Authoritarianism, the GOP, Trump, and the slow motion assassination of truth.

If being a lying criminal is wrong, the GOP don't wanna' be right...

When I originally composed the essay below, some five and a half years ago (here revised, updated, expanded), the vile, deranged moron Putin installed in the oval office had been in place two years, a span during which the public was subjected to an unabated torrent of falsehood unlike anything the world had seen since Goebbels held the top PR slot for the Reich:

According to many accounts, it was the young Adolf Hitler who coined the term “Big Lie.” In his 1925 tract, “Mein Kampf,” he wrote that “the broad masses” are more likely to “fall victims to the big lie than the small lie,” because “It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Contrary to some accounts, neither Hitler nor his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, took credit for successfully using what the French refer to as le grand mensonge: the Nazi leaders always claimed they were telling the truth. In Hitler’s mind, it was the Jews of Vienna who spread the original Big Lie—about Germany’s conduct in the First World War. Goebbels later blamed the English, saying they “follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it.”…

Depending on how charitable one feels, Trump’s blatant disregard for the factual record could be described as chutzpah, self-delusion, or the default reaction of someone to whom lying has become, in the words of his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, “second nature.” (“More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true,” Schwartz told my colleague Jane Mayer.)…

We will see if Trump repeats this new outlandish claim in the coming days. Until he does, it could probably be categorized, by his demanding standards, as a medium lie, rather than a big one. It is the sort of thing he throws out every so often—a bit like his claims that President Obama founded isis, or that “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City cheered the collapse of the Twin Towers. Trump must know such things didn’t happen. But, in his world, the truth’s value is instrumental, rather than intrinsic. “He lied strategically,” Schwartz told Mayer. “He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” (Last week, The New Yorker launched a new series of reported essays about Trump’s relationship with the truth.)

John Cassidy/ The New Yorker/ September 8, 2016

So much lying.

Preposterous statements.

Lies only another deranged person might entertain.

Which brings us to 2023, and the slew of indictments which bring into somewhat sharper focus the extent to which the rank and file fascists of America, the entire edifice of the GOP and every one of its voters swaddle themselves in confabulation as a predicate of simply existing in the world:

Former President Donald Trump and his supporters are reacting to a third indictment against him with a now-familiar playbook: deflecting with unrelated accusations, distracting with misleading claims about the charges, and demonizing the prosecution.

Instead of convincing his followers about the seriousness of the charges, Tuesday’s indictment is being held up as proof of a conspiracy to take down the Republican ex-president and a continuation of the effort by Democrats, the media and the so-called deep state to interfere with the nation’s elections.

For years Trump has told his supporters that elections can’t be trusted and that he is a victim of a corrupt persecution by the government and media. With that narrative endorsed by conservative news outlets and amplified on social media, it’s only natural that many of Trump’s supporters will accept it, said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian who studies authoritarian propaganda.

“He’s set up the idea since 2016 that elections themselves are corrupt and cannot be trusted. This is seven years now of this narrative,” Ben-Ghiat said. “Trump is one of the most superb propagandists of the 21st century. He has created this seamless world, where to his followers, everything just confirms his victimhood.”

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The source of endless consternation of so many on the left, who with all good intentions posit the rank and file fascists- the voters who prop up the GOP- are redeemable, if only presented with The Truth, is the daily reminder that the rank and file fascists already know THEIR truth (a bigger, stronger, shinier truth than any woke empirical fact). They have no use for consensus reality, brute facts, or basic logic. Such triflings are for losers. The fascists of America dispensed with any association with the truth, even as something to be aspired to, long, long ago.

The truth, whether historical or scientific, is the enemy of the society they wish to impose on the rest of us: an authoritarian apartheid regime in the service of cis-gender hetero White Christians.

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Trump supporters seem to be living on a different planet, in a different reality. How can they not see the absurdly obvious falsehoods? How can they be so impervious to empirical evidence? 

I was prompted to think about the link between pathologically fantasy prone people and Trump supporters by this excellent article by Kari Halloway at Alternet, looking at  research into the psychological characteristics of on-line Trolls:

The question for non-trolls is, behind the layer of protective anonymity, what lies at the core of the troll psyche. The findings of a few studies suggest that trolls who are mean-spirited and manipulative online have offline personalities to match, and that insecurity drives a fair amount of their trollery.

Case in point are two 2014 studies from Canada’s University of Manitoba that looked at the personalities of some 1,200 people who engage in trolling, which the researchers described as “behaving in a deceptive, destructive, or disruptive manner in a social setting on the internet” for seemingly no purpose at all. (The trolls would likely say they do it for the "lulz,” or laughs that come at another person’s expense.)

These characteristics are perhaps most evident in the alt-right, but the notion of adopting an alternate identity to express sadistic feelings certainly is part of the appeal to join the Klu Klux Klan or neo-Nazi groups:

Both studies revealed similar patterns of relations between trolling and the Dark Tetrad of personality: trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism,” the researchers wrote. In other words, those who took part in trolling generally enjoyed watching others suffer, were pathologically self-absorbed and lacked “conscience and empathy”.

 Now consider attendees at a Trump rally, when the targets of their animosity are outnumbered, or absent, and the tweets of Trump supporters filled with hate and fear-mongering, but most importantly, their receptiveness to bizarre conspiracy theories.  

I think a great number of Trump supporters, especially those that given to conspiracy theories, and are dismissive of science, or documentation that contradicts their beliefs, do live in a different reality. That reality get’s reinforced by those they interact with, and where they get their news, but it is nevertheless a self-constructed world. In that world, they get to make the rules for what is real, what is not, what is evidence, etc:

Scientific theories, by definition, must be falsifiable. That is, they must make reliable predictions about the world; and if those predictions turn out to be incorrect, the theory can be declared false. Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, are tough to disprove. Their proponents can make the theories increasingly elaborate to accommodate new observations; and, ultimately, any information contradicting a conspiracy theory can be answered with, “Well sure, that’s what they want you to think.”

Despite their unfalsifiable nature, conspiracy theories attract significant followings. Not all theorists, it seems, hold their “truths” to the standards of conventional science.

While we all daydream and fantasize, if we’re reasonably psychologically healthy and cognitively intact, we are able to distinguish our fantasy life from reality. Not everyone is able to make this distinction consistently:

the totality of the research indicates that there is this broad clinical entity known as the fantasy-prone personality type, which is likely comprised of various psychological and neurological conditions that result in heightened fantasizing and/or an impaired ability to distinguish internal fantasy from external reality. Research indicates that this subset of humanity is disproportionately responsible for a large number of reported paranormal experiences, including ghosts, angels, aliens, abductions, out of body experiences, near death experiences, reincarnation, and others.

A more detailed description of the pathological fantasy prone personality is found here:

A fantasy prone person is reported to spend a large portion of their time fantasizing, have vividly intense fantasies, have paranormal experiences, and have intensereligious experiences.[5] People with FPP are reported to spend over half of their time awake fantasizing or daydreaming and will often confuse or mix their fantasies with their real memories. They also report out-of-body experiences.[5]

A paracosm is an extremely detailed and structured fantasy world often created by extreme or compulsive fantasizers.[6]

Trump supporters are acting out in reality- but behind the anonymity of the crowd or the internet— their fantasies of righteous triumph over evil:

Thus, conspiracy theories offer a further dimension interesting from a psychological standpoint. They offer the possibility to transfer one's value system into the social domain: According to Mason (1997), the moral self must learn to discern the values held by other persons and institutions; and should encourage others to act morally. Fivush and Buckner (1997) argue that language is not only a medium, but is both necessary to construct a self-concept and to engage in moral-based interaction with others. From this point of view, making stories that describe the ethics of institutions as well as one's own is not a possibility, but a necessity in moral development. Also, sharing these narratives is desirable.

A conspiracy theory, thus, could be seen as a differentiated story of our beliefs and values helping us to understand and express our non-conscious moral feelings. Historic or contemporary events and developments which threaten these values may become the initial nucleus for such a story. The need to construct such a story arises from living in a society where the generally acknowledged goal of individuation is no longer a mere adoption of common beliefs, but where becoming individual is the preferred goal.

Who is susceptible to a cult-leader like Trump, and a cult of hate and violence? 

Someone who perceives “historic or contemporary events and developments which threaten their values”, and so feels to need to construct a preferred identity, a more positive sense of self— based on power over others— within a fantasy they have blurred with reality.  

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In a September 10, 2016 article The Economist declared that we have entered ‘The post-truth world’:

It is thus tempting to dismiss the idea of “post-truth” political discourse—the term was first used by David Roberts, then a blogger on an environmentalist website, Grist—as a modish myth invented by de-haut-en-bas liberals and sore losers ignorant of how dirty a business politics has always been. But that would be complacent. There is a strong case that, in America and elsewhere, there is a shift towards a politics in which feelings trump facts more freely and with less resistance than used to be the case. 

Mind you, The Economist still needed to indulge in just a touch of  ‘both-siderism’, and ‘every politician does it’, as if the Democrats— any Democrat— could reasonably be compared to the spew of falsehoods that emit from Trump and his lackeys, or the studied mendacity of the GOP over the past half-century (and yes deceptiveness and the purveying of falsehoods to further political ends is as old as the existence of organized government), but ultimately, a crucial observation emerges:

Political lies used to imply that there was a truth—one that had to be prevented from coming out. Evidence, consistency and scholarship had political power. Today a growing number of politicians and pundits simply no longer care. They are content with what Stephen Colbert, an American comedian, calls “truthiness”: ideas which “feel right” or “should be true”. They deal in insinuation (“A lot of people are saying...” is one of Mr Trump’s favourite phrases) and question the provenance, rather than accuracy, of anything that goes against them (“They would say that, wouldn’t they?”). And when the distance between what feels true and what the facts say grows too great, it can always be bridged with a handy conspiracy theory.

As with almost every other aspect of what is despicable about the modern GOP, the basic disregard for any semblance of the truth, of facts, of evidence, there is a parallel, and connections, to be found with Putin’s Russia:

Then there is Russia, arguably the country (apart from North Korea) that has moved furthest past truth, both in its foreign policy and internal politics. The Ukraine crisis offers examples aplenty: state-controlled Russian media faked interviews with “witnesses” of alleged atrocities, such as a child being crucified by Ukrainian forces; Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, did not hesitate to say on television that there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine, despite abundant proof to the contrary.

Such dezinformatsiya may seem like a mere reversion to Soviet form. But at least the Soviets’ lies were meant to be coherent, argues Peter Pomerantsev, a journalist whose memoir of Mr Putin’s Russia is titled “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible”. In a study in 2014 for the Institute of Modern Russia, a think-tank, he quotes a political consultant for the president saying that in Soviet times, “if they were lying they took care to prove what they were doing was ‘the truth’. Now no one even tries proving ‘the truth’. You can just say anything. Create realities.”

I happen to disagree that Russia is the archetype of this approach to ‘managing the message’ by outright fabrication; the GOP cultivated this approach during the Reagan administration, and raised it to a high art during the Bush/Cheney years, beginning with their response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11:

''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

That's the famous quote wrested by Ron Suskind from a "senior adviser" to president Bush. We have long thought of it as a coda to the refusal to see reality in the fiasco of the Iraq war (and the failure of the Afghanistan war). But, in retrospect, it might also tell us something about the real point of the torture program. If the CIA were telling Cheney that Zubaydah, for example, had told everything he could know, and Cheney had not secured the informtion linking Saddam to 9/11, torture was an obvious next option. It could "create a reality" that comported with what Cheney already believed as a matter of faith. If you want to "create" such a reality, you can "fix" the intelligence to make the case for war, as we now know happened; but if you want to "create" the original intelligence, you need to torture. Specifically, you need to craft torture techniques designed to procure false confessions. Ta-da! We have SERE, inversely adapted from Communist totalitarian methods for producing propagandistic false confessions.

What has become clear since Trump became a candidate for president, is that the GOP as a whole— the organization, its leadership, its elected officials at every level, and its rank and file voters (who represented 90% of his votes)-- have fully embraced fiction as both the conceptual framework of the entire conservative political enterprise, and as the primary mode of communication. It is equally clear that ‘mainstream’ broadcast and print media are complicit in merging fiction with reality, having perpetuated the ‘let all sides be heard’ model of journalism (using the term loosely), whether willingly, or over time being bullied by conservatives with yet another fiction—  that of the ‘liberal bias’ in the media:

“The facts have a well-known liberal bias,” declared Rob Corddry way back in 2004 — and experience keeps vindicating his joke. But why?

Not long ago Ezra Klein cited research showing that both liberals and conservatives are subject to strong tribal bias — presented with evidence, they see what they want to see. I then wrote that this poses a puzzle, because in practice liberals don’t engage in the kind of mass rejections of evidence that conservatives do. The inevitable response was a torrent of angry responses and claims that liberals do too reject facts — but none of the claims measured up…

Yet another factor may be the different incentives of opinion leaders, which in turn go back to the huge difference in resources. Strange to say, there are more conservative than liberal billionaires, and it shows in think-tank funding. As a result, I like to say that there are three kinds of economists: Liberal professional economists, conservative professional economists, and professional conservative economists. The other box isn’t entirely empty, but there just isn’t enough money on the left to close the hack gap.

Finally, I do believe that there is a difference in temperament between the sides. I know that it doesn’t show up in the experiments done so far, which show liberals and conservatives more or less equally inclined to misread facts in a tribal way. But such experiments may not be enough like real life to capture the true differences — although I’d be the first to admit that I don’t have solid evidence for that claim. I am, after all, a liberal.

Unlike Krugman, I do believe there is evidence to support the notion that conservatives are much more inclined than liberals to dispense with factual reality when reality refuses to conform to their worldview, and have addressed this in a number of previous diaries; for example:

Persuading conservatives with appeals to facts and logic: Good luck with that.— Part 3 (March 15, 2017)

This third installment of an intermittent series (parts 1 and 2 found here and here) focuses on two features of conservatives’ tenuous relationship with empirical reality (perhaps it’s better to say they’re estranged from empirical reality, and are filing for divorce):

1) their disavowal of science 

2) their capacity to filter their own experience solely through the lens ofideological correctness (my term, I think, since I don’t remember seeing it anywhere else, but I’ll give credit if someone coined it before me).  

The refusal of conservatives to ‘accept’ anthropogenic climate change (carbon combustion, primarily oil, coal and natural gas, heating the air, oceans, and soil, with destructive consequences for weather, ecosystems, disease, crops, etc.) serves as a useful prism for examining the psychology of those that espouse conservative views.  

By ideological correctness I mean an individual assessing information in terms of their worldview and identity, which for conservatives have become inextricable from core premises about the world and other people, and so are not subject to challenge or even scrutiny. This tendency has been shown generally to distinguish progressives from conservatives— progressives will change views and conclusions when data require it, conservatives will not…

As summarized in the excerpt above, because of ideological considerations, conservatives will simply deny a problem exists, and refuse to consider that any change in their views or conduct is necessary. (Note as well the elements of fundamentalist Christian views of the relationship between humans and the environment: humans have dominion over the earth, because they were granted this by God; this view overlaps with the purely capitalist view that the earth is a repository of resources to be exploited, and the libertarian view that those who are most deserving take what they wish from the world and other people; it is not coincidental that Christianists, free market zealots, and corporatists all find a home under the umbrella of conservatism and the GOP).

From such a perspective, a progressive initiative to promote remediation of environmental harms caused by human activity will always seem to a conservative to be a political ploy, and the imposition of a progressive scheme on conservatives who are just going about their own business, as opposed to the lifestyle promoted by conservatives, and the practices of industry, are imposing catastrophic health effects and environmental degradation on everyone.

An article published on-line in the journal Climatic Change on March 13, 2017 looks at just these features of conservative attitudes about climate change…

In fact, attempts to ‘educate’ conservatives, perhaps trying to find ‘language they will hear’ and ‘terms they understand’ will the opposite of the intended effect, if the intended effect is to get conservatives to see climate change as a problem:

“Several empirical studies have analyzed interaction effects between political orientation and various social structural and cognitive variables. For example, Hamilton et al. (2012) study of polar-region warming concern demonstrated that among ideological conservatives, greater scientific understanding predicted lower levels of concern” (Bohr, pg. 3)

Reflect of this for a moment.

The more information a conservative has about the science of climate change, the less concerned they are.  It’s not about information, or understanding, it’s about ideology…

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see also:

Reality matters. But not to everyone. (June 25, 2017)

the US is, far and away, the primary purveyor of climate change denial:

American climate change deniers have been remarkably successful in confusing public opinion and delaying decisive action. They receive considerable media attention and enjoy access to key Washington power brokers.

This is on full display not just in Beltway debates and demonstrations, but in local decision making:

On the Delaware Bay, N.J. town struggles against sea rise.

People who live in these communities don’t all agree with scientists who say they are on the front lines of climate change. Some insist it’s a temporary phenomenon that could be endured with enough effort and money.

Downe Mayor Robert Campbell discovered the township on a Sunday drive 35 years ago, fell in love with it, and stayed.

Now, Campbell, also a GOP candidate for state Assembly, is fighting to keep Downe’s six communities — which also include Fortescue, Dividing Creek, Newport, and Dyer’s Cove — viable. Scientists, he says, just don’t get it.

“There is no sea-level rise, and it’s a bunch of hogwash,” Campbell says.

This bayside community, whose homes are literally becoming submerged as sea-levels rise, elected as their leader— the person who will represent their interests with the state and federal governments— someone who believes climate change and sea-level rise is ‘hogwash’.

Even those that acknowledge the problem have been cowed into a ‘neutral’ stance when it comes to the reality of climate change...

Among the problems we, as progressives, need to acknowledge and address is that there is a cohort among our fellow citizens who are, have been, and will continue to be receptive to the messages of Authoritarians (my apologies, no links for the cited excerpts from Hannah Arendt, below):

Selected excerpts from Hannah Arendt’s February 25, 1967 New Yorker article ‘Truth and Politics’:

The hallmark of factual truth is that its opposite is neither error nor illusion nor opinion, no one of which reflects upon personal truthfulness, but the deliberate falsehood,or lie. Error, of course, is possible, and even common, with respect to factual truth, in which case this kind of truth is in no way different from scientific or rational truth. But the point is that with respect to facts there exists another alternative,and this alternative, the deliberate falsehood, does not belong to the same species as propositions that, whether right or mistaken, intend no more than to say what is, or how something that is appears to me. A factual statement – Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 – acquires political implications only by being put in an interpretative context. But the opposite proposition, which Clemenceau, still unacquainted with the art of rewriting history, thought absurd, needs no context to be of political significance.It is clearly an attempt to change the record, and as such, it is a form of action. The same is true when the liar, lacking the power to make his falsehood stick,does not insist on the gospel truth of his statement but pretends that this is his“opinion,” to which he claims his constitutional right. This is frequently done by subversive groups, and in a politically immature public the resulting confusion can be considerable. The blurring of the dividing line between factual truth and opinion belongs among the many forms that lying can assume, all of which are forms of action.

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Contemporary history is full of instances in which tellers of factual truth were felt to be more dangerous and even more hostile, than the real opponents.

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It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism – an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything,no matter how well this truth may be established. In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.

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The telling of factual truth comprehends much more than the daily information supplied by journalists, though without them we should never find our bearings in an ever-changing world and, in the most literal sense, would never know where we are. This is, of course, of the most immediate political importance; but if the press should ever really becomes the “fourth branch of government,” it would have to be protected against government power and social pressure even more carefully than the judiciary is. (emphasis added)

Excerpts from ‘Hannah Arendt: From an Interview’, which appeared in the New York Review of Books, October 26, 1978:

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

In my view, no one has so fully and accurately described as Arendt the role of destroying the truth-- destroying the very notion that there is a truth to be found— in establishing and maintaining a totalitarian state, and an Authoritarian culture. 

Arendt warned us that autocratic governments, by definition, must destroy the truth if they are to remain in power, because they must maintain their base of support among followers who will accept blindly the ‘truth’ as given to them by the autocrat (which is why the GOP has so patiently inoculated generations of its conservative base with dose upon dose of falsehood). To destroy the truth, the autocratic government begins with attacking those institutions whose purpose is to present facts— the press, universities, science itself.

The truth is not assured resuscitation during our lifetime; we can’t simply assume ‘the truth will win out’. If you doubt that, consider the ‘debates’ about the cause, and meaning of The Civil War.