Truthiness doesn’t care about your prescription drug plan
People feel what they feel. They cannot be reasoned out of them. But feelings can be manipulated, preyed upon. Con men know this. Too often, the American left kids itself that the truth will set people free, and that our own feelings do not influence our book-learnin’. They do.
In a post titled, “Fascism will not be defeated by logic,” Anand Giridharadas considers “the role of emotion in the fraught political life of America in 2024.” Change by the boatload has left Americans anxious. The Ink talked to Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) for his seeming ability “to be both in the arena and up in the stands, observing the whole scene.”
Giridharadas writes:
We talked to him just after he’d finished work on the 2024 edition of the World Happiness Report, a process that got him to recognize how the country’s democratic crisis is rooted in deep emotional distress.
We believe Democratic leaders have failed to help Americans cope with the crisis of anxiety and unhappiness they face in a transformed world — and this failure of change management has had dire political consequences.
When we see people unsettled by it, discombobulated, a lot of them are just trying to get their heads around all that a new era is asking of them. And the authoritarians are getting to them earlier and more effectively than pro-democratic movements. And so people who start out as merely disoriented by change are radicalized into fanatics.
Murphy says that Democrats simply cannot leave emotion to the Republicans — it just plays directly into a classic authoritarian strategy. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has told us:
Autocrats are very, very good at tapping into people’s innermost fears. On the one hand, they make themselves the carriers of those fears, but they also make themselves the solution. So when Trump said, The American dream is dead, he made himself the vessel of the forgotten, the people who felt downtrodden. Of course, his regard for them is fake. He just wants to use them. But he simulated care and inhabited those emotions, and then provided a solution: “I alone can fix it.” And people felt safe with him. .
They weren’t. Neither was the country (or the world).
“You don’t solve a crisis of meaning and purpose by just giving people a little bit bigger tax credit,” Murphy told The Ink (subscription required):
I want to start with what you’ve said about happiness. Can you expand on your notion that the government you are part of is culpable for inhibiting people’s happiness, or at least for not making happiness probable?
It’s important to remember that the government’s responsibility to protect your right to happiness is in our founding document. So this is a legitimate conversation — our founders thought this was an essential conversation. Government stays out of what you’re passionate about, who you connect with, where your purpose and meaning come from. But we are responsible for setting the rules of society and culture and economy that give you a chance at happiness.
The studies on what brings happiness don’t surprise anybody. What people want is connection and positive relationships and agency and power over their lives. They feel like they have less chance of connection today, and they certainly feel like they have much less agency over their economic lives. And there are public policy choices we’ve made that have robbed people of connection and power.
I’ve admitted before that I do what I do not as much from a deep love of country as much as a for a restored sense of power and agency. Being on the field and in the game (rather than a heckling spectator) means that, even if you get politically run over sometimes, you don’t feel like road kill. I dislike feeling like political road kill. People overwhelemed by rapid change dislike it too. Many others just find more hurtful outlets for their feelings.
There is also community in being together in the fight, even in an online community.
Murphy: “You can’t be happy if you don’t have friends and connections. You can’t be happy if you don’t feel like you have control over your life. And to the extent people feel more isolated and less in control of their lives today, there are direct lines from government policies to the ways that people feel like happiness is further away.”
[…]
I think we’ve reached a tipping point of exhaustion with an American society that has become hyper-focused on individual success and treats human beings as consumers instead of citizens. We are not a common-good society any longer. We are a kill-and-eat-what-you-can society. It’s been a gradual process, but I think we have reached a point where folks want something different.
Don’t you? Take control. Show initiative. Be more than keyboard warriors.
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