The roots of our election madness
Millions of Americans – intelligent, hardworking, and otherwise eminently pragmatic – believe the unbelievable: that Donald Trump won the 2020 election for president and that Joe Biden lost.
They also believe, at least by deduction, that a vast conspiracy was put in place to accomplish this abomination – a conspiracy that involved red states as well as blue; Republicans as well as Democrats; local and state election officials; judges, both federal and state; and, of course, the media – the mainstream media, which, in this instance, includes the news side of Fox News.
It’s a conspiracy for the ages.
How is it possible that so many Americans are deluded about such an elementary thing as an election won by seven million popular votes and by a margin of 306-232 in the Electoral College?
To quote George Packer, “How did half this country – practical, hands-on, self-reliant Americans, still balancing budgets and following complex repair manuals – slip into cognitive decline when it comes to politics?”
It’s not for want of gray matter. Neither ignorance not stupidity are in play, as Parker points out in the current issue of The Atlantic.
So then, what is it?
Critics such as Parker blame Trump himself. Ever since he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to begin his assault on the American presidency, so the argument goes, Trump has spun one false yarn after another, until our ability to believe in things that were once considered concrete has been deeply, some might say permanently, eroded.
According to Parker, Trump followers and Republicans in general have “abandoned common sense and found their guide to the world in him…. This was Trump’s purpose – to keep us locked in a mental prison where reality was unknowable so that he could go on wielding power.”
I suspect most Trumpsters would deny the supposition that Trump has a hold on their minds. Or that he exercises an inordinate amount of influence over their thoughts and beliefs.
As a relative of mine and a Trump voter recently told me, “Trump’s a goofball.”
This relative, a successful small businessman, added, “I hear there’s something fishy about the election (results). I don’t know but I hear there’s something wrong.”
He swore he came to this conclusion on his own; he was not swayed by Trump, he said. He called the president nstupid.
For what it’s worth, millions of Americans consider the president neither stupid nor goofy, but a perfect amalgam of brains, common sense, and patriotism.
If it’s not Trump, then why do so many Americans believe that come Jan. 20 Joe Biden will take the presidential oath fraudulently?
In 1964, the political-historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a piece for Harper’s called, “The Paranoid Style of American Politics.” He made clear the paranoia he was talking about wasn’t the clinical kind.
“In fact,” he wrote, “the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”
Hofstadter sketched examples of this particular form of paranoia, beginning with the deranged anti-Masonic movement shortly after the Revolution. It then chugged along in the guise of anti-Catholicism, a staple of American politics from the Know Nothings in the 1840s to the anti-Kennedy loonies of 1959-60.
“Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination,” Hofstadter argued.
“The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three.” All three have a familiar ring. First, a “sustained conspiracy … to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. “
As Hofstadter wrote in 1964: “A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of ‘The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil,’ that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.”
Contemporary Tea Partiers would give their assent: it all began with Woodrow Wilson and the Federal Reserve.
The point is, fantasies such as a fraudulent election in 2020 have been a recurring phenomenon of American politics.
What makes this paranoia different is that it’s the handiwork of the president of the United States. What makes it doubly dangerous is that it’s been taken up, not by the fringe, but by one of the two great parties.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book, “JFK Rising,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.