They Want To Believe
We’re long past the point of wondering why Donald Trump’s most ridiculous statements don’t cause his adherents to question their support, or his sanity. The tragic truth is, they want to believe in what he says, whether it’s about immigrants eating pets, toilets that need to be flushed a dozen times, or windmills causing cancer. It’s all part of a fascist fever dream.
Fascism is primarily an aesthetic movement. It’s about myth, not policy. Those myths include both hagiographies and demonologies that are as believable as what motivated the witch crazes of a few centuries ago. “They’re eating the dogs” is just as credible as, “Goody Proctor’s astral projection is tearing at my entrails.” Both are absurd, and yet people want to believe in them. Or, perhaps more accurately, because they are absurd, some people want to believe in them, as long as these absurdities feed their dark fantasies of the world, the flesh and the devil.
The fascist fever dream holds the dreamers tightly in a narcotic embrace. They won’t awaken because you point out the ridiculousness of the dream logic, or present controverting evidence, or make an appeal to just snap out of it. These dreams are too powerful, playing to vulnerabilities in the dreamer’s psyche, assuaging their fears without actually addressing the reasons behind them.
In short, they want to believe.
It’s important to remember that. We shouldn’t be stumped why this election is close, no more than Germans should have been baffled by the appeal of a ridiculous band of misfits, clad in comic opera uniforms, screaming about Jewish conspiracies. Certainly, there are people who support Trump for less fevered reasons, from the transactionalists who focus on a single issue at the risk of destroying democracy and the rule of law, to the careerists who just want a seat at the table (or in the bunker). But the real core of Trumpism, the hypermassive black hole around which all of these other groups orbit, is the army of somnambulists who want to believe.
In a previous age, fever dreams like these were harder to create and sustain. The Salem witch trials flared up and burned out in a couple of years. The witch craze in Europe lasted longer, in part because of the active encouragement of religious and secular authorities. But there were no mass media to constantly promote these fantasies. (Texts like the Malleus Malificarum were more instructional manuals on how to deal with witches and their demonic masters than widely-read propaganda tracts.) But eventually, after exacting a tool paid in fear, persecution, torture, imprisonment, and murder, it faded.
Now, of course, we have both one-directional mass media and multi-directional social media. On the blog War By Other Means, the author argued that Twitter has turned into a non-stop machine for producing “fascist slop,” 24/7 misinformation at a mass scale. By “misinformation,” of course, we don’t mean occasional factual errors. Instead, we’re talking about a kind of political pornography. It doesn’t resemble real human beings and how they relate to one another. Instead, as with all forms of pornography, it depicts the subjects in the most exaggerated ways possible, to give people the fastest and strongest jolt of what they really want.
We can debate to what extent to which the MAGA faithful actually believe in a cabal of child-killing Democratic elites, hordes of murderers and rapists crossing the border with the encouragement of the White House, or microchips hidden in vaccines. Maybe people believe in this nonsense in the same way that they’re willing to indulge in the kayfabe of “professional wrestling.” The important thing is that a large number of Americans want to believe in the semi-lucid nightmare over the waking world.
Elections don’t dispel fascist fever dreams, nor do inaugurations. However the events of the next couple of months play out, many dreamers will want to continue to dream, and they will find a ready supply of exciting new hallucinations on their phones, tablets, and laptops.
The pet-eating hoax is nothing more than a modern version of the blood libel.
Woodward’s new book also reveals proof Trump has talked 6,7 times personally to Putin from Mar-a-Lago since leaving the presidency… and some of those times were after Putin invaded Ukraine. And to Republicans, Trump continues to be better for the military.
Even though Trump also has given actual gifts to Putin.
It’s fun to see Republicans become their final form: All vibes all the time, safe space required, can’t deal with facts.
I’ll say. The innertubes are informing me that witchcraft was made illegal in England in 1542 (the first law) and the second witchcraft law was repealed in 1736 when witchcraft was “decriminalized.”* Totally distinguishing witchcraft from fortune-telling scams took until 1951 in the UK.
*They stopped putting witches to death but continued to impose other penalties.
This is from an excellent analysis called Propaganda, AI Fakes, and MAGA’s Totalitarian Kitsch, by Hannah Yoest over at The Bulwark yesterday.
@Gavin:
According to Woodward and the WaPo, Trump secretly gave Covid tests to Putin when there was a shortage of them here.
@Gavin: But none dare call it treason.
Amen. Every issue at hand has to have an index card solution, index card explanation and index card reason. Majority of people seem to no longer have the time to think beyond that, because they are already scrolling through to the next in their myriad of mis-informational diarrhea social media feeds.
@Joe: Re: “I don’t even care if it’s a fake!”
When I hear someone say something like this, I begin to wonder if, they in fact, do not care.
When someone gets to this stage, they are saying the words “it’s a fake” out loud, so that they can hear themselves say it. Believe it or not, this has an impact.
This process may suspend, or continue. If it continues, it will result in a collapse of belief and support. I’ll bet you have seen this kind of thing in some very different contexts, such as addicts.
Of course, this is not useful for predicting the outcome of this election. But I think framing the MAGAs as addicts in denial about their addiction is fairly helpful.
They may want to believe, but why do they want to believe this?
I’m sure we all have things that we firmly believe because they reinforce our worldview, but most of us have a filter that ensures the nonsense isn’t too far from reality and too dangerous.
And we all have the silly things that we will “believe” because they sound great and we know they aren’t really true, but they are otherwise perfect. But it’s silly things, like how raccoons keep damaging the back lid of Cybertrucks because they look like dumpsters and the raccoons are trying to get inside (who wouldn’t want to believe that?)
But why would people want to believe that there are microchips in vaccines that are turning the frogs gay? Why would anyone want to believe in a made up dystopia when the real one is right here?
Because Trumpers just as dishonest and amoral as Trump is, when not either ignorant or stupid. Basket of deplorables. We been knew.
Does anyone here know or care if Trump gave covid testing machines to Putin, or is it an excuse for a blood libel against him? It doesn’t matter if it’s true as long as it reflects the deeper truth that Trump is bad. It’s like when fake hate crimes get exposed the Left complains about how it smears the truth of all the real hate crimes.
@Fortune:
Personally, those accusations are pretty low on my list of things that “reflect the deeper truth that Trump is bad.” Honestly, his well-documented record of doing things–including things as recent as the racist attacks on immigrants and in particular those living in Springfied, OH and spreading lies that will only negatively impact people who need help in hurricane areas–is more than enough proof of the deeper truth that Trump is bad.
What’s notable is the constant complaints about how the left is too focused on Trump is bad and never any defenses of his behavior as being “good” or at least “not bad.”
BTW, what do you think about the core of this post?
@Fortune: If Trump provided testing machines to Putin during a time when there were shortages, yes, I DO CARE. Bob Woodward has a pretty decent track record.
Why don’t you care? You think it’s okay that Trump sent testing equipment to Putin, while we had shortages here in the US? Really? Somehow I think that if the situation was applied to any Democrat, you would not be quite so accommodating.
Trump IS bad. He’s a horrible person who thinks only of himself. I’ve felt that way since long before he was a Republican–back when he was a Democrat, in fact.
Faith is a bad thing. It always requires a suspension of disbelief. It requires suppressing what you know in your bones. It is seldom enough to believe nonsense, you have to suppress doubt everywhere, lest you be challenged.
@Fortune:
Just to the extent this weird story confirms, again, that Traitor Trump 1) botched the COVID response thereby worsening outcomes around mass death and record job loss and 2) is in collusion with a murderous and imperialistic dictator who wants to destroy Western democracy, the American republic, and the vital and stabilizing transatlantic alliance.
As discrete stories though, Trump inviting Putin a) to meddle in US elections and b) to attack Europe are more concerning, with more grave implications than Trump giving away then-limited and badly-needed pandemic resources to hostiles in China and Russia.
@Michael Reynolds:
Nah, I’mma go with George Michael on this. Youuuu gotta have faith doop-doodoop-doo-doooo
MAGA is a matter of faith, where faith is the desire to believe in spite of evidence, and the leap of faith is construed as an act of bravery and courage. Only cowards don’t believe the cat and dogs are being eaten.
@Jay L Gischer:
Boy genius senator Rubio did this recently regarding the bigly positive jobs number — he said “it’s a fake” rather than bothering to dive into the crosstabs and invent a lie based on an irrelevant subgroup statistic. They’re not even trying any more..
@Michael Reynolds:
Otherwise known as… faith?
@Dutchgirl:
Or Deep Staters who pretend not to believe it in order to flood the country with pet-eating Haitian savages.
I’m wondering what is a “covid testing machine.” As I recall, early tests were PCR (polymerase chain reaction). These are machines that can make millions of copies of specific genetic sequences, like the RNA in the trump virus. The trick is to get them to replicate the sequence you want or are interested in. I’m not sure how that gets accomplished, but I think this is where testing kits with relevant reagents become important.
PCR machines are used a lot in genetic research and in diagnostic tests. By the time the trump pandemic hit, there were plenty of these in labs all over the world.
If “covid testing machine” is a PCR machine, I fail to see any problem. I fail to see, too, how Mad Vlad’s realm lacked sufficient such machines to begin with, but maybe Russia is that badly run. If, on the other hand, the media means covid testing kits, then that is a problem. there were not enough of them early on, as you may recall.
@Matt Bernius: Is the core “Trump is fascist” or “gullible people believe falsehoods”? I think some gullible people believe Trump is a fascist. It’s Godwin’s Law. He’s not fascist, he’s just bad. Some other gullible people believe Trump is good.
@MarkedMan:
No, self-inflicted lobotomy. You know gravity is real. You never ignore it. You don’t defy it. Because you know in your (broken) bones that gravity is real.
Faith is pretending to believe in things you know deep down are bullshit.
You nailed it Kingdaddy. People believe what they want to believe and a significant percentage of humans are capable of holding two mutually exclusive thoughts in their head at the same time without noticing. This reminded me of something.