We all know The Big Lie exists, and is central to any future Republican platform.
But what is it, exactly? What components came together to make it? Who promoted these things, and what do they say about them today?
Cognitive Dissonance 101.
Errol Morris wrote a book about photography called Believing is Seeing. I think it's such an apt name. We all see the things that we already believe to be true, and often times we're correct, but not because we've weighed the evidence...rather just because what everyone believes is often true. But the rubber really meets the road in these special cases where the thing is so obviously untrue to everyone who doesn't already believe it. How do you pierce that shell? Everything they've proposed has been debunked, and most of them acknowledge the debunking but then just move onto the next thing, because the evidence itself is beside the point. The bigger truth is the actual point, but I can't quite pinpoint what the bigger truth really is in this case. Is it really about the election? Is it about fealty to Trump as a sort of savior? Is it just general distrust of all of our liberal institutions? It's actually fascinating if you can stop thinking about the fact that they're trying to ruin our system of government for a second.
Ohhh, it feels like time for an e-hubski badtime story :D! So sorry about all of this. The Big Lie is arguably the most refined progression of Trumpism so far, but MAGA’s also kinda always been a version of: “I know I won. I deserved to win, because I’m righteous, and if I seemed to lose, it’s because you cheated. You cheated because you’re evil, which means that I should cheat harder because I’m not evil, and I deserve to win. I’ve always won, because good always wins, and I’m good. Frankly, I’m scared about what I might have to do to you next in the name of goodness.” Fascism is so infantile. It’s wild. It is the simplest thing. Primal. And we thought we’d found ways to make sure it couldn’t happen again, or that we’d learned our lesson. lol. The history books will probably say of America that at the moment of the most extreme wealth inequality ever, we had the fascist revolution required to sustain and further that inequality. It doesn’t matter that most of Trump’s base will almost certainly see further economic erosion under Trump or whoever. Fascism is a feeling. A soft, warm comfort blanket. Like, hey, The Big Lie. The combination of social media, Trump, and Murdoch (and others) is too much. Fox is currently shitting bricks and slandering the new disinformation effort announcement by DHS. In my deepest fantasy, DHS plans to investigate financial ties between media and oligarchs, foreign and domestic, right wing and left, I don’t care. I don’t know how else they plan to determine what is or is not willful disinformation except by proving foreign funding from hostile countries. And, again, because this is a fantasy, the DOJ brings charges against some interesting people, all before 2025. The 2000 race in Florida was rough, and I think the democrats had some legitimate technical/procedural concerns, and uhhhh the Bush(es) conflict of interest looks very, very bad. But now, maybe we should all really appreciate Al Gore’s gracefully conceding the race. Even if Trump dies in prison, DeSantis or whoever will take over the brand, and the movement is super unlikely to de-radicalize. They’ll quickly need another carnival barker, though, DeSantis is pretty boring. Giullfoyle? Candace Owens? Palin II? Shouldn’t be long before the movement no longer really needs a strong voting base anyway, obviously a seizure of voting materials and procedures and related local offices is already in the works by people who “feel” that the last election was stolen. And they feel like it’s their turn to do some revenge stealing. It’s possible that 2020 was the last election that we definitively knew what the outcome was for almost every office. If we can’t tell whether Trump legitimately wins 2024 or not, Trumpism will be to blame, and Trump will congratulate himself and begin moving back into the White House. Recent stories suggesting an awareness of Mike Pence to a potential plot among the secret service to whisk him away in a car and prevent him from certifying the vote on J6 bode poorly. Surely you’ve seen a Timothy Snyder interview or two. This one is fascinating now, five years later. And the most hardcore Trumpists did, in fact, try to gaslight us on J6, blaming it on Antifa terrorists and FBI provocateurs to use it as justification for whatever they needed; delaying the vote, deflecting blame, hell maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene’s suggestion of declaring “Marshall Law”. It all seemed ludicrous at the time, but it’s been pretty mainstreamed since. When a guy like Snyder has a model, makes a prediction, and the prediction comes almost exactly to pass, it’s hard to ignore his continued five-alarm-fire outlook on American politics. So far, the recent string of catastrophes (covid, global warming looming, Ukraine/inflation, even the insurrection itself) have been used to successfully divide and radicalize us more. What will it take to force the introspection required for Americans to abandon our homegrown fascism? Fucking yikes. ['X0Oo_am_Unitoinz'_e-hubski_bAdtimes_dairy_oO0X'] post 10/??
The success of the Big Lie happened because the people previously benefiting from entrenched power structures are grappling with the fact that they're losing control of American politics and culture. Their legitimate grievances, like the hollowing out of the middle class, manufacturing jobs moving overseas, automation taking away agricultural jobs, etc. have been successfully redirected and inflamed to permit and even require anti-American principles and actions. Emotionally-driven decisions are one fine side effect. Perhaps never before has class warfare so successfully hoodwinked such a huge swath of people into waging cultural warfare against others who should be their allies, if the wealthy class is to remain in check. Honestly you could say the same things about coastal urban democrats, but they're not quite as divorced from reality, and typically less armed and less inclined to political violence. At least for now. The fact that we're unequipped to handle such an obvious falsehood probably means that the American experiment will fail. We're well into the process. At least you won't feel the need to waste worktime on a Tuesday voting. You'll probably still have the option for quite a few elections, but our ability to effect change through the ballot box will wane from here on out. Not that things have ever been anywhere near ideal in this country, to be fair, but it can get a whole lot worse. More immediate predictions: I'm still betting on Trump as Speaker of the House from 2023 - 2025 (again, cannot wait to see McCarthy's face, and now all the McCarthy tapes that leaked probably make a Trump Speaker bid even just a little more likely). They might impeach Biden at least three times to outdo the two impeachments of Trump. What's a more interesting question is whether or not Trump would step down as Speaker if he is also installed back into the presidency. I doubt it ("Trump critics allege that he has trouble relinquishing power"). Seriously, think of the most ridiculously unconstitutional things that you can, and then expect them to happen. He nominates himself for a 10th chair on SCOTUS, to oversee and overrule the rest, if need be ("Super SCOTUS, people are saying. Double Supreme! Can you believe it, like a boss of the other robes, it's kind of, because, excuse me, everybody knows I've always been the best boss ever in the history of bossing.")? The consolidation of all three branches of government into a single man is hilarious ("Look, folks, I check myself. My checks never bounce, and I have very good balance! So checks and balances, really, it's worked out, the founding fathers didn't have a Trump at the time, or else, right away, they would know to do this.")
I get the feeling that the Russian Revolution and the Cultural Revolution in China followed a similar path... committing to things you knew were not true because it help solidify your position in your clique. Then there are too many people in the clique, so you make the lies even more ridiculous, and the "true believers" have to get loonier and loonier to separate themselves from the "mainstream". It's the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, all the way down, until the utterly lunatic fringe is all that is left... an irrelevant, powerless minority of people who have gone so far down the rabbit hole they are unrecoverable. And then they get their heads cut off. (historically)
Right, and this is a big problem in America at the moment. The two party system, for all its other failings, is at least supposed to moderate extremism, since you can always flip to the opposition if one side gets too extreme. But what we have now looks a lot more like 2 one party systems, given the regional specificity of the parties. No matter what one’s specific political leanings are, one should never think things are going to be better under one party rule. Fails everywhere.