"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
Is awareness of one's insanity evidence for sanity? Or does that indicate the insanity is beyond volition and therefore worse? What can a culture do when volitional insanity is a growing trend? Lock 'em up? Or request that the insane stand back and stand by?
The insanity had been simmering for years, of course. It took a special kind of American leadership to turn the dial up a few notches to the proverbial full boil. Was President Trump always merely a carny barker lacking any kind of decency, empathy, or strategy beyond making a few bucks? Or was he the empathetic spear point for a new depressed and abused minority, the white American Christian male? Was he the harbinger of a white Christian male Second Coming? Despite the fact that the First Coming had never ended?
It's been 50 days since the November 3 election in which Donald Trump took an electoral beating by the same tally he had dubbed "a landslide" in 2016. The popular vote deficit for Mr. Trump was roughly eight million. That is not a close election by American (or any other) standards.
And yet, here we are, 50 days later, and somewhere between 70% and 80% of polled Republicans report that they believe Trump won the election. They report believing that the election was stolen through various and sundry nefarious means. The evidence brought to bear to support this in 60 lawsuits over the last seven weeks has been nil. Nada. Zilch.
That 70% to 80% of Republicans self-identify as rigged-election conspiracists seems to indicate that irrationalism is spreading in the GOP at an even faster pace now that the virus-deniers have been backed into their anti-science corner by 3000 covid deaths a day. In March, an NPR poll had revealed that roughly 40% of Republicans considered the virus a serious threat while 54% said the public was overreacting. As reported by Business Insider in May, roughly 45% of the GOP believed that a COVID-19 vaccine was an excuse for Bill Gates to microchip people. Today's mantra is "the election was rigged." I'm surprised that Bill Gates hasn't been fingered as the mastermind behind the purported rigging.
For the entirety of 2020, Americans have been faced with choices to make based on existing evidence and the slow unfolding of reality before their eyes. Those anchored in the narrative that COVID-19 was no worse than the flu have been pummeled daily by a tidal wave of irrefutable facts. Facts, however, didn't change their core positions or beliefs. We Americans have been left with the realization that literally a quarter of our populace has no place in a democratic society because they have absolved themselves of the responsibility to think critically. They have retreated to childlike hero worship and have adopted religious positions regarding secular decisions.
Over the course of 2020, not only did American ideologies bifurcate into non-overlapping belief systems, but the rules and means of processing evidence have bifurcated as well. For a large chunk of the American electorate, objective pragmatic evidence has become something beyond their inclination to recognize or process. The validity of the disparate approaches of these dichotomous camps was always going to be put to the test by outcomes in the 2020 real world. That is precisely what happened. As days passed and evidence mounted against the March/April/May proclamations of Trump and his acolytes, Trump's followers sought to put off the recognition of reality and the history of an entire year-in-the-life of America. Three hundred thousand died amidst the arc from "It's 15 and soon it will be none" to "I'm told it's going away in the summer" to "Covid, covid, covid; it'll magically disappear after the election." What magically disappeared in 2020, however, was not covid, but the ability of 50 million Americans to recognize and process real events.
Early in 2020, I realized that there could be only one outcome to all of this. Record numbers dead, a depressed, desperate population, and a religion masquerading as a political movement. Reality, not fantasy, was going to unfold. I was correct, of course. This was no test of competitive belief systems, of evidence-based hypotheses. This was science versus self-serving proclamations and a kind of state religion. The 2020 matchup was reality-based predictions versus delusional wishes. The delusions were wrong, of course, and the cost was high.
The competing handicapping systems, science hypothesizing against magical conspiratorial thinking, was not truly much of a competition in terms of prognosticating. Michael Osterholm, of the University of Minnesota and the Biden covid team, nailed everything back in March and April. So did I, simply because I read what Osterholm and his international cohorts had to say.
The science versus Trumpian narrative was no test of predictive power. It was a test of preference, and many Americans simply committed to what they preferred to hear. It's funny how someone like myself had moments where the Trump covid narrative had such massive support (especially here in the South), that I had to take a moment every now and then to ask, "Are they this delusional or might it be me? Am I missing something obvious?" Sadly, however, I wasn't wrong about a thing. Instead, it was this American president and his cronies running Florida and Georgia whose predictions were completely, utterly wrong and whose "strategies" were simply exercises in self-promotion.
The United States' leadership failed. And the events of 2020 pulled back the curtain on the cruel, cold realities of how American cultural myths are illusion-laden, ineffective-in-crisis, houses of cards. We've learned that people matter less than coin. And we've learned that 50 million Americans treat civic decision-making as a kind of me-first religion for children. You believe what you prefer to believe and act accordingly. The legacy of Donald Trump.
Bob Dietz
December 27, 2020
