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It’s a fundamental principle that American democracy is dependent on fealty to the rule of law, but it’s less acknowledged that the “rule of law” itself is also dependent on something called “truth.” In criminal law, to convict someone of a crime generally requires a finding of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” In civil cases the proof threshold is a lesser one, proof by a “preponderance of the evidence,” or in some cases, “clear and convincing evidence.” All of these formulations are different ways of getting to the truth of the matter at hand. Since there is rarely something as recognizable as an “absolute truth,” such “truths” are, by necessity, approximations: reflections of our best, though imperfect, human efforts to determine what the facts of the matter actually are.
When these courts threw out or otherwise disposed of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits, nearly all of them referred to the complete absence of any evidence put forward to support them. Still, again and again, even down to the last-ditch filing on Tuesday in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Trump campaign, with either the tacit or full-fledged support of the Republican Party, continued to insist that its bald assertions and arguments should be afforded the same consideration applied to real facts. They continued to insist that their contrived, bare, and hyperbolic accusations of some sinister “plot” against Donald Trump should be treated with the same deference as actual evidence.
In effect, they asked our legal system, over and over, to agree that 2+2=5, that A=B, that fraud should be assumed and investigated where none could possibly exist. Trump’s team demanded that zero credible evidence should nonetheless lead to a drastic result in their favor, a result that would repudiate the entirety of our democratic-based system of government. In other words, they’ve repeatedly asked the courts to discard truth.
As long as the courts refused to do that, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everything will turn out okay. But the Trump campaign, and the Republican Party that prop it up, never actually expected these lawsuits to be successful. Their own lawyers, at least the ones employed by genuine, “respectable” law firms knew exactly where they were headed—they were simply being paid (at least in theory) to do a job. Lawyers don’t drive lawsuits—their clients do; in this case, they had a client who desperately wanted to create a narrative. Trump’s vehicle to this goal was to abuse the legal system, something he’s done all his life. It was a narrative that the whole Republican Party would end up buying into: that truth didn’t matter anymore. It was the story they were selling to the 70 million or so Trump voters that mattered. And they counted on their credulous base, snug in its information bubble, to accept exactly what they were being told.
Jim Small, writing for the Arizona Mirror, diagnosed this dangerous susceptibility on the part of the Republican electorate just after the 2018 midterms. Then, the GOP did a trial run at spinning a false fraud narrative of why and how then-candidate Kyrsten Sinema defeated former Sen. Martha McSally in that state’s 2018 election; how eagerly the Republican rank and file embraced that phony narrative. At that time, Small described their unsettling capacity for willing self-delusion.
But they want to believe, with as much sincerity as they’re able to trick themselves into faking, the fantasy that there is fraud, that there is a conspiracy to steal political power away from them, that their political opponents are evil and their time in positions of power will be nightmarish. Facts that refute the lie are instead used as evidence of the conspiracy, and truth-tellers become conspirators.
Why?
Well, fantasies – and nightmares, in particular – are exciting. The day-to-day existence can be mundane: cleaning the litter box, the drudgery of our jobs, doing laundry, and our orderly and peaceful elections. The prospect of a massive evil conspiracy of evil conspirators conspiring to do evil spices things up.
They’re having fun. They’re enjoying this. It delights them. A make-believe session of feigned indignation over imaginary outrages is a close substitute for emotional fulfillment.
But after four years, Small’s assessment of Republican voters has become considerably darker, as what once could have been written off as a feigned “distraction” has morphed, outright, into a life-affirming obsession. Writing again this month for the Mirror, Small quoted author Kurt Vonnegut, whose 1962 novel Mother Night examines how the human capacity for self-deception can, if unchecked, ruin entire populations.
His warning is a chilling one, laid out in the opening sentences: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Republicans have spent four years ignoring and then humoring and then repeating Trump’s vile and utterly false claims that strike at the heart of our democracy. Now, they are demanding exceptional and unprecedented remedies to problems that were fabricated out of whole cloth. …
They’ve become what they pretended to be.
What George Packer wrote this week in The Atlantic dovetails completely with that analysis: The myth that Republicans were somehow “stabbed in the back” and betrayed by unseen forces has now taken hold of the Party, and most of its constituents.
So a stab-in-the-back narrative was buried in the minds of millions of Americans, where it burns away, as imperishable as a carbon isotope, consuming whatever is left of their trust in democratic institutions and values. This narrative will widen the gap between Trump believers and their compatriots who might live in the same town, but a different universe. And that was Trump’s purpose—to keep us locked in a mental prison where reality was unknowable so that he could go on wielding power, whether in or out of office, including the power to destroy.
For his opponents, the lies were intended to be profoundly demoralizing. Neither counting them nor checking facts nor debunking conspiracies made any difference. Trump demonstrated again and again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and abandon the field of politics to the fantasists.
For believers, the consequences were worse. They surrendered the ability to make basic judgments about facts, exiling themselves from the common framework of self-government. They became litter swirling in the wind of any preposterous claim that blew from @realDonaldTrump. Truth was whatever made the world whole again by hurting their enemies—the more far-fetched, the more potent and thrilling.
The consequences of this warped and radical departure from truth are coming into clear focus as the Trump charade careens toward its inevitable endgame. We see the rage building as deluded hordes of armed vigilantes gather to harass and intimidate government servants for doing their job. We see Republican governors taking Gestapo-like revenge on people for speaking the truth in the face of their lies. We see cowed public officials refusing to acknowledge the truth out of fear for their lives. And we see efforts like this shameful document, where elected state officials, who presumably should know better, now feel free to advocate disenfranchising their own citizens as a token of their obedience to Donald Trump.
Where a political party is subordinate to a cult of personality, with rare exceptions, any deviation from the party line is politically suicidal. Fear of being labelled an apostate or a heretic keeps people in line, because their political survival depends on echoing the dogma spewed by the leader. This is why brutal, dictatorship-style regimes, such as North Korea, for example, do not simply whither away but sustain themselves in perpetuity. In such regimes, truth becomes forever the province of whatever the leader says it is. In such an environment, whatever institutions exist that oppose that made-up “truth” ultimately must run up against the numbers and power of the population so deceived, and ultimately those institutions must either stand or crumble.
The Trump campaign knew that if it could persuade a single federal or state appellate judge that 2+2 did in fact equal 5, they would have elevated this disregard of truth to a level of respectability which it desperately wants to achieve. They didn’t initiate over 50 meritless lawsuits because they were expecting to win, but because they wanted to game the system in the future. They wanted to work the refs to see what could be achieved in warping truth to their own ends. They know that the inroads already made with our legislative branch of government will only inspire further attempts to co-opt the judiciary, because as any lawyer can tell you, while judges may swear to uphold the law, judicial decisions are often made with a nod toward the undercurrents of society as a whole.
And they know that if the judiciary succumbs to the abandonment of facts, the final arbiter of truth in this country all but disappears.
For the next six weeks or so, Republicans can hide behind the excuse that Donald Trump is still the occupant of the Oval Office. As of Jan. 20, they will no longer have that excuse. After that, and in the months that follow, we will all be seeing just how deep this rot runs within the Republican Party, how far they intend to goad their own constituents down this ever-circling rabbit-hole of grievance, and most importantly, whether they have any inclination at all to respond to the urgent needs of the American people. In the midst of an unprecedented public health and economic crisis, to have one political party gamely attempting to dig us out of this abyss while the other remains totally enamored by delusions, lies, and hateful revenge fantasies is simply unsustainable.
One truth, and one reality, is going to have to win out in the end.
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