Delusions are not the exclusive domain of the political right. The left’s are no less delusions because they are more reality-based. A principle one is that facts matter.
Hoping to erode GOP support by 2022, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) intends to tie QAnon around Republicans’ necks like an albatross, Politico reported last week. “They can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters,” said new chair Sean Patrick Maloney of New York. “They cannot do both.”
Another delusion belied by facts, writes Osita Nwanevu at The New Republic:
Of all the “big lies” distorting our politics, one of the largest and most popular—back in 2010 and now—has been the notion that our political divisions are the product of under- or miseducation. The Republican Party’s flight into lunacy, it’s often suggested, has a fairly simple cause. The unwashed aren’t getting The Facts in school or from their media sources, and it’s up to the enlightened to shower The Facts upon them …
Actually, no. More and better Facts will not set them free. Polls show few differences between between QAnon believers with or without college degrees. Nwanevu writes, “Civiqs’s latest survey, for instance, registers 72 percent opposition and 5 percent support for the theory among graduates. The split is 71 to 5 among nongraduates and 78 to 3 among postgraduates. And, notably, Americans without college degrees are less likely than graduates to have heard of QAnon in the first place.”
Economic dislocation and under-education have little to do with support for efforts to toss aside the 2020 election results, Greg Sargent notes in considering a mid-January Washington Post-ABC News poll. Sargent writes:
Bubbling underneath all this is the fact that there really is a serious anti-democratic movement afoot among the class of intellectuals who are trying to carve out a purportedly respectable version of Trumpist post-liberalism.
As Laura Field and Damon Linker demonstrate, this movement is getting darker, more desperate and more radical, and some strains of it appear to be contemplating a fundamental and permanent break with liberal democracy’s most basic core commitments.
“Intellectuals,” not yahoos. Linker wrote in late July:
Just how dark and desperate is the right becoming? So much so that it is now increasingly common to find conservative writers flirting openly with ideas that clearly point in the direction of outright political radicalism — including talk of civil war, permanently purging liberals from political office and positions of cultural influence, the need for revolutionary action, and hopes for a “refounding” of America using “regime-level power.”
It is liberal arrogance to dismiss by its most clownish spokespersons what is happening on the right.
Intellectuals aside, Nwanevu cites a report that 40 percent of people charged so far in the insurrection were not unemployed, but “CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants.” In fact, studies show that more knowledge actually deepens political disagreements on the right. The problem is in fact that many “will believe what they want to believe in spite of available data and evidence.”
What they want to believe is that conservative hands are the only ones that may legitimately steer the ship of state. Democracy is useful to them for appearances only; even authoritarian regimes hold elections. Popular sovereignty be damned if it delivers the “wrong” outcome, e.g., Democrats in charge. More and better facts will not neutralize that kind of motivated reasoning among neither conservative intellectuals nor the hoi polloi.
Nwanevu again, critiquing the DCCC’s strategy (emphasis mine):
Doing something about the power of the Republican Party seems more plausible—as long as those fighting it frame the battle as right against wrong rather than smart against dumb.
Democrats should try campaigning on the truth: The Republican Party is controlled by intelligent, college-educated, and affluent elites who concoct dangerous nonsense to paper over a bigoted, plutocratic agenda and to justify attacks on the democratic process. That agenda and those attacks are supported by millions of reasonably intelligent voters who will believe or claim to believe anything that furthers the objective of keeping conservatives in control of this country forever. Simply pointing to figures like Greene and hoping the indignation of college graduates will do the rest is a mistake. Instead, Democrats should present voters with a material choice between a party that has nothing to offer the majority of Americans but abuse and conspiratorial flimflam and a party committed to building a democracy and an economy that work for all. If they don’t, the lizard people who run the GOP will be running the government again in no time.
The will to power is all the GOP has now. They do not want to govern. They want to rule. Republican party members hanging onto the old ways have already lost control. They have nothing to offer their authoritarian base.
In 2019, John Dean and retired professor of psychology Robert Altemeyer worked with a Monmouth University study measuring subjects’ right-wing authoritarian “RWA” and “social dominance” traits:
The Monmouth poll overwhelmingly found that most Trump supporters are both highly authoritarian and highly prejudiced, and revealed that authoritarian views are deeply embedded in the belief system of many Republicans who would seek another strong leader to take Trump’s place whenever he departed the national political stage.
Trump’s followers don’t care about his dishonesty and questionable actions because their primary concern is the perceived corruption of the purity of American society, write Dean and Altemeyer. Trump’s base is oblivious to his unpresidential behavior, endlessly forgiving of his incompetence, and stands “ready to give Trump all the power he wants” in exchange for his promise to reverse societal change and protect them from the purported danger posed by “lawless” minorities and immigrants.
In that pursuit, adherence to democratic principles are as situational as American traditions like the peaceful transfer of power are disposable. The period between Nov. 3, 2020 and Jan. 20, 2021 illustrated that in violence and in blood.
Arrestees so far include a mother of eight, a messianic rabbi, a couple of realtors, a couple of fitness club owners, a young farmer, a couple of corrections officers, and more. Male, female, younger and older. Americans in name. Everyday anti-Americans at heart.