Asylum Polling

I've delayed writing this particular column for days. My reasons for delaying are ironic. I'd prefer to not believe what the polling shows, and what the polling shows is that Americans believe what they prefer to believe, regardless of evidence. Writing this column is psychically painful, and the column is about people avoiding dealing with anything psychically painful.

I've been hoping some later versions of the polls would contradict the earlier polling, but that hasn't happened, and I think it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. So, to borrow a phrase from CNN's Chris Cuomo, let's get to it.

The problems framed by the polling are fairly simple and straightforward. How should a modern democracy deal with the fact that a large chunk of its electorate is clinically delusional? And does it make any sense to placate, negotiate, and attempt to reach common ground with those citizens who are unable to rationally evaluate evidence and who often fail to even recognize evidence? Is there any real democratic value in failing to disqualify paranoid and irrational individuals from having a voice? In other words, why cater to people who are nuts, bonkers, off the deep end? What is the advantage in allowing inmates to help run the asylum?

The January 11 Quinnipiac University poll reveals that Republicans, by a 73-21 margin, say there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Democrats say there was not by 93-5, and Independents say there was not by 60-36.

Back in the spring, a plurality of polled Republicans said that coronavirus threats were overblown, and I debated in several columns if that was due to people just taking political stands in their poll responses as opposed to reporting what they actually believed. I think that debate can be shelved. A big chunk of the GOP has anchored themselves in the Sea of Delusions. They're not lost due to a political stance. They're failing to process reality because they'd prefer to play dress up.

An Older Poll with a Surprise

Now I'll back up to an older poll, one taken December 1st through December 6th by NPR/PBS. I'm pleased to announce that due to President Trump's absence, my propensity for political incorrectness will once again merit some notice.

The question that interests me is on Page 43 of the NPR poll, "Do you trust that the results of the 2020 election are accurate, or not?" The answer, as has been widely reported in the media, is that just 24% of Republicans say yes. A massive 72% say no, and 4% are unsure. As was the case for "coronavirus is overblown" questions in the spring and summer, less education correlates with non-evidence based answers. Thus, 26% of college grads of all parties say the 2020 election was not accurate, while 39% of non-college grads say the same. 

What I found fascinating about the NPR poll, however, was the gender disparity among Republicans. I was very surprised, and part of my surprise results from nobody in mainstream media highlighting it. Here we go.

For Republican men, 33% said the election was accurate, and 64% said it was not. For Republican women, just 15% said the election was accurate and a whopping 81% said it was not. That is a monstrous irrationality gender divide. Huge. I have not heard a mention of it on CNN or MSNBC or in polite company. The fact that Republican women are significantly more nuts than Republican men appears to have been buried on Page 43.

No need to thank me for mentioning it. I aim to do as much politically incorrect wet work as the law allows.

New CNN Poll

Next I'd like to mention a CNN poll from January 9-14 that highlights the continued election denialism of most Republicans. Just 19% of GOP voters in the poll said Biden had actually won the election. Seventy-five percent said that there had been widespread voter fraud. In addition, 50% of Republicans said that there was solid evidence of such fraud. 

These polls raise a large number of serious questions. What I'd like to know is if these views are crystallized as a kind of permanent Trump base mythos or if they're amenable to degradation over time. Whatever the answer, the problem-in-the-now is that a majority of the Republican electorate believes what they prefer to believe. The Covid-19 irrationality has lessened a bit over time, but half of Republicans polled December 1-6 still thought the virus was overblown. 

The mental acuity criteria for deciding whether action must be taken is whether an individual poses a threat to himself or others. The Covid-19 deniers clearly fall into that category. Election deniers may pose less of a threat overall, but in many ways are just as delusional. The question, and it bears repeating, is whether attempts to include irrational people in political processes serve any useful purpose. In the case of Covid-19, the United States has paid the price for allowing the promulgation of irrational anti-science nonsense. How high a percent of irrationality and paranoia can a population sustain without completely falling prey to self-defeating madness? And how can a country compete economically and scientifically against other nations, and other economic systems, when its back is bowed by the weight of its own delusions?

Bob Dietz

January 23, 2021

Keeping Tabs on Lingo

Those who have read my entries for the last year know that my favorite 2020 word was "delusional," and my favorite phrase has been "cognitive dissonance." I have admittedly worn them out.

The rest of the world, however, is now catching up. Most media conversations for the last two weeks have centered on who is responsible for the degree of Republican electorate delusions in this country and what can be done about it. Commentators have avoided the term "insanity" as that is inflammatory at a time when we are supposed to pivot towards Kumbaya. Thus, media lays the blame on a handful of manipulative GOP leaders and the hypnotic promulgations of social media. "Delusion" therefore becomes a common term.

Pinning down the provenance of people being irrational, however, isn't likely to be helpful regarding existing mass delusions. Delicately ignoring the intractability and ubiquity of Americans being nuts does not solve the issue of their being nuts. It likely makes things worse. My personal suspicion is that attempts to heal a deluded chunk of the electorate without labeling them as deluded is a snipe hunt. I liken it to labeling Norman Bates as a taxidermist in hopes that he won't notice that he's psychotic. We shall see.

I've circled back to cognitive dissonance many times in the last hundred posts, and it's good to see that the phrase has entered mainstream nomenclature. I leave you with a quote from Daniel Hodges, a D.C. cop who was seen crushed in a doorway by Trump rioters in a famous video. 

"The cognitive dissonance and the zealotry of these people is unreal. They were waving the Thin Blue Line flag and telling us 'we're not your enemies' while they were attacking us, and you know, killed one of us."

There are no solutions for popular delusions.

Bob Dietz

January 20, 2021

American Insanity -- A Russian's View

How did the United States get here, with literally half of a major political party clinically deluded? And what comes next? My next column recommendation is a January 12, 2021 piece by Garry Kasparov, the famed Russian chess champion.

I'm not usually a huge fan of Kasparov's columns, as I feel that he's often guilty of a kind of Margaret-Mead-in-Samoa naivete and self-presumed expertise when it comes to U.S. culture. What I find refreshing about Kasparov's writing, however, is that he doesn't treat the U.S. as if it has some Kryptonian invulnerability to fascism and idiocy. He sees America as any other country-in-a-mess.

Kasparov's blunt warnings certainly carry more heft after the January 6 insurrection. I'm going to quote a paragraph here that I think hits everything on the head. "Garry Kasparov: What Happens Next" was published by CNN on January 12.

"Hemingway wrote in 'For Whom the Bell Tolls': 'There are many who do not know they are fascists, but will find it out when the time comes.' The time has come, and we are finding them out. Fortuitously, they are inclined to boast of their transgressions on Instagram and from the Senate floor, which makes them easy to find."

In his column, Kasparov mentions a couple of recent surveys that I'll address in a future "Popular Delusions and Madness of Crowds" entry. Based on these new surveys, Americans are more deluded than I give them credit for. As I like to chant before nodding off to sleep:

There are no solutions for popular delusions.

Bob Dietz

January 15, 2021

Framing the American Insanity

How did we get here, to the point where a full quarter of the American electorate is clinically delusional? In the months ahead, I'll make the case (as I have in the past) that American culture predisposes its citizenry to bouts of clinical insanity. In the next few columns, I'll reference others' columns rather than my own predictable blather as a way to frame some of the issues.

I spent many of the previous hundred columns describing how Trumpism and Trump support is primarily a religion. I was initially hesitant to define Trumpism as such, mainly because labeling it as religious is such an easy, blase, and cliched thing to do. Sometimes, though, the easy observation is also the correct or most useful observation. I think that's the case with Trump's infamous base. Trumpism checks all the religious boxes, and Trump's base supporters certainly qualify as zealots.

I've argued these points for more than a year. Today I'd like to present another voice, the author of a brief CNN opinion piece. Peniel E. Joseph's "What the Church of Trump is costing America" was published October 7, 2020. Joseph is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. I'm going to quote the opening two paragraphs for their timeliness in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot. I recommend reading the piece in its entirety. Bear in mind that this was published in October.

"How did the President of the United States become one of the nation's largest threats to public health and safety? When one man became head of "church" and state: the Church of Trump, that is.

For many of his most ardent supporters, Donald Trump has indeed become a church -- defined as a gathering place or grouping point for like-minded individuals to learn, express and amplify a set of beliefs that they collectively define and refine over time. While unable to articulate any meaningful religious experience, biblical knowledge or deep belief system, the President has become, for many, the embodiment of a peculiar definition of American exceptionalism."

As I've said many, many times, it didn't take Mensa-level reasoning to anticipate where 2020 Trumpism would lead. And here we are.

Bob Dietz

January 15, 2021

American Delusions

As the American media shifts its focus to Trump's second impeachment, they leave behind the question that was a focal point for the last week -- how did we get here? The answers are obvious if complex. When you literally have a quarter of an electorate clinically delusional, bad things figure to be on the menu. I'm not being hyperbolic here. I've given my take on the situation in many past columns, most explicitly in the two listed below. I recommend readers interested in balancing themselves in our present-day American context revisit those columns.

1) Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (May 25, 2020)

2) The Sanity Test of 2020 (December 27, 2020)

There exists no easy out, no quick fix, when half or more of one political party is so mentally damaged as to be unable to process evidence in a rational manner. I'm sure there are many subtle threads that contributed to our current spider-on-LSD cultural tapestry, but there are also threads that have been flashing neon orange as well. Internet echo chambers have largely replaced small newspapers as trusted sources of both information and psychological equilibrium. The fact that Americans now move every five years means that personal internet gestalts feature more continuity than physical interpersonal gestalts in the real world. Getting unanchored in reality has never been easier, the Middle Ages excepted. As in the Middle Ages, many Americans now tend to be cloistered, and the conspiracists bury their heads in the minutia of folios rather than actually observing the world. Science is anathema to them.

So while the media is mesmerized by the politics of impeachment and the logistics of Trumpian insurrection, I'll turn my attention in 2021 to the delusional nature of large swaths of the American public. 

I'm not a political writer; never have been. I was able to see pandemic reality and GOP irrationality, and call them out, because I have a knack for evaluating public evidence quickly and understanding when other people cannot. That's the province of the professional sports gambler. It'll be a useful ability in the months ahead.

My next column will be a shout out to a couple of CNN pieces that set the stage for what rational Americans are going to face in the months ahead. 

Buckle up. There's no quick solutions for popular delusions. 

Bob Dietz

January 13, 2021

Tales from The Asylum -- Insurrection Edition

For the last year, I've done "Tales from The Asylum" stories as a way to highlight how truly irrational U.S. leadership decisions have been and how unhinged large chunks of the Republican electorate have become. If you like, check out:

August 3 -- Last Week in The Asylum

August 10 -- Tales from The Asylum

August 19 -- Tales from The Asylum

August 29 -- Tales from The Asylum

October 24 -- Tales from The Asylum

The August 19 column received some good reviews.

Now, after a Trump-fueled mob attacked the Capitol yesterday, people suddenly realize that irrationality runs rampant in Trumpworld. After four years of inoculation from reality, snowballing these last 12 months with pandemic lie after pandemic lie, how could the cult of Trump have been conditioned for anything but irrationality?

Suddenly GOP asses were on the line yesterday and guns were drawn and people died, and the GOP is shocked, shocked they say, that it came to this. LOL. Sounds like a bunch of lawyers. Voluntary blindness when convenient; backbones like Gumby.

So Trump is nuts, and the GOP couldn't figure it out until yesterday. If that's true, Republicans are the dumbest, most imperceptive political party on the planet. 

I had my popcorn ready yesterday, as I anticipated the events. Two things surprised me. First, I was shocked at the non-response of law enforcement and how easily rioters flooded the Capitol. Second, I was surprised that Congress reconvened in the same location last night. Because many of the rioters were wearing large backpacks, I thought sweeping the entire Capitol for bombs would take until morning. Evidently, bomb sweeping tech is well beyond my expectations.

The unfortunate aspect of all this -- the Capitol goes sane in two weeks and rampant insanity, for the most part, will be outside the walls of Congress or the White House. It will be in the streets and homes of American towns and cities. And it will be more dangerous than what we saw January 6.

Bob Dietz

January 7, 2021

In the Footsteps of Captain Renault

Now that injuries have accrued and at least one life has been lost amid 30,000 Trumpian zombies attacking the Capitol, I roll my eyes cynically at the idea that today was a tipping point that magically enabled some in the GOP to focus their eyeballs on reality. Yeah, they had a real epiphany today. What, were they complete morons up to this point, unable to anticipate the most obvious of causes and effects?

I can just hear Ted Cruz, whose slimeball minister act is such a caricature as to be B-movie worthy, saying:

"I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that 30,000 delusional anarchists with a history of white nationalism, conspiracy paranoia, threat-making, and ownership of automatic weapons would violently break into the Capitol."

Bob Dietz

January 6, 2021