Richardson's daily cataloguing of the atrocities focuses on recent attempts to destroy various forms of fact gathering and journalism. The Trump administration really seems to believe that if you just suppress bad news that no one will think things are getting bad. We have already seen a steep decline in consumer sentiment, and whether it's hiring freezes or rising prices, people very much aware that the economy is struggling some. Things feel off.
Some of this is the full frontal assault on expertise seen in the visa scam recently unveiled. There are a lot of smartish people who run or help run important companies. Everything is fucking nuts right now, and not having trustworthy economic data or not being able to know what tariff or immigration policy will be next week (much less next year) makes planning impossible. The very steps that Trump is taking to make it seem like things are going great will only make things get worse.
In this weird attempt to canonize Charlie Kirk, I was struck by the seemingly bizarre way that evangelicals in particular saw him and the world. This nutso idea that Kirk "loved his enemies" is just contrary to fact. They are even saying that he "stopped the bullet that would've killed someone else" because he's literally Superman. This just feels like almost medieval superstition.
But when you think about superstition, how different is it, really, from conspiracy theories? Both are just cognitively flawed ways of looking at cause and effect. Both are not able to understand what evidence is really telling you. Both want to ascribe elements of random chance to some overarching power or plan.
We live in a messy world. The reason we rely on doctors and statisticians and forecasters is that the future is a dark room, and we need to know where to find the light switch.
Trump seems prone to this sort of conspiratorial thinking, not as a way to engage with his base, but because he shares their fascination with it. He rose to political prominence on birtherism. Yeah, it was racist, but it was also a conspiracy theory. Trump is a narcissist who has two failed marriages, numerous bankruptcies and has won the popular vote once. All of those things must be someone else's fault or things that were stolen from him.
Trump is not - in any way - a religious man. Yet his stranglehold on white evangelicals is total. It's not because they share a theological understanding. It's because they share the need for some form of thinking that is conspiratorial. It's based on "faith" in the sense that it is not based on evidence. Jesus' face did not appear in a storm cloud, and gas is not $2.00 a gallon.
Obviously, the Trumpist war on facts is part of the authoritarian playbook. But the reason they have to do it is not just to make themselves look more popular. I don't think reality will let them get away with that. Hiding the economic data will not change the price of groceries or make it so you don't get laid off. I think that - at least in part - the war on facts is because the crave the certainty of their bizarre beliefs and they want to wall off any information that might disturb that.
Yes, it's Authoritarianism 101, but it's also a desperate attempt to stave off cognitive dissonance.
No comments:
Post a Comment