I was heading into work and heard Wisconsin writer Mike McCabe on the radio, and he mentioned
his most recent substack column, which discussed how so much of today's political discourse exists in a Land of Make-Believe.
On stage stands a very famous man, perhaps sensing his appeal is wearing thin, maybe fearing what the mileage on his tread could mean to his future prospects. The very famous man, brimming with intention, certain the willing and able are large in number, hurls an audacious lie to the wind, confident it will float as far and wide as a dandelion’s seeds.
In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs . . . they’re eating the cats.
He didn’t care it wasn’t true, didn’t give a thought to how many this preposterous yet vicious lie would hurt. The very famous man’s consort, undoubtedly sensing his railcar is hitched to a runaway train, surely fearing the coming wreck, nevertheless did not try jumping to safety. He stayed on board.
If I have to create stories . . . then that’s what I’m going to do.
Lies like these ones are akin to nuclear blasts, causing devastation at ground zero before showering toxic fallout over a wide radius. There are the immediate casualties. Then there’s the collateral damage.
McCabe then mentions that a reader complained about McCabe's decision to write a novel, as there was too much fiction in our political world, and we didn't more in another form. McCabe uses that comment to note that the barrage of Trumpian lies in 2024 America is limiting the ability of many of us to see things as they are, and more importantly, to visualize what things can become.
Several things bother me about this reader’s reaction. It conflates fiction writing and dishonesty, as if fiction and false mean the same thing. They do not. It also conflates factuality and truth. The two can go hand in hand, but that doesn’t make them exactly alike. Nonfiction is confined by facts, and that can prevent the whole truth from being told. Fiction is more unbounded, depending on imagination to identify and describe encompassing truths. Works of nonfiction or fiction both can lie. Either can speak truth.
Most troubling to me is how pervasive and persistent dishonesty can disparage and discourage imagination. If we stick to the facts before us and call off the search for yet undiscovered truths, hope for human progress is lost. If we trust only what currently is and stop trying to imagine what could be, the potential of civilization to advance is crippled.
And when certain people spend all of their time being scared about things that aren’t real, they don’t care to go outside and see what’s actually happening, and deal with that reality. It limits our growth, and sets us back.
Republicans know they can’t win in November if the election is based on reality. So they do things such as blowing up isolated incidents into “rampant migrant crime” while ignoring the myriad more crimes that are committed by Americans with guns and committed against women on a daily basis.
This is also why Republicans keep having ads where
GOP activists everyday voters complain about “crushing inflation” when inflation has been under control for the last 18 months, to a point where the Federal Reserve is now cutting interest rates. GOPs also never mention that
ever-increasing corporate profits are likely a significant reason behind the price rises of the 2020s, because that would require them to mention that concern and possibly have to give a solution to it. And they'd have to introduce that into the BubbleWorld that many GOP-leaning voters live in, which is not something GOPs want.
And why this is done is illustrated in an excellent column from Rick Perlstein in the American Prospect today.
"Journalistic norms are not a suicide pact." prospect.org/politics/202...
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— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein.bsky.social) October 2, 2024 at 9:36 AM
He starts the column by looking back at an article from 2004 in The New Republic written by a young Chris Hayes, who was walking around Wisconsin trying to figure out what undecided voters wanted in an election that would be decided by less than 1% up here.
The future MSNBC host’s TNR piece was an account of the lessons he learned canvassing among undecided voters in Wisconsin for John Kerry. It incinerates a basic foundation of how political junkies think: “Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the ‘issues.’ That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs.”
Chris noted that while there were a few people he talked to like that, “such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number … the very concept of the ‘issue’ seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to.”
Which means that there isn't a lot of deep analysis going on with these voters. They're just going on vibes and feelings.
And that's where Trumpian idiocy comes in, because by giving simple reasons and shallow statements to deal with real, complex problems, it takes the place of the honest, hard work and adjustments that real solutions require. Perlstein says that this allows for weak, vulnerable Americans to be susceptible to loudmouthed strongmen who don't ask anything more of them beyond "blame these others for why things are going wrong for you" and not have to put any more effort to improve your life.
Millions of pages have been filled by scholars explaining the psychological appeal of fascism, most converging on the blunt fact that it offers the fantasy of reversion to an infantile state, where nothing can come and harm you, because you will be protected by an all-powerful figure who will always put you first, always put you first. It is simply indisputable that this promise can seduce and transform even intelligent, apparently mature, kind-hearted people formerly committed to liberal politics. I’ve written before in this column about the extraordinary film The Brainwashing of My Dad, in which director Jen Senko describes the transformation of her Kennedy-liberal dad under the influence of right-wing talk radio and Fox News—and also how, after she explained the premise of her film for a Kickstarter campaign, scores of people came out of the woodwork to share similar stories about their own family members.
I’ve learned a lot about the psychological dynamics at work from the X feed of a psychologist named Julie Hotard, who drills down on the techniques Fox uses to trigger infantilization in viewers. The people at Fox who devise these scripts, one imagines, are pretty sophisticated people. Trump’s gift is to be able to grunt out the same stuff just from his gut. Trump’s appeals have become noticeably more infantile in precisely this way. When he addresses women voters, for instance: “I am your protector. I want to be your protector … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger …”...
Perlstein then combines Hayes' observations of undecided Sconnies from 20 years ago, and how these types of voters are basically deciding what American reality they are going to live in.
I imagine that what at least some of them — certainly more than those supposedly entering the two candidates’ issue positions onto spreadsheets to study, ruling out the candidate not “specific” enough about their fiscal policies — are undecided because they are poised at a threshold. “Undecided” is a way station between the final surrender to the Trumpian fantasy, and all the imaginary comforts it offers, and sticking with the rest of us in the reality-based community, despite all the existential terrors the real world affords.
It really feels like this election comes down to a relatively straightforward question. Do you believe that the country is going downhill, times are tough, and scary brown people are marauding the streets and making you cower in your basement? Or do you go outside, touch grass, look around, and realize things are much better than the hellscape we were in 4 years ago. And that you want to live in a diverse and becalmed country where respect for others is a virtue, versus something to be taken advantage of.
It seems like an easy choice, but it also involves thinking and making an effort to care. What MAGA is counting on is that enough Americans won’t do those things, and allow them to grab power through fear, idiocy, and self-centeredness. And if the bad guys win, we will have rulers that are not based in reality, dealing with non-problems and residing in BubbleWorld instead of real life.
The MAGA-GOPs would be using their power to actively build their Bubble of BS higher, and put those lies and deflections into policies and laws. We would then have a country that wouldn't be worth saving, because enough of its citizenry has decided it doesn't want to deal with reality, and there will be no sense for those of us living in the reality-based community to exert any effort to dig these jackwagons out of the hole that MAGAts will have put us in.
