I am still trying to puzzle these times. Why is the GOP still so wedded to the Big Lie?
Why are something close to 60 percent of the GOP convinced that Trump won the election?
Why does the media not confront the GOP representatives with the one threshold question that matters--do you support the big lie or not? Why are there so many vaccine holdouts? Why are there so many guns and why are we no step closer to banning at least assault weapons? Why has a propaganda channel full of supremely underqualified gasbags and adhere to few journalistic values get far more viewers than CNN or MSNBC?
There are few if any solutions offered in Anne Applebaum’s new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism but it tells us that what we are going through is both global and potentially a turning point in world history. Applebaum, a dual nationality conservative columnist, staff writer for The Atlantic who has reported from all over the world writes illuminatingly about what changed. Her central inspiration is a book written in 1927 by French essayist Julien Benda. The book’s title La Traison des Clercs commonly translated as Treason of the Intellectuals is better understood as the preference for ideological fabrications over truth by journalists and bureaucrats. Benda’s book, Applebaum explains, is prescient because ten years before Stalin and six years before Hitler he nailed the way that even those privileged with status and education would embrace authoritarianism sacrificing logic and critical judgment in the process. Applebaum gets little joy from exposing some of her former friends across Europe and the US who disgraced themselves in their pursuit of something they perceive as higher than truth—typically a mythic past that can provide a sanctuary from the all too rapid change. Such intellectuals Applebaum theorizes get their start down this dark path as a result of becoming troubled by their place in the elite. Many of these treasonous intellectuals found themselves at the end of the cold war bewildered by the so called end of history and were searching for new demons to slay and new utopias to create. Bored with the hard work of democracy and frustrated by the free markets that were leading to the smashing of old elites, intellectuals in Eastern Europe as much as in much as in the US were looking for alternatives. Among the right wing in particular there was a general feeling was that the new order was not producing positive results for the largely white and privileged. In Britain this emotion was expressed in terms of fear that Brussels was diminishing the role of the UK when any rational person would have seen the opposite —that there was an opportunity for the UK to lead the EU. Rejecting that opportunity meant glorifying a mythic past when England was “great” and did not have to compromise with anyone let alone the pernicious Brussels bureaucrats. Boris Johnson a key fabricator of this mythic past created stories from the Belgium capital to fit the prevailing mood emphasizing absurd restrictions on British imports that had zero foundation in fact. Then when they found the Syrian immigration issue and the fear that refugees would come in through Turkey that wanted but was never granted EU membership the story was as the professional journalists say was " too good to check.” Johnson and many of those millions who were looking for someone to blame for their downward mobility together most crucially their allies in the media were all too ready to commit the treason of the clerks--ignoring truth--siding with a comforting storyline. Such forsaking of critical thought would not be so troubling (did not Polonius ask Hamlet to “Get thee glass eyes, and like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not”) if many of them wanted their side to win so desperately that they turned their backs on democracy--and consistently misrepresented the truth. When in 2016 three British judges ruled that Parliament would need to give consent before the UK could withdraw from the EU the Daily Mail a chief collaborator with the Brexit fabricators ran a front page with pictures of the judges alongside the incendiary headline, “Enemies of the People.” Trump went further demonstrating in his term in office not just a contempt for norms but laid on with the help of his ally Fox News the groundwork for the January 6 authoritarian coup that came after his big lie that the election had been stolen.
The big lie is still the foundational brick for GOP loyalty and one that they hoped to run on 2022 and 2024 as large parts of the media have normalized his claim that the election was stolen with 59 percent of Republican voters believing this untruth. Applebaum shows us how in country after country --and particularly in Hungary and Poland the assault on truth has led to authoritarian rule aided and abetted by a class of people who have lost any professional status either as journalists or as supporters of democratic freedoms. They exist in a realm of alternative facts, of conspiracy theories and in narratives that attribute sinister motives to democrats who are always plotting to bring about some kind of world state --one on which individual freedoms are stamped on.
The question remains how in the US did the party of Reagan and optimism about the US place in the world can embrace Trump’s nightmare dystopia is something of a mystery. We can point to 9/11--the madness that induced Bush to invade two countries --and start “endless wars'' in both Afghanistan and Iraq significantly contributed to the current state--in that after it was revealed these wars were built on lies and fabrications --a much larger set of voters than we probably knew grew disgusted with politics. A greed induced set of economic collapses did not help matters in which the banks were bailed out while millions of people lost their homes and their economic futures.
Then as Kurt Anderson puts it in his latest book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America “technology and globalization” took over as a job killing tag team.” There was no doubt that the country was radicalized by these events as Paul Starr, a Princeton economist put it, America no longer was a center-right country but rather a country with a “center right” political elite and a “polarized electorate torn between parties on the far right and center left.” Anderson now feels we are at a pivot point ---our volatile electorate --hit by Covid and an uncertain economy could tilt towards disaster or with the right leadership tilt towards a more democratic egalitarian future. Anderson references two countries that made different choices--Argentina a century ago was the tenth richest country and made a series of choices that meant that their GDP is equivalent to some of the poorest African countries. China in the late 1970s was failing to even feed its people but today its per capita income is ten to fifteen times higher. The US indeed in the 1930s could have sunk from being the world power it became were it not for FDR’s leadership in moving us out using the full forces of the federal government from deep depression. To get there we will need new more positive and powerful narratives to overcome the seductive lure of authoritarianism. It will be hard work. The big lie has to be defeated. We need new dynamic thinking about how to rebuild the communities that have been decimated by free market economic forces, we need a new green economy that can counter climate change--we need to quiet the voices of ethnic hate by embracing the American motto “e pluribus unum” Applebaum ends her heartfelt book on a sobering note by quoting the Italian author Ignazio Silone, who lived through a series of communist and fascist governments
“Political regimes come and go but bad habits remain” --the worst of these habits is nihilism, “a disease of the spirit which can be diagnosed only by those who are immune from it or have been cured of it but to which most people are quite oblivious, since they think it corresponds to a perfectly natural mode of being.” We must in other words redouble our efforts to find another path. Surely one that has not been tried very much is sitting down and talking with each other --finding forums where sound bites and lazy thinking and hateful speech are not the norm will mean we will have to leave our social media devices at home and walk out into the market square and engage and work like to rebuild our frayed democracy.
Thanks Bob--just re-edited as full of typos I missed. Thanks old sport for passing it on
Thanks for sharing. I'll pass it on.