A parallel dimension at war with our own
People who excused torture, defended it as effective, justified it as necessary, now assert their right to lie. They brandish alternative facts or reject them entirely. Make no mistake. It is a basal expression of power. Like rape.
Greg Sargent examines how Donald Trump’s Big Lie has metastasized among the body MAGA. In addition to vile snickers, the conservative response to the hammer attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul has inspired a flood of new lies and conspiracy theories (I won’t repeat here) meant to excuse attempted murder. Or to dismiss it.
“The embrace of political lying as a declaration of power — of the power to say what reality is — has long been studied by academics,” Sargent explains. “Some see it as a harbinger of autocratic political tendencies.”
It worked for the cult of personality in Orwell’s Oceania.
MAGA Republicans’ alternate reality is “constructed to be impervious to outside challenge,” Sargent continues:
But it’s also because the whole point of all the lying is to assert the power to manufacture an alternate story in the face of easily demonstrable facts and outraged condemnation — and, importantly, to assert that power unabashedly and defiantly.
I can’t prove this is what’s driving the response. But prominent right-wing personalities have blithely asserted that the media is spreading misinformation about the attack, trumped up absurd “false flag” theories about it, spewed truly vicious mockery and even turned the hammer into an online meme.
Watching all those figures, it’s hard not to conclude that the key act here is a political faction unshackling itself from even the most minimal standards of public conduct. The louder the shaming and the fact-checking get, the greater the assertion of power in defiance of them becomes.
Status anxiety is a powerful motivator. Factionalists read spreading social diversity as an existential threat. They want their way, and they want it now. If America cannot be theirs and theirs alone, they will burn it to the ground. But it seems first they will construct a MAGA America that exists in the same space but in a parallel dimension at war with our own.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat (“Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present“) confirms, “The ability to assert a false reality in the face of empirical evidence is itself an act of power.”
Beautiful wickedness
Freedom, long a tribal shibboleth on the right, has itself been radicalized to include rejection of social norms and responsibilities. Authoritarians, Ben-Ghiat says, place themselves “above the truth” and “above democratic custom.”
At the core of this politics, says Ben-Ghiat, is the flaunting of the ability to “get away with it,” whether the “it” is serial lying, the abandonment of basic norms, or even deliberate cruelty to a longtime colleague and member of the political opposition.
After Charlottesville and Jan. 6, we have reason for concern that eliminationist and denialist rhetoric may spawn more political violence. Sargent concludes that “the mass denial of the violence — and its functioning as a proud marker of political identity — might be just as ominous.”
The Witch of the West gloried in her “beautiful wickedness.” Trump’s MAGA cult glories in its own. One nation, not wholly under them, is one they reject, democracy and all, even as the wave the flag of the republic for which they no longer stand.
Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre published “Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate” in 1944, observed Jeet Heer. France had been liberated, but the Holocaust had not reached its peak. Anti-Semites, Sartre observed, enjoy rhetorically toying with opponents as a sadistic child might with a frog:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play.
They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
MAGA believers and their unapologetic propagandists from the Ministry of Lies, spout falsehoods as an expression of freedom from any reality they cannot dominate.
There are four lights. They insist there are five and demand you agree.
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Please go vote and take family and friends.