“The world is a strange place and in it lie things of another nature, a bent order, and beyond a certain point there are no rules to make men mind.” — Larry Brown, “A Roadside Resurrection”
As the dismal summer of 2021 staggered toward its woeful conclusion, “the worst of times” seemed hard upon us, and the only relevant question was “Can it get much worse?” After the tragic Second Coming of the coronavirus, those surging body counts and hard-pressed hospitals, the vaccine wars, hurricans, floods and wildfires, the painful conclusion of the Afghanistan fiasco, primitive legislative assaults on our voting and reproductive rights——how much worse could it get, here in our once-free, once-favored USA? The answer, trust me, is “very much worse.”
Some broad hints: You could balance a shot-glass on its lacquered orange forelock, its tailor apprenticed with Barnum and Bailey, and it was never caught telling the truth unless you asked it if it was still hungry. There’s a hungry, attention-starved thing out there that could make the summer of 2021 look like a morning stroll through sunlit meadows.
That second Second Coming, the Restoration of Donald J. Trump, is a cause so weird and suicidal that foreign observers, friend and foe alike, fail to believe that it’s still thriving in America. The Far Right’s pitiful convulsion in Washington Sept. 18 was such a flaccid non-event that never-Trumpers were encouraged to believe that the ex-president and his Stop-the-Steal fantasies of returning to office have lost momentum. My guess is that the impotent, sparsely-attended rally in support of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists simply showed us the difference between a police force that couldn’t imagine the stupidity and ferocity of the Trump alt-Right, and one that’s now well-prepared for it. January 6 was a lesson that won’t have to be learned again.
If only the general population could learn its lessons as well as the Capitol police.
Now as then, in 2016 and 2020, the unanswerable question is not “How could so many millions of voters be fooled by this fool?” but “How could anyone?” New books on the Trump presidency, notably “Peril” from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, portray a president so erratic, hysterical and profane that no satirist could do him justice. I’ve worked in a steel mill and in major league locker rooms where the F-word is heard less often than it was uttered in the Oval Office. One of Trump’s charms for a certain class of voter is that he’s a man who’s had every advantage, but behaves like men who had none.
And now these books make it clear that virtually everyone who worked with or against him knew that he was insane.
“Who knows what he might do?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time. So don’t say you don’t know what his state of mind is.”
“Madame Speaker,” Gen. Milley replied, “I agree with you on everything.”
The most frightening revelation in the Woodward/Costa book is that Milley was so alarmed by Trump’s post-election derangement that he went outside diplomatic channels to contact a Chinese general — to reassure him that Trump wouldn’t bomb China to distract the world from his defeat. For what appears to have been a heroic effort to save the human race from nuclear annihilation, Milley has now been branded a traitor by most Republicans. “Peril” also reveals that Attorney General William Barr mocked Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s wild team of defeat-deniers, which Barr referred to as “the clown car.” America survived — more or less — an administration with its top military official and its top legal official in agreement that their boss was a ridiculous lunatic.
But polls still show that 60% of Republican voters admire Donald Trump and would choose him again in 2024. Trump’s immunity, his lifetime free pass from truth and responsibility, is an infuriating conundrum with only one explanation I can comprehend. An explanation that links it, if I’m right, to the most pressing of America’s current agonies, the only one it can — and must — address immediately and forcefully.
News item: President Biden issues a broad and entirely necessary vaccine mandate. The idiot governor of South Carolina, one Henry McMaster, declares that he will fight the president and the mandate “to the gates of Hell.” The governor of Alabama, a state where every ICU bed is occupied and COVID-sick patients are stretched out in waiting rooms, calls Biden’s mandates “outrageous, overreaching.”
Besides stretching the outer limits of demagoguery and reminding us that Republicans have no Biden policy besides total obstruction, what can we say is happening here? Vaccine refusal is something that cannot be tolerated. Public health has nothing to do with “freedom” or individual rights. Citizenship always entails certain risks and sacrifices, and compromises for the common good. Consider only military service, and the military draft. These doctors who want to vaccinate you are 100 times more competent, and more concerned with your personal welfare, than the people who sent you to Vietnam or Afghanistan. Your refusal to be vaccinated, like a refusal to fire back when your company is under attack, might cost you your own life. But in the chain of consequences it will certainly cause the deaths of many others.
Most of us dislike mandates. I have my own libertarian streak, a “Tell me I must and I swear that I won’t” streak that’s plagued me since grammar school. But there is no rational argument for refusing the COVID vaccine, any more than there’s a rational argument for embracing and reinstating Donald Trump. So where does this organized, stubborn resistance to proven vaccines — infecting a quarter of America’s population and more than half the population of several states — draw its fuel and its inexhaustible supply of falsehoods?
Look hard at the media, at an information culture in crisis. News outlets and websites that feature bald-faced, preposterous, dangerous lies — the presidential election was stolen, the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax, climate change is a hoax, the sacking of the Capitol last Jan. 6 was “a normal tourist visit,” Nazi demonstrators are antifa agents in disguise, Democrats are Satanists and pedophiles, etc. — continue to prosper and proliferate. Social media extends and intensifies their poisonous reach. A recent Wall Street Journal series on Facebook and its notorious algorithm quotes the company’s own researchers on the perils of giving the information customer just what he wants.
“Publishers and political parties were reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism,” internal memos complained. “Our approach has had unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content, such as politics and news. This is an increasing liability. Misinformation, toxicity and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares.”
“I fall heavily on the side of trusting science more than something you read on Facebook,” actor Matt Damon offered, helpfully, but few star-struck anti-vaxxers were lining up behind him. It’s not news that the American Right openly despises facts, dismisses science and ridicules expertise, or that extremist news sources and their social media bullhorns have substantially undermined public trust in our institutions. Polls show that trust in the medical establishment has slipped from 75% to 25% since the 1970s, and trust in higher education has dropped nine percentage points in just three years, to below 50%. Trust in the free press may never recover from Donald Trump. This war on truth — on individual, uncomfortable truths and on Truth as an essential civic guidepost — has been the foundation of every dictatorship, every authoritarian government. H.L. Mencken, a harsh critic of American democracy, warned us 100 years ago that working democracy depends entirely on an educated electorate and reliable sources of information. He was not impressed with the way it was going in 1921.
What if the sacred majority is ignorant, loves its ignorance, and is essentially unteachable? Mencken asked, at his most alarmed. What happens to the reasonable, the responsible, and the well-meaning who try to live among them? What then? Mencken, of course, could never have imagined Twitter and Facebook — or even Fox News.
With so many sources peddling deliberate audience-tested and -targeted misinformation, it’s getting much harder to maintain the critical learning curve that sustains a democracy. And a sad thing we’ve learned from the Trump cult and the anti-vaccine movement is that their believers don’t randomly choose fantasy and disinformation from a confusingly vast menu of news choices. It’s ALL they eat. The vaccine war, for example, is not a real quarrel between liberals and conservatives. Little ideology is involved. It’s simply, starkly a quarrel between people who earnestly pursue the truth about the world they live in, and other people who inhabit and cling to alternate realities, where facts are not honored or even welcome. They live in self-serving, self-protecting anti-reality chambers they construct out of inherited prejudice, wishful thinking and the mediasphere’s cheapest materials.
We don’t need Mencken to remind us that the unteachables have always been with us. And we’ve always been cursed with cynics who sell poisonous snake oil to the simple-minded. But in the past they had nothing like the Internet and its social media echo chambers to capture, program and control the weakest minds and wills. We recognize and to some extent pity the simple, even as they doom themselves and others.
But what about the cynics, the opportunists who advance and enrich themselves on the gullibility of the uninformed? Check the educational backgrounds of Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and you might be surprised to find the names of some of America’s most prestigious universities. These people are all vaccinated; they all know perfectly well that Donald Trump is crazy and that most of his passionate supporters are mouth-breathers and knuckle-draggers.
Their hypocrisy is infernal, possibly unprecedented. And what about media frauds like Tucker Carlson and Mark R. Levin (whose books were recently ranked first and second on the New York Times’ non-fiction bestseller charts)? Carlson was a wealthy boy who went to an upscale college. He was even a working journalist at one time. Does he really believe any of things that he says, the outrageous things that have made him famous and wealthy? I’m an elderly gentleman who hasn’t won a fight since the sixth grade, but if Tucker Carlson ever walked into a room where I could reach him, he would need bodyguards to escape unharmed. There is no place in Hell hot enough for hypocrites like Carlson or Ron DeSantis. When Gov. Henry McMaster makes his last stand on the vaccine mandate down at the gates of Hell, he’ll find a lot of familiar faces waiting in line.
Wired America’s most dubious 21st-century achievement is a deadly nuclear core of ferocious ignorance — or ignorant ferociousness — that cynical demagogues like Carlson, DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott manipulate ruthlessly, in the service of nothing more worthy than their own egos and careers. This deadly core is indifferent and prejudicial to the general welfare, to the health of the nation. They’re traitors and public enemies without meaning to be, so profound is their ignorance. They’re possible in this time, in our time, as in no time that came before us.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist with the Buffalo News, Time and Newsweek and executive editor for The Spectator in Raleigh, N.C., from 1984 to 1989. His latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L. Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2021
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us