In the August 9, 2021 issue of The New Yorker, investigative reporter Jane Mayer has a long article titled The Big Money Behind the Big Lie that looks at how “Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.” These conservative groups, formerly more focused on issues like abortion, seem to have coalesced around efforts to pass voter suppression laws nationwide. It is an interesting article that focuses on what is going on with the so-called ‘election audit’ in Maricopa country in Arizona that went heavily for Joe Biden, but embeds that in the larger national context of undermining belief in the integrity of elections as a way of overturning results that they do not like. If they succeed in overturning the Arizona result, the plan is to mount similar challenges in Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia.
The article explores many facets of the American political psyche but there was one section that I found helpful in understanding something that has been puzzling me. We have seen an explosion of craziness recently in the US, with people not just believing in all manner of bizarre things but going to public forums and expressing ideas that in former times would have branded them as out-and-out nutcases. My puzzlement was whether the extent of this kind of craziness, where people seemed to have fallen down all manner of rabbit holes that led them to conspiratorial thinking, was a recent phenomenon or whether that susceptibility was always there, just lying dormant, and what has changed is that now there are more rabbit holes to fall into, aided and abetted by the Trump cult. Since I do not believe that people as a whole change that much, my suspicion is that such people and beliefs were always out there but dormant, and that they are now just out in the open.
The weirdest of the rabbit holes is the one that ends up with people thinking that there was massive fraud in the 2020 election and that is why Trump lost. It looks like that has been the big rabbit hole, the gateway to other crazy beliefs, drawing them into anti-vaccination and anti-mask holes, let alone the hole about lizard people and pedophiles running rampant among the political leadership of the Democratic party.
There is always the occasional fraud in elections, sometimes inadvertent because people make errors such as not knowing that their registration has lapsed or voting in the wrong precinct, but all serious observers have concluded that the scale of it is minuscule and nowhere near enough to overturn the results of any major election. Furthermore, deliberately voting illegally simply does not pay. The cost-benefit analysis is overwhelmingly negative. A person convicted of election fraud can face a hefty prison sentence and lose all manner of future civic privileges. Providing a single vote for a candidate is nowhere close to being worth the risk. So why is there such a strong belief that many people are taking pointless risks?
Mayer explains:
As Phil Keisling, a former secretary of state in Oregon, who pioneered universal voting by mail, has said, “Voters don’t cast fraudulent ballots for the same reason counterfeiters don’t manufacture pennies—it doesn’t pay.”
What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”
…Barack Obama’s election in 2008 made plain that the voting-rights wars were fuelled, in no small part, by racial animus. Bigoted conspiracists, including Trump, spent years trying to undermine the result by falsely claiming that Obama wasn’t born in America. Birtherism, which attempted to undercut a landmark election in which the turnout rate among Black voters nearly matched that of whites, was a progenitor of the Big Lie. As Penda Hair, a founder of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, told me, conservatives were looking at Obama’s victory “and saying, ‘We’ve got to clamp things down’—they’d always tried to suppress the Black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.”
…Even Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who for years led the Party’s election-law fights, recently conceded to the Times that “a party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”
…It would be tempting for [Republican member of the Maricopa county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill] Gates, a lifetime Republican with political ambitions, to blame only Trump for his party’s anti-democratic turn. But he has few such illusions. What’s really going on, he believes, is a reactionary backlash against Obama: “I’ve thought about it a lot. I believe the election of President Obama frightened a lot of Americans.” Gates argues that the fear isn’t entirely about race. He thinks it’s also about cosmopolitanism, secularism, and other contemporary values that make white conservatives uncomfortable. But in the end, he said, “the diversification of America is frightening to a lot of people in my party.”
Gates believes that his party’s reaction may backfire. Polls show that, although the Arizona audit is wildly popular among Republican voters in the state, it alienates independents, who constitute approximately a third of the state’s electorate—and whose support is necessary for statewide candidates to win.
…Back in Arizona, where the auditors are demanding still more time, Gates believes that the Big Lie has become a “grift” used to motivate Republican voters and donors to support conservative candidates and political groups. “The sad thing is that there are probably millions of people—hardworking, good Americans, maybe retired—who have paid their taxes, always followed the law, and they truly believe this, because of what they’ve been fed by their leaders,” he said. “And what’s so dispiriting is that the people who are pushing it from the top? They know better.”
So it all comes down to an old idea that dates back to the origins of America, that the US has been chosen by God to be a white Christian country and that that it is only such people who should be in charge or get to decide who should be in charge. It is a belief that has survived the Civil War and Reconstruction and led to the systematic suppression of the rights of non-white people through Jim Crow laws, racist immigration policies, and now with voter suppression efforts.
“Gates believes that the Big Lie has become a “grift” used to motivate Republican voters and donors to support conservative candidates and political groups”
It always was just that. Republican “policy” and more importantly, strategy, has been built on lies and repeated pushing of lies since reagan showed that blatant falsehoods coupled with health doses of racism, would sway elections. the difference in magnitude between reagan’s years and now is easily identified: reagan didn’t have a widely viewed PR corporation the way the modern right has with Fox, and reagan didn’t have have social platforms ready and willing to spread his messages on an almost unlimited scale.
Well, sort of…. I don’t think it needs to depend on many ideas/beliefs which are all that specific. Indeed, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? The less it’s tied to specific, tangible policies from conservatives (many of which have never been especially popular), the easier it is to convince a large swath of voters that maybe these assholes have a legitimate point. In other words, this implies more than you might realize:
A lot of people aren’t so enamored with their stupid fights about abortion or gays or guns or racism or what have you. This much is clear. For a minority, the “culture war” shit is still practically everything, so sure, they do still toss in that red meat here or there, in order to appease their most rabid supporters. In fact, that stuff is basically the only thing you ever hear in terms of an actual consistent policy message, even when the issue at hand doesn’t have anything to do with it. They will find a way to squeeze it into the story anyway.
However, for the rest, they have to manufacture something else — anything else — which would do the job of keeping conservatives in power (their only goal). “Those votes aren’t valid” or “I call shenanigans on the election” is a perfect fit for this, because it’s not saying much about how those assholes would govern if they won…. Except for the obvious I guess: that they are lying, authoritarian, anti-democratic blowhards, which is apparently still a safe thing to be for run-of-the-mill conservative voters. But when you start to add more details about what they’d choose to do in office, that’s when the cracks start to appear.
Not saying they’re equivalent, but for something that’s sort of roughly analogous, I think you could explain a lot of the “success” of Aristotelian physics and the classical elements and so on, which it’s worth pointing out endured for many centuries, with the fact that those weren’t being pinned down to very specific, easily testable predictions that could have led at least some people to recognize the problems (if there were any to find) and come up with other theories. It was just failing to say a lot of empirical things that should’ve been said — like nailing jello to the wall, as they say. That just makes it harder to analyze, much less criticize, harder to even formulate some conceivable alternatives and consider whether those might be better.
Obviously, religious doctrines tend to work this way too: make it very hard to figure out what is even being said about the world or how those doctrines should be interpreted, and it may stick around for a very long time. That’s a feature, not a bug. I mean, okay, maybe you want to say people are broken, but it “works” from the perspective of the religion.
Yet it’s the *liberals* who are playing “identity politics.” They don’t see white as an identity like fish don’t notice water.
Isn’t it also that people have a difficult time believing that their preferred candidate lost, despite them being historically unpopular?
A large number of Clinton supporters concocted elaborate conspiracies to explain her defeat, for the most part ignoring that she was a particularly weak candidate.
People just don’t like to think that their impressions about the strength of the candidate were wrong, and that they lost.
I’m sure that’s also true. But the election-rigging nonsense was not the sort of spontaneous, grassroots response that individual voters might have as a psychological defense mechanism, independently and after the fact, when they find out that they lost. It had been deliberately cultivated by the party and the Trump campaign, that the 2020 election would and should be theirs to steal (by claiming that it was going to be stolen by the Dems). Trump was saying similar things about not accepting election results even back in the 2016 campaign, with very little push back from within his party (only from Democrats). I don’t remember which asshole pseudo-journalist came up with the idea of asking him whether would accept, as if that’s a thing he can legitimately do, but there was already a lot of Kool-Aid drinking going on whenever that began to sound like a reasonable thing to ask.
Also, a big one I failed to mention above: birtherism is more or less just the claim that Obama couldn’t have legitimately won the election. Since (almost) nobody would ever believe Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden are Kenyan jihadists or some such thing (although they could still be lizard people, Marxists, etc.), you just have to change some of the premises of that argument a little bit. It can definitely still be racist, though.
@sweigold: Yet, Hillary Clinton actually won the popular vote.
If you want to hear fantasy, listen to the people who insist that St. Bernie--despite not being a Democrat and clearly not the first choice of people who vote for Democrats--was the only good candidate to ever run.
K @#7
Yet on these pages at this pont the only people who bring up “St Bernie” are people sayng what you are saying. Where are these people you talk of?
NB I don’t actually care, I’m not American so it’s not as if I have a say in how you f^ck the rest of the world.
@Jazzlet:where are these people? Were you not here at all during the last 5 years? I know you have because I have seen your name. We were treated to overwrought wailing that people were “Doing everything POSSIBLE to keep Bernie from being elected” (aka voting for someone else). The wailing and gnashing of teeth, the lies told, the never-ending drama of it all. Anyone who dared venture that Bernie was not the savior of all mankind was branded “corporate” and an enemy of the commentariat.
Your petulant response that you’re not American so you have no say in American politics makes me wonder why you’re commenting, then? Like the people who say “Needless to say” and then proceed to say the thing, clearly you have an opinion, and your feelings are hurt over…something?
We have seen an explosion of craziness recently in the US, with people not just believing in all manner of bizarre things but going to public forums and expressing ideas that in former times would have branded them as out-and-out nutcases.
This seems to have been the norm since before the USA came into existance.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
Kurt Andersen
ISBN 978-1400067213
“The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year.”—Lawrence O’Donnell How did we get here? In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, “fake news” moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we’ve never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book.