Democracy after Trump? The continuing problem of a party built on lies and conspiracy theories

 Donald Trump will never concede the 2020 election in any formal terms.  His pathetically fragile ego will never permit it, and his life has always been built around self-serving lies.  His behavior now was predictable from the beginning.  Yet, we are at least fortunate that the courts are laughing at his lies.

Laughter is the key.  Laugh at how small he is.  This is the secret to beating him into final submission, and to making him feel bad, which is a victory in and of itself.  Laugh at the pathetic loser as he cries his little tears.

Laugh at his tears of self-pity, and laugh at everyone around him.

But understand that all is not well.  Going into the 2020 election, I was not sanguine about the state of American democracy, and in assessing American democracy, I have focused on two dimensions of the multifaceted concept.  American democracy, I argued, has crumbled with the loss of two vital features:  checks-and-balances, and a unified understanding of fact.  I will return to the concept of checks-and-balances, which we may have the potential to resurrect, but my focus for this morning is truth.  Short version:  we still have a big problem.  The problem predates Trump, but he made it worse, and I don't know if there is any going back.

We cannot have anything like small-d democratic deliberation without facts.  No postmodernist bullshit here, and I'm not going to split hairs on the difference between "truth" and "fact."  Philosophers can argue about some such nonsense as they ask if you want fries with that, but they can't even do that anymore because a) nobody goes out to eat anymore, and b) computers were handling the ordering at fast food joints before COVID anyway, so philosophy was a worthless discipline even before COVID.

Get a real major.

Anyway, we can't engage in a serious debate when one party says 2+2=4, and the other says 2+2=235w45698275469054wtdfuhpa9ew87r4.  Yes, I banged on the keyboard a bunch, and there are letters in there, so that wasn't even a number, much less an integer, but that kind of makes it even better, doesn't it?  You really can't engage in a policy debate with someone whose arithmetic goes... lemme just copy-and-paste here... 2+2=235w45698275469054wtdfuhpa9ew87r4.  It's damn-near impossible when they say 2+2=5.  2+2=235w45698275469054wtdfuhpa9ew87r4?  No fucking way.  We need facts.  Period.

Realistically, yeah, both parties cheat in their math when they propose public relations budgets, but since we run deficits anyway, who cares?  There's a difference between underestimating the cost of your programs, and, oh, say, telling people that COVID is just the flu.  As an example.  Facts matter.

Lies matter.  Lies kill.  Andrew Wakefield killed with lies.  Do you not remember him?  That's the lying motherfucker who published a phony "study" in Lancet claiming that the MMR vaccine caused autism.  It was based on a sample size of 12 (yes, 12) and even then, he faked his data.  Lancet eventually retracted the article after he was exposed as the lying sack of shit he is, but once the lie got out there and took root among the anti-intellectual, conspiratorial fools of the world... well, welcome back measles and mumps!  Andrew Wakefield murdered people with lies.

I hate liars.  I hate liars.

So someone may jokingly ask how I got into studying politics?  The thing is, the lies in American politics used to be penny-ante lies, and relatively symmetric.  Like I said, everybody underestimates the cost of their budgets, but at the end of the day, who cares?  That's why we have the CBO.  American politics changed, and the party structure changed.  Before Trump.

Once upon a time, the parties really were roughly symmetric.  When did they diverge in terms of dishonesty?  I'm putting the year at 2008.  2008 was when the Republican Party went absolutely insane, and defined itself by bizarre lies and conspiracy theories.

What was the biggest lie Barack Obama told in the 2008 campaign?  There were two lies that stand out.  If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it.  Nope.  The new regulations being proposed would make some of those health insurance plans illegal.  That was a lie.  He knew it.  The other one?  No middle class tax increases.  The individual mandate was a tax!  Just ask John Roberts!  In the scheme of things, how big were these lies?  Pretty ordinary.  These were ho-hum, wake-me-when-you-have-something-interesting lies.  Yeah.  Barack Obama was a politician, and politicians are what we call, "human."  Mostly.  (Donald Trump notwithstanding.)  Humans lie, because humans suck.  And humans believe lies, because humans are stupid.  That was about the scale of things, though.

But something happened to the Republican Party.  They... lost it.  Their lies just entered new and theretofore unknown territory.  First came birtherism.  Long before Donald Trump stumbled in front of the "movement," an insane Moldovan dentist named Orly Taitz was is-it-safe-ing the country with her torturous delusion that Barack Obama was secretly born in Kenya, and therefore ineligible to be president.  And rather than throw her into the loony bin where she belonged, the entire Republican Party decided to jump on board with her particular brand of flat-eartherism.  Before Trump ever realized that he could get tv coverage and audiences chanting his name by doing it.

But it was even weirder than that.  They also decided that Barack Obama was both secretly muslim and a christian of the black liberation theology variety, with Jeremiah Wright as his Svengali.  Now you may stop and think that these two ideas are in conflict, but that's because you have active brain cells that notice contradictions.

So here I turn, once again, to Neal Stephenson's Fall; or, Dodge in Hell.  Quick refresher.  The plot is sweeping and very weird, but things get going when the big villain of the book perpetrates a hoax on the world that Moab, UT was nuked by terrorists.  He does this by creating a couple of faked videos, released simultaneously with a DDoS attack on the communications systems for Moab.  The hoax is revealed pretty quickly, obviously, but unfortunately, and unfortunately realistically, a bunch of loonies decide that the real hoax is the claim that Moab wasn't nuked.  So, when Maeve Braden, resident of Moab turns up and says, "hey, motherfuckers, cut this shit out," the conspiracy theorists go after her.

A weirdo hacker-- Pluto-- decides that this is a perfect opportunity to do what he always wanted to do.  Tear down the internet in an Schumpeter-ian act of creative destruction.  So he creates an open source code to release bots that flood the internet with not just personal attacks on Maeve Braden, but obviously self-contradictory personal attacks, so that everyone would know that it is ludicrous.  If Attack A directly contradicts Attack B, the you have to disregard it all!  Right?  I mean, otherwise you're a fucking moron!

I mean, what kind of total, fucking moron would say in one breath, "Obama is secretly muslim," and then in another, "Obama is a pawn of Jeremiah Wright?!"  I mean... there's a word that I'm not supposed to use anymore here.  I'll just leave that danglin'.  I can type, "fucking," but not this other word.  Weird.

Anyway, yes, there is a long history of lies in campaigns.  What made these lies different?  The totality with which the Republican Party organized itself around them.  (And I will be elaborating on what I mean by "the Republican Party," with reference to V.O. Key.)  This wasn't about a couple of people telling a lie.  This was about the party coalescing around a set of absolutely insane lies.  A switch had flipped.  That switch related to the insanity of the lies themselves, and the extent to which the party was not just telling the lies, but organizing around them.

And after the 2008 election, it got even crazier.  Without any need for a half-witted, delusional, reality tv con man to help the party along in the process of its psychotic break from reality.

Obamacare.  There were three primary components to the law, as originally written:  subsidies to help poor people get health insurance, regulations to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage for people with pre-existing conditions and the Ray-Jay-mandate-tax.  As originally written, though, there was a very minor and completely bipartisan provision.  Insurance companies would be required to cover a consultation for an advanced directive, so that if you couldn't speak for yourself, doctors would know what you want.  Why?  So that nobody has to guess, and you don't wind up with family members arguing, and the Terry Schiavo mess, and yadda, yadda, yadda.  Completely, 100% bipartisan.

Then, a batshit crazy liar-- are we noticing a theme here?-- named Betsy McCaughey looked at that provision, and decided that what it said isn't actually what it said.  What it said, in McCaughey's delusional, idiot-brain, was that every few years, a government bureaucrat would bang on your door, and demand that you sign a document stating that you just want the plug pulled, because the government saves money that way.  Did the first draft of Obamacare say anything even remotely like that?  Fuck no.  McCaughey was just operating on roughly as many functioning brain cells as Donald Trump, or any other shit-throwing monkey.  Sorry, I shouldn't say that.  I like monkeys.  They're cute.

Anyway, the thing is, as crazy as McCaughey was, it got crazier.  Why?  Remember an unqualified redneck twit who somehow wound up uncomfortably close to the nuclear codes back in 2008?  Yeah, her.  (And yet, as we stop to think about the last four years... she'd have been infinitely better, wouldn't she?)  So, like a game of redneck telephone, Sarah Palin got her hands on Betsy McCaughey's critique of Obamacare, and it mutated (insert comment about recessive genes here).  Somehow, McCaughey's complaint about consultations for advanced directives got turned into... say it with me... "DEATH PANELS!"

Yes, that's right.  According to that silly woman from Wasilla, (I've been there, by the way, and wow is it podunk), what Obamacare actually did was require anyone seeking medical care to go before a government "death panel" and have government bureaucrats decide that you were worthy of it.

So how do you go from "insurance companies must cover consultations for advanced directives"-- which Palin had supported prior to 2008!-- to all-caps, all-bold, "death panels?"  The Republican two-step.  Two steps of absolute craziness.  Neither step resembled reality in any way, and with two-steps that each took the party an order of magnitude above any political lie that preceded it in history, you had a political lie so insane that it was two orders of magnitude crazier than anything that had preceded it.

And the entire Republican Party organized around it.  Centrally.  This was the public campaign against Obamacare, and this was the foundation of "the Tea Party," along with racist attacks on Barack Obama derived from birtherism and suspicions about his religion linked to birtherism.

So now let's discuss what a "party" is.  Valdimir Orlando Key.  To Key, a party is a tripartite thing, consisting if the party in government, the party in the electorate, and the party as organization.  The party in government refers to the elected officials who organize around the party banner.  The party in the electorate refers to the portion of the citizenry who identify with the party in question.  The... party as organization?  This is tricky.  Once upon a time, the DNC and the RNC mattered.  Now?  Not so much.  These days, we talk more about party networks, and I don't just mean Fox and MSNBC.  Each party has interest groups and affiliated organizations that do a lot of the heavy lifting that the formal party organizations used to do, so it isn't quite as clear as it once was what the "party as organization" is.  But we can set that aside, because it isn't the point for today.

The Republican Party right now, in government and in the electorate, is built around lies and conspiracy theories.  How it got there is a little tangled, though.  Consider the birtherism/religion issue from 2008.  To a significant degree, this was a grassroots-driven conspiracy theory, but it was stoked significantly by Sarah Palin.  "Pallin' around with terrorists," and other such lines were staples of her stump speeches in 2008, and by speaking of Obama in these terms, she contributed to the conspiracy theories about Obama, particularly as they related to religion.  McCain got, in my opinion, undeserved credit on these matters.  His one moment confronting a supporter was half-assed, and Palin was his fault.  The one who really got it right was Colin Powell, but I've said my piece enough on McCain.  And unlike Trump, I have reasoned disagreements with McCain's political approach.

Anyway, the point is that the development of conspiracy theories about Obama was partly grassroots-- party in the electorate-- and partly party in government.  Yet when birtherism really took off, after Obama won, the "party in government" got very squirrelly about it.  The party in the electorate went whole-hog birther, but most Republican officials tried to play coy.  They wouldn't reject birtherism because they didn't want to alienate their own voters, but most didn't want to talk like that wacko Moldovan dentist on camera because they were trying to put on a front of respectability.

Sound familiar?  Like... the template that they were going to follow when a racist, misogynist, lying piece of shit con man would eventually wind up president, and displace James Buchanan as the worst president in history?

So that's kind of an important point.  The way they handled birtherism was the way they would handle Trump.  Birtherism preceding Trump.

Somehow, though, the death panel lies?  They got fully on board with those.  Which were arguably even crazier!  They just weren't racist, so I guess that was the difference-maker.  Whatever.  Still, the point is that the party went absolutely crazy before Trump.  In 2009 and 2010, Sarah Palin's "death panel" lie was the central organizing plank of the party.  No, the Tea Party was not an anti-deficit crusading organization.  It was a "let's yell about death panels and the Kenyan in the White House" organization.

And that last part... kind of gives something away.  Something changed in 2008.  The party went nuts.  What happened in 2008?  What was the big thing that made the party lose its shit?  Why the big freak-out?

I kinda think it was a black guy in the White House.

But the problem is that once a party starts down that road-- the road of lies and conspiracy theories-- it is hard to come back.

There are two reasons.  First, conspiracy theories are self-protecting.  That makes them the opposite of science.  Science is built on falsifiability.  I formulate a hypothesis.  My hypothesis must be falsifiable.  It must be constructed in such a way that if it is wrong, I must be able to determine that it is wrong.  Falsifiability is what allows science to self-correct.  To progress.  Or at least, shift to paradigms that solve more problems, in Kuhn's terms.  Conspiracy theories?  They don't self-correct.  They self-protect.  They are never falsifiable, because any observation will be explainable within the context of the conspiracy theory.  The conspiracy theory will simply grow more elaborate to incorporate the new and discordant observation.  Occam's expanding blimp.

That means once people start believing conspiracy theories, it's hard to get them to stop.  You ever try debating a Marxist?  A critical theorist?  Anyone like that?  Don't.  They aren't worth it.  They are anti-intellectuals whose belief structures are self-protecting such that any new and discordant piece of information will just result in their core conspiracy theory becoming more elaborate, along with them attacking you in a personal way.  The only way to have a truly intellectual debate is science, and once one side leaves science behind, you can't talk to them anymore.

And that's the problem.  The Republican Party is no different from a Marxist organization.  It is anti-intellectual in precisely the same way, organized around a core conspiracy theory that responds to empirical evidence contrary to its claims by constructing ever-more-elaborate conspiracy theories.

For all their supposed hatred of elaborations on critical theory, modern-day conservatives and critical theorists are no different from each other in their response to empiricism.  That makes them the same to me.

The second problem is that conspiracy theories, and the other lies that Republican officials tell, are comforting to their electorate.  Getting people to accept a harsh truth isn't always easy.  Republican politicians are offering lies which reduce cognitive dissonance.

Those of us in the reality-based community?  What we have to offer to Republican voters is, alas, cognitive dissonance, in many circumstances.  (Like, y'all lost.  Your winner of a president... lost.)

Not always.  There are an increasing number of lies floating around the Democratic Party as it goes crazy, and as Biden takes office with lefties doing their lefty thing, I'll write more about this, but the GOP is crazier, and its craziness creates a special problem.  It is in the process of creating a special problem now.

Because Trump is doing his Trump thing.  Telling insane, self-serving lies.  He lost.  Period.  His lawsuits are being laughed out of court because I guess his lawyers put about as much time into preparing as a drunken frat boy jock who expects his grade to be fixed by the coach, or his rich dad, and he.  Fucking.  Lost.  There is zero ambiguity.  Republican election administrators, DHS... everyone involved in the actual process is calling bullshit on his insane lies.

The problem?  Well, the first problem is Donald Trump himself.  He has a very fragile, child-like ego, and he demands constant praise.  Relatedly, he cheats at everything, and lies about everything.  So, when he loses, as he so often does, he lies about it.  As he is doing now.  The second problem?

Republican voters... oy.  Yes, humans are generally grotesquely stupid, but Republican voters have been sopping up lies and conspiracy theories, year after year, and they have spent the last four years in a Trump personality cult.  Despite the fact that Trump is not just a pathological liar, but a bad liar... an obvious liar, Republican voters are actually so stupid that they believe him.

Now, here is where a person attempting to defend the Republican electorate will interject to say, "but they're just in an echo chamber!  They don't know any better because they get all of their information from Trump, Fox, and blah, blah, blah!"

At this point, I will repeat one of my basic principles of political judgment.  You need to be able to spot the cranks, charlatans and liars on your own side.  If you can't, that's your own fault.

You on the left need to be able to tell that Ocasio-Cortez is a crank, and that Omar is not just a crank, but an antisemite.

And if you can't tell that the guy telling you to ingest bleach is a moron, that's on you.  If you can't tell that the guy who stares directly at an eclipse is a moron, that's on you.  Access Hollywood.  I could keep going, but the point is that there is no excuse, when someone is as far gone as Donald Trump.

And right now, the guy who is that far gone is going around telling people that the election was rigged, when it wasn't.  He just lost, having been the worst president in American history, after having been behind in all of the polls, with a weak economy, and having presented zero evidence of fraud.  But his cult followers are... idiots.  And like the idiotic cult followers they are, they believe him.

That's a problem.  It is a problem that predated Trump, but it is worse now, make no mistake.

The Republican Party has spent more than a decade stewing in the craziest lies and conspiracy theories we have ever seen from a major political party.  Trump was the consequence of the GOP embrace of lies and conspiracy theories.  He fed them their racist birtherism back to them with all the bile they demanded, and ramped up the lying to a level "the likes of which you've never seen," to use one of his favorite phrases.

So what now?  Even if Trump went away, this is a party so committed to lies and conspiracy theories that finding a way back is hard.  Remember that conspiracy theories are distinguished from science by their self-protecting nature.  You can't debate a conspiracy theorist because they respond to contradictory information with elaborations on their conspiracy theories rather than reconsidering their conspiracy theories.  And since they are comforted by the lies and conspiracy theories they have been fed, consider a hypothetical contest between two non-Trump Republicans in 2024.

Let's say we have John Kasich or Mike DeWine, and... Tom Cotton.  Why is it that the Ohio Republicans seem to be more tethered to reality?  I dunno.  Whatever.  Let's say you have DeWine with, "hey, remember when we were just the party of tax cuts?  Can we, like, do that again?"  Then, you have Tom Cotton going full Trump, doing the lies and conspiracy theories thing.  Which candidate is easing cognitive dissonance, and which candidate increases it?  At that point, DeWine is worse than a cuck.  He's part of the demonic pedophile cult, or whatever conspiracy they've moved on to by 2024.  Lizard people.  I dunno.  Throw in a couple of deep-fake videos of DeWine in bed with both a dead girl and a live boy, and the corpse of Edwin Edwards, and say hello to your Republican presidential nominee, Tom Cotton.

I'm not saying it'll be Cotton.  I have no idea.  He's just the first Trumpist whose name came to mind as I typed.  Lindsey Graham will have a hard time giving a stump speech while wearing a gimp suit and a ball gag in Trump's basement.

Anyway, the point is that once these people have gotten accustomed to the conspiracy theories, getting them to come back to reality is hard.

And it's worse when the lie is that the whole election was rigged.  How will they respond, stewing for four years on that?  We really don't know.  I had planned a bit in this post on Democrats post-2000, but this post has already gone way-long, so I'll leave that as a teaser, but the short version is that there are a few options.

Republicans could just keep developing crazier and crazier conspiracy theories.  They almost certainly will.  This will hold true for Republicans in government, and Republicans in the electorate.  Where it becomes concerning is where it affects action.  Republicans in government will continue to follow the scorched earth approach that they have taken since... well, Obama.  That's guaranteed.  Legislative stalemate, executive action limited only by Biden's brazenness.

So what will Republicans in the electorate do?  2022 is coming up.  Are they going to turn out in droves to overrun Congress with QAnon nutjobs?  Or with people who make QAnon nutjobs look like Neil deGrasse Tyson?  Remember those 2009-10 Tea Party protests?  Do they actually start shooting people?

If they actually think that there was a coup, there really is no telling what they'll do.  In 2000, there was a vote-counting mess which is still misunderstood, even by Democrats.  The relationship between ballot structure, recounts, and the Supreme Court, is a complicated one, but at the end of the process, Al Gore conceded because the final official tally put George W. Bush ahead by 537 votes in Florida.  So, George W. Bush was inaugurated.  Legally.  A lot went wrong, but Trump is going around right now lying about what happened in 2020.  There is no ambiguity about 2020, and his cult followers have been fed a steady diet of lies and conspiracy theories for over a decade, priming them to respond in some truly ugly ways to the lie that 2020 was rigged.

And they were primed to respond to him, before he ever realized what dupes Republican voters really are.  Sarah Palin paved the way, along with people like Orly Taitz and Betsy McCaughey.

Joe Biden will be inaugurated as President.  Donald Trump will be removed from power, despite every desperate, pathetic attempt to install himself as a dictator.  We will meet this minimal condition of democracy.  This shouldn't have been a question at all, and you should be distressed that it was a question.  But the Republican Party, both the party-in-government, and the party-in-the-electorate, will continue getting crazier.  This trend predates Donald Trump, and the consequences of Trump's 2020 lies remain to be seen.

No, it's not time to relax.  Donald Trump still may have done irreparable damage to American democracy.