. “Inflation and the economy” always comes out way on top, 51% or so, while “democracy” or “the threat to democracy” comes far behind. But this is like saying you like your heart better than your lungs. Some things are just deal breakers, no matter where you (perhaps confusedly) rank them. The economy will not matter so much, long term, if democracy goes down and these aspiring tyrants take over. And democracy will still matter very much, say I, even if the economy sinks far deeper into post-Covid misery than it has so far. (We Ds have abjectly failed to get our current woes, quite mild when all’s said, into proper historical perspective.)
Someone who runs for office this time but denies the legitimacy of 2020, knowing better all the while, and knowing you know better, has severed all ties to honesty and fair dealing, staking his claim on the basis of nothing but naked will and power. He is telling you plainly enough that he means to overpower and enslave you, and what are you going to do about it, anyway?
For God’s sake vote, people. There’s still time, and it might be your last chance, ever.
