People can be perfectly rational in everyday life, even while holding some goofy ideas. Such occasional lapses are natural and normal. But what if they become comprehensive in extent?
That’s the state today of America’s political right — which for five decades I myself aligned with, till they went comprehensively to war against reality.
Their biggest watchword is “freedom.” Ron DeSantis paints it all over himself — while breaking new ground in government bossiness, telling individuals what they can and can’t do. Telling schools not only what they can or can’t teach, what books can be read, but even barring them from measures to protect student and teacher health. “Freedom” my ass.
This is going on all across red America, flummoxed by the idea of nonconforming sexuality. So these “freedom lovers” push all sorts of legislation trying to stop people living their lives as they choose, from “bathroom bills” to banning medical treatments and sports participation and even drag shows. And to keep this whole aspect of human life from surfacing in schools, lest children gain some understanding of the society they’ll be inhabiting. (While ignoring our real schools problem: lousy basic education, especially for minorities.)
The one freedom the right truly does fetishize is of course gun ownership. Despite also prating about “law and order” and crime — though a crucial threat there is the easy availability of guns, including military style weapons designed to kill a lot of people fast. The right blocks all reasonable gun regulation. “Law and order” my ass.
And their notions of personal self-protection are a tragic fantasy, because guns are extremely dangerous to have around, mostly killing not miscreants but gun owners themselves and their families. The local paper recently reported on a guy fiddling with his gun, which accidentally went off. His wife died. Just one more sad statistic in America’s anti-reality gun insanity.
Another obsession is abortion. A complex, difficult moral issue. But here again we see the “freedom loving” right deploying the heavy hand of government, to impose simplistic answers restricting freedom, rather than leaving it to women and their doctors. Draconian abortion bans deprive many women of vital medical care, with resulting deaths. And while “pro-lifers” fixate on the unborn, they couldn’t care less about the lives of children after birth. And of course all those lost to gun culture. “Pro-life” my ass.
A recent PBS profile of Dr. Anthony Fauci highlighted all the craziness sparked by the Covid pandemic, with widespread right-wing resistance to masking, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination. (Sloganeering “My body, my choice” with no sense of irony.) A whole subculture of medical misinformation and conspiracy mongering, with a thin veneer of asserted science and fact that was really all obvious garbage. Heeding clowns and frauds while Fauci himself was demonized as a murderous monster. This lunacy literally cost America hundreds of thousands of lives. Hundreds of thousands.
And, again, these people call themselves “pro-life??”
By the way, anti-abortion crusaders also seem oblivious that more Black babies born due to abortion bans will hasten America’s becoming majority non-white. A prospect that really discombobulates their brains, and drives a lot of their political behavior.
Including that exploding culture war over teaching in schools. “Critical race theory” is made a bugaboo by people not knowing what they’re talking about, or that it’s not even taught in any public schools. No kids are indoctrinated to feel guilty for whiteness. But some of these culture warriors even want to ban any teaching about slavery, a huge fact of U.S. history, still shaping American society today. Which students need to understand.
The right’s hostility to ethnic minorities, and sexual nonconformity — and immigrants too — is all of a piece, a basic antagonism toward “the Other.” Anything unfamiliar making them uncomfortable. What small mindedness. And all based again on factual nonsense. That gay and trans people somehow threaten children’s minds or sexual whatever. That Blacks are inferior, moochers, and crime-prone. That immigrants and refugees are threats too — rather than benefiting America, which is the reality.
Many on the right even believe the preposterous “replacement theory,” that there’s some calculated plot to somehow swap out white U.S. voters for “obedient” brown ones. (A pet theme of Fox’s Tucker Carlson.) This led the Buffalo shooter to target Blacks — with an assault rifle he easily got due to our insane laxity of gun regulation.
Speaking of Carlson, if Fox is your information source, you’re simply unaware that he and other top Fox talkers have been exposed as huge liars, loudly promoting Trump’s “stolen election” lie even while knowing it was nonsense. (Any fool could see Trump made it up because his snakepit psyche couldn’t face losing.) But that didn’t deter Carlson from doubling down by concocting a laughable alternative reality to what everyone witnessed on January 6.
Now these “law and order” and “tough on crime” Republicans are shrieking with outrage at our law-and-order system’s prosecution of crimes committed by Trump. Whether he actually did commit crimes seems irrelevant to them.
Yet they loudly call themselves “patriots.” Dismissing or excusing the January 6 attack on American democracy, and all the rest of Trump’s lies and depravities, is deeply sick. Continuing to support him is insane and treasonous. “Patriots” my ass.
So, in sum, the right’s flight from reality is indeed comprehensive, across the board. They also refuse to believe in climate change, or humanity’s role in it. They don’t believe in evolution. They don’t believe in church-state separation — ignorant of how that’s actually benefited religion in America. While they do believe everything is run by a man in the sky, and they’ll go to Heaven after death.
Religion is the gateway drug. It scrambles the brain, making it susceptible to all manner of other delusions. If you believe in God, you can believe in Trump.
Not everyone on the right holds all the nutty ideas I’ve mentioned. And there’s nuttiness on the left too.
But between the two sides, there’s no comparison. At least one scientific study* has found that factual falsehoods are more prevalent among right-wingers, they’re less good at telling truth from lies, and more credulous toward what really is “fake news” — a mostly right-wing phenomenon. It was noted that their beliefs tend to need falsehoods because they’re at odds with reality.
The right threatens to make America into a grotesque parody of its founding ideals. “Great again” my ass.
