We can't fight the Republican party's 'big lie' with facts alone
By: the Guardian
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Peter Pomerantsev
Agreeing to Donald Trump's claims about the 'rigged' 2020 election ensures your fealty by making you complicit
Why do seemingly serious people repeat crazy political lies? This was the question the American anthropologist and political scientist Lisa Wedeen explored when she studied the Syrian dictatorship in the 1990s.
She was struck by how people who were usually rational in private would repeat the utterly absurd slogans of the regime, such as claiming that the dictator Hafez al-Assad was the greatest chemist in the world.
"From the moment you leave your house, you ask: what does the regime want?," a Syrian explained to her. "The struggle becomes who can praise the government more." The bigger the lie you uttered, the more loyal you were.
"The regime's power resides in its ability to impose national fictions and to make people say and do what they otherwise would not," Wedeen concluded. "
This obedience makes people complicit; it entangles them in self-enforcing relations of domination, thereby making it hard for participants to see themselves simply as victims of the state's caprices."
I was reminded of Wedeen's research when the US Congress finally selected a speaker after weeks of chaos. Their choice, Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana, is best known for ardently supporting ex-president Donald Trump's baseless claims that the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Jo Biden, was rigged. Johnson was the head of the committee to question the integrity of the election. He constructed spurious legal arguments that tried to discredit the vote, though his proposals were thrown out by the US supreme court. He raised the unfounded theory that the voting machines used in the election were tampered with.
This claim is so groundless that Fox, the network that supported the allegation, had to pay nearly a billion dollars in a settlement with Dominion, the company that makes the machines.
Many of the Republican representatives who supported Johnson's candidacy have admitted both publicly and privately that the elections were, in fact, not falsified. Yet when journalists faced a gaggle of Republican congressmen and questioned Johnson's record on this blatant lie, his colleagues jeered and he mockingly said: "Next question" - as if the facts were irrelevant here.
And in a sense, they are. Agreeing to Trump's claims about the rigged election is the absurdity you have to pledge allegiance to in order to show you belong to the tribe. It ensures your fealty by making you complicit. For anyone who has lived in authoritarian regimes, it's a familiar sight.
Along with Wedeen's Syrian example, I'm reminded of the Czech dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel's essay The Power of the Powerless, where he tells the story of a greengrocer in communist-era Prague who puts up pro-regime posters in his shop window. The greengrocer doesn't believe the communist slogans; the people who make the slogans don't believe in them; and the people who read them don't believe in them.
But as long as everyone plays along, the system continues. It's the act of not believing and yet pretending, rather than of fervently believing, which is the power of such systems. Your will is corroded: you are made into moral mincemeat that can be shaped any which way by the leader.
Havel nobly suggested that in order to fight such a system, what was needed was to "live in truth", start being honest. Republican politicians face none of the danger communist-era Czechoslovaks or Syrians under the Assads have, but living in truth seems beyond them.Contradicting Trump's absurdities risks falling out of favour with the leader and his supporters.
Altogether, about 40% of Americans think the 2020 vote was illegitimate, and about 60% of Republicans (the figures fluctuate). A democracy will struggle to survive, let alone flourish, when such huge swathes of its population see it as their badge of loyalty not to trust its most fundamental processes.
But if the "rigged" election claim is more about identity than evidence, it also means it will be hard to fact check our way out of this situation. The issue can't simply be resolved by "trusted" sources, even those on the far right, who can communicate the truth about the election to Trump supporters. Instead, sources only become trusted if they agree to the lie.
Pledging loyalty to the "big lie" is more about identity than knowledge - and to fight it entails understanding the need for belonging and meaning it fulfils. Authoritarian propaganda can give the illusion of status and at its extremes a sense of supremacy to compensate for the lack of real agency.
Self-styled "populists" can flourish in what sociologists call "civic deserts": frequently rural areas where the old institutions that bonded communities, the local clubs and town halls have disappeared and where civic engagement is particularly low.
But such communities can start to be regenerated for a digital age with, for example, online as well as offline town halls; reinvigorated local news that responds to people's priorities; and online municipal budget making and other innovations that help people feel part of a community and have ownership over local politics.
Historical lessons from understanding and fighting propaganda can be useful here too. When he investigated the psychology of German soldiers in the second world war, the British psychiatrist Henry Dicks thought that counterpropaganda needed to stress the bonds people had that went beyond belonging to the Nazi Volk: the emotional bonds they felt with loved ones and relatives, for example.
The competition with the big lie is not just, or even primarily, about fact checking. It's a competition between different models of belonging: can we build alternative communities that are more benign and yet fulfilling than the ones offered by the conspiracy theorists?
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The first step in ending "Big Lie" behavior is to beat them at the ballot box.