That they should believe a lie
by Tom Sullivan
In the car last night, my wife mused on why many struggling to remain in the middle class speak so harshly of the worse off who accept public assistance, you know, for food. Given last-place aversion (see Saturday’s post), isn’t it a small price to ensure there are people below you on the social ladder to look down on?
I shouted, “You want me on that dole! You need me on that dole!”
In a bit of serendipity later, up popped Heather Cox Richardson’s piece in Salon featuring a photo of Jack Nicholson from “A Few Good Men,” about how Movement Conservatives can’t handle the truth.
Beginning in the 1950s, she writes, William F. Buckley formulated a strategy for pushing back against the popular New Deal. It was “an attack on the Enlightenment principles that gave rise to Western civilization.” Truth no longer served. Instead, “a compelling lie could convince voters so long as it fit a larger narrative of good and evil.” The Cold War provided the growth medium.
By the George W. Bush administration, Richardson concludes,
Buckley’s intellectual stand had won. Facts and argument had given way to an ideology premised on Christianity and the idea of economic individualism. As Movement Conservatives took over the Republican Party, that ideology worked its way deep into our political system. It has given us, for example, a senator claiming words he spoke on the Senate floor were “not intended to be a factual statement.” It has given us “dynamic scoring,” a rule changing the way the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the economic impact of tax cuts, to reinforce the idea that cuts fuel economic growth despite the visibly disastrous effects of recent tax cuts on states such as Kansas. And it has given us attempts in Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina and Colorado to discard the A.P. U.S. History framework and dictate that students learn instead the Movement Conservatives’ skewed version of the nation’s history. Politicians have always spun information to advance their own policies. The practice infuriates partisans but it reflects the Enlightenment idea of progress through reasoned argument. Movement Conservatives’ insistence on their own version of reality, in defiance of facts, is something different altogether.
Examples are legion. And when confronted publicly? Double down on the lie.
Last year I wrote about the popularity of “pass-it-on” email, a phenomenon of the right all but absent on the left:
Some of us are old enough to have seen Superman on black-and-white TV defending truth, justice, and the American Way. That was then. The saddest part of pass-it-on propaganda and AFP disinformation is that the people who raised us at the height of the Cold War warned us that commies would use propaganda and disinformation to destroy America from within. Now, many of those same Real Americans™ consider trafficking in propaganda and disinformation good, clean fun for the whole family. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.
There’s an end-times passage in the New Testament about this:
2 Thess 2 (KJV)
11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.