When they win, they’re all “Elections have consequences.” And when they lose, somebody cheated. That pattern was established well before Donald Trump came along to upend the Republican Party. This he did not upend.
Yes, I heard for months from friends with conspiracy theories about the 2004 results in Ohio. Don’t show me statistical analyses of exit polling by some researcher, or a hacker demonstrating that with access he can alter one machine’s vote totals, I said. Show me a whistleblower with the means, the motive, and the opportunity to rig lots of machines and vote counts and we’ll talk. I’m still waiting. Contrary to Politico’s take, those voices died out pretty quickly on the left.
After November 2020, Trump the Ungratious spun up rumors of a stolen election into a national obsession and quite nearly a toppled government. As for evidence, what sore losers on the Trumpist right lack in quality they make up for with quantity. Classic conspiracist move.
All this brings us to Greg Sargent’s Friday column asking why we should be any more sensitive to Triumpists’ “Snowflake Syndrome” than we were to lefties’ feelings in 2004. Why they hell is it, Sargent writes, that “from voting rights to covid-19 to the legacy of Jan. 6 — we’re being told these voters are afflicted with a deeply fragile belief system that must be carefully ministered to and humored to an extraordinary degree”?
Why must we take their conspiracy theories more seriously than those of 2004? Or not confront their vaccine reluctance “too aggressively … lest they feel shamed and retreat into their anti-vax epistemological shells”? They of the Fuck Your Feelings tee shirts.
I’ve argued repeatedly that deriding people as stupid for “voting against their best interests” is no way to persuade anyone to change their minds. Sargent agrees. But making obesiance before their looney delusions neither placates not respects them either.
Take Texas, please. Republican legislators there are shepherding a bill that would require an audit of 2020 results by a third party appointed by Republicans:
But tellingly, as The Post reports, the audit would be required only for the largest counties — virtually all of which backed President Biden.
This is being justified by the notion that Republican voters no longer “believe in their election system,” as its chief sponsor, Republican state Rep. Steve Toth, put it.
But why audit just in larger counties? Behold this remarkable answer:
While Toth said he would support a statewide effort, he also argued the undertaking would be too expensive and time-consuming. Asked if he would consider including some smaller counties, Toth replied, “What’s the point? I mean, all the small counties are red.”
This “confidence” story line is nonsense. Sargent writes, “It’s being widely abused to keep alive the myth of the stolen election and to justify an unprecedented wave of efforts to disenfranchise the opposition’s voters. It is not designed to build confidence in our elections, but to further undermine it, for illicit purposes.”
Republicans have in fact spent decades working to instill in their base the belief that when Republicans win it is because they represent “real” America, and when Democrats do — let’s not mince words — it is because Black people cheated.
Vaccine hesitancy? Same deal. For some reason, we must take conspiracy theories about microchips and “needle Nazis” and stolen Bibles seriously lest we hurt the delicate feelings of manly antidemocracy agitators with guns. “It’s a tired act,” writes Sargent, “not to mention a transparently disingenuous and even dangerous one.”
It’s fine and good to insist on and search for ways to be empathetic and more communicative with the other side. But we need a limiting principle here. This requires forthrightly grappling with the true motives of these bad actors, and with the constraints on how far good-faith persuasion can get in a right-wing information environment that they are polluting daily.
Many Republicans are airing concerns about “voter confidence” to justify further efforts to suppress votes and undermine that confidence. Many demanding understanding of vaccine hesitancy are working to inculcate further vaccine distrust.
Voter confidence is not their problem, anyway. It’s more like the “civilizational confidence” Mark Steyn once warned the West lacked with all the “Wake up, America!” subtlety of the parody right-wing radio commentator, Earl Pitts – American. The encroachment of the Muslim world on western civilization was a clear and present danger, Steyn wrote. Admitting conservatives’ real concern was the encroachment of brown people on White political hegemony was a bit too confessional for the pages of the Wall Street Journal in 2006.
I wrote at the time:
Steyn argues that just ground-pounding the Muslims wouldn’t prevent the fall of the Christian west. We suffer from an alarming birthrate gap vis-à-vis the Muslim world, Steyn warns, and the Christian world risks being eventually overrun because of “our lack of civilizational confidence.” (The cure for which is, no doubt, civilizational Viagra.) Americans are not afraid enough of the urgent threat posed by Muslim children and must retaliate by stockpiling more of our own.
And if treating the lack of White confidence by boosting the birthrate doesn’t work (conservative Christians are trying), pass laws to make it difficult if not impossible for brown people to vote when they come of age — just what G.O.P.-led legislatures are doing in Texas and elsewhere. Republicans are not worried about hurting their feelings.