Does the news break your heart about every other day? Okay, okay…it’s every day. Golly, it’s getting to the point of being no fun at all. No wonder fake news has become so popular! Why watch real news? It can really get you down.
Look hard enough, however, and you may find some hopeful signs even in real world news. You have to kind of think it through though.
For example, it is depressing to hear the reports that tens of millions of Americans remain convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. These reports are based on legitimate polls. The polls have been conducted many times since the 2020 election. They are hard to ignore. But should we believe them?
Polls are statistical. So, remember the order of rank: lies, damn lies, and statistics.
But the pollsters are not lying about their data. So, the percentage of polled persons that tell pollsters that they believe the election was stolen is substantial. The majority reporting as election deniers are Republicans (I like to think of them as Republicans in name only), but there are a few Independents and even the odd Democrats (odd indeed).
Now you might be tempted to think of the “Trump won” crowd as lunatics. But, come on. Tens of millions of American lunatics? That must be an exaggeration. Surely, most of them, your neighbors among them, go about their daily lives with a reasonable degree of competence. They manage driving on public roads. They hold down jobs. They get their kids off to school. They make dinner, clean up the dishes, and put them in the cupboard.
I recommend that you keep this foundational human competence in mind when you consider political polls as a metric to judge Americans. You would not trust a real lunatic to prepare your meals, would you? To serve you at a restaurant? Think about what a lunatic might put in your food? If you thought there were really tens of millions of them loose and unsupervised, you would probably never eat out again.
I have given these polls a lot of thought…mainly because I still like to go out for a meal once in a while. I say they are wrong. I do not doubt that the pollsters are taking down the data correctly, but the data are corrupt. Tens of millions of Americans are lying to the pollsters.
I know it is hard to accept that there are so many liars in America, but keep in mind that there is a long and storied tradition of lying when it comes to politics. For myself, I am satisfied that the vast majority of people lying to pollsters do not lie generally—most of the time. At least, not more often than people commonly do about everyday matters. Most of the people calling in sick to work probably are sick, at least a little bit sick.
For that matter, a fair number of people show up for work when they ought to stay home. Don’t they know they are contagious? “It’s really nothing,” they say and then sneeze all over the office pastries.
Think of these representations as dingy lies. They are not pure enough to be white lies. They have untoward consequences. Sometimes little ones. Sometimes not so little. They often spread disease or unsubstantiated rumors. But they are part of the American tapestry and we tolerate them…most of the time.
My point is simply that you should not get too discouraged by the apparent nature of some news. Look deeper. Tens of millions of Americans are not delusional. They are only telling dingy lies, a habit to which they have grown accustom through decades of experience and more recent prompting by one liar in particular, the one who will stand trial for fraud in Manhattan on Monday.
Now don’t protest. Don’t tell me that it is just as bad that tens of millions of Americans are liars as it is if tens of millions of them are delusional. While a lie may be hard to cure, it is nowhere near as difficult a problem as mental illness. Administer enough doses of truth, and a lie will eventually succumb and wither. On the other hand, vanquishing a delusion is nearly impossible. Just ask the Pope or any tele-evangelist.
And if you look even deeper at this special case—election denialism—maybe it is not such a big deal after all. I admit that we will likely have to go through another four-year cycle of it after the 2024 election. The violence associated with this year’s election will probably be worse this time than it was three years ago. But eventually it will fade because the lie will cease to have much currency. Most people touting it today will just employ another lie down the road: “Oh, not me! I was never one of those people.”
Unless, of course, the liar-in-chief stays out of prison and wins the election. Then all bets are off.
I wish we did not have to deal with election denialism at all, but we can solve it. If we don’t, I am still hopeful that a little more time probably will do the trick. That makes election denialism more tractable than a lot of other news troubling the entire world. Let’s face it. We’re getting very little done to keep Greenland from melting into the Atlantic Ocean and swamping hundreds of millions living on the coast. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have no end in sight. Geeze, even nuclear world war is back on the radar.
Well, like I said, the news just breaks your heart every day.