Category: “Dead Skunk in The Middle of The Road”

WASHINGTON — In the fall of 1981, a young conservative lawyer named John Roberts, fresh off a Supreme Court clerkship, arrived at the Justice Department at the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Hired as a special assistant to the attorney general, Roberts focused on voting rights, and in particular the battle underway in Congress over the reauthorization of parts of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. That included Section 2 of the law, which gave voters a tool to fight discriminatory voting laws and rules in the states.

As Roberts settled in at DOJ, a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in Congress wanted to reform Section 2. Under their plan, voters could strike down discriminatory voting laws by proving those laws caused discrimination, not that the people who made the laws had set out to discriminate. In other words, intent didn’t matter; outcomes did.

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John Roberts helped lead the fight to stop this change. He drafted op-eds, talking points, and memos arguing that the proposed reforms gave the federal government too much power to influence state voting laws and would lead to a quota system for who held elected office.

Roberts and the Reagan DOJ failed. The Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed with bipartisan support in 1982, and the number of lawsuits about discriminatory voting laws brought under Section 2 went from three in 1981 to 175 in 1988, according to the book Give Us the Ballot by the journalist Ari Berman. But Roberts would get his revenge. He claimed the Supreme Court chief justice’s seat once held by his mentor, William Rehnquist, in 2005. In the ensuing years, Roberts has chiseled away, piece by piece, at the nation’s laws for voting rights, campaign spending, and other democracy issues. Today, voting-rights activists and election-law scholars say the Roberts court, having dismantled chunks of the post-Watergate ethics reforms and the Voting Rights Act, is one of the biggest impediments to democratic reform at a time when the country needs those reforms more than ever.

The final two opinions of the most recent Supreme Court term put this phenomenon on full display. In Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the court’s six conservative justices ruled that California’s requirement that charities disclose their biggest donors to state regulators was unconstitutional. Critics of anonymous political spending say the decision will fuel future challenges to transparency laws and empower anonymous donors at a time when American politics is awash in dark money from Democratic and Republican groups alike. “We are now on a clear path to enshrining a constitutional right to anonymous spending in our democracy, and securing an upper hand for dark-money influence in perpetuity,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a statement reacting to the decision.

In the second decision, Brnovich v. DNC, the Roberts court knee-capped Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Brnovich decision, legal experts say, will give greater leeway to state governments when they craft voting rules, and makes it much harder to prove that a voting law is discriminatory. “This is the rewrite of Section 2 that John Roberts couldn’t get in 1981,” Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, tells Rolling Stone. “I think it’s going to be extremely difficult now (to bring Section 2 challenges) except for the most egregious forms of voter discrimination.”

Combined, the AFPF and Brnovich decisions continue the Roberts court’s decade-plus track record of undermining the hard-fought voting laws enacted during the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-corruption reforms passed in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. And with a six-vote conservative majority on the Supreme Court in place for years — if not decades — to come, that trend shows no sign of ending soon. “As long as there’s a strong conservative majority on the court, any hope that the courts will do anything to rein campaign spending or states’ efforts to restrict the vote or tilt the playing field is indeed a hollow hope,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America.

In the face of the Roberts court’s agenda, reformers in Congress and in state legislatures as well as election-law scholars say the need for new policies tailored to survive the high court’s scrutiny. Coming at a time when Republican state governments are seeking to restrict access to the ballot box, the Supreme Court’s latest decisions are “yet another affront to Americans’ right to pick their elected officials and know who is working to influence the democratic process,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) tells Rolling Stone. “This further underscores the need for Congress to pass legislation to protect the freedom to vote and ensure that our democracy works for the people, not for special interests and billionaires.”

Before surveying the options under consideration by reformers, it’s worth better understanding how far-reaching and potentially damaging the Supreme Court’s last two decisions were.

In the AFPF case, the court struck down California’s requirement that large donors to charities must be disclosed to the state government so that the state can root out possible fraud related to those donors. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a Koch-backed group, and the Thomas More Law Center challenged that requirement, saying it violated the group’s freedom to associate in private. They also cited the risk of harassment if the private donor information became public (as had happened in the past when some donor information was leaked).

The case harkened back to the influential NAACP v. Alabama decision in 1958, when the Supreme Court ruled that the NAACP didn’t have to disclose members who feared facing retribution in the Jim Crow South. In AFPF, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, ACLU, and other civil-rights groups invoked that earlier case in a friend-of-the-court brief that argued for the right to associate in private and urged the court to reach a narrow decision that would have struck down California’s rule without broader implications for transparency in civic and political life.

Instead, the majority’s opinion, written by Roberts, has broad implications for politics and activism. Before, the Supreme Court had made clear that disclosure was important enough to preserve even if it led to some nastiness or vitriol as a result. In his AFPF opinion, Roberts tossed that out the window. The mere possibility of a chilling effect on association was enough, he wrote in his opinion, to justify getting rid of certain disclosure requirements.

Roberts’ decision does more than wipe out California’s law, experts say. Under this reasoning, it opens the door to future challenges to longstanding laws on the disclosure of campaign donations put in place after Watergate, when untraceable money flooded into American elections and led to corruption. “Today’s analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull’s-eye,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent in the AFPF case.

In Brnovich, the voting-rights case, the Roberts court took the opposite stance toward a state’s authority to set the rules. This time, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court deferred to the states to set their own voting rules and raised the bar almost impossibly high to challenge those laws for alleged discrimination, voting-rights advocates say. The majority’s opinion makes it so that a state can justify voting changes (cutting early voting, restricting absentee voting, reducing polling places) if it did so in the interest of preventing possible fraud, even if such fraud is vanishingly rare. The majority’s Brnovich ruling also takes as its benchmark the year 1982 — the year when Congress last passed major updates to the Voting Rights Act — for gauging the discriminatory nature (or not) of voting changes.

Rick Hasen, the election-law expert, describes the practical effect of the decision like this. Imagine that a state offered a week of early voting, he says, and there was evidence that a large number of African American voters used the Sunday before the election to do Souls to the Polls drives to get people to vote right after church. Then imagine that, post-Brnovich, the same state got rid of Sunday early voting and the evidence suggested the state did so to blunt African American turnout.

Under the Roberts court majority’s approach, Hasen says, this would likely not run afoul of Section 2. In his opinion, Alito says the benchmark for measuring whether a voting change is discriminatory is how it compares to the voting rules when the VRA was last reauthorized — in 1982. His test also implies that as long as a state can point to other voting opportunities, it can fairly justify cutting something like Sunday early voting. “For one reason, in 1982 there were very few early voting opportunities, so eliminating early voting can’t be a Section 2 violation because that wasn’t the norm in 1982,” Rick Hasen says. “For another thing, you have to look at the election system as a whole, so long as there are other ways to vote, then it’s not discriminatory under this court’s ruling.”

So what can — and what should — Congress do?

Lee Drutman, the New America political-reform expert, says the For the People Act, aka H.R. 1 and S. 1, contains a number of provisions that could repair some of the damage done by the Supreme Court’s two most recent decisions. That bill — which was recently filibustered in the Senate but Democrats have vowed to revive — would increase disclosure of dark-money donations, mandate paper ballots, and give the federal government more latitude to expand access to the ballot box.

But Drutman acknowledges that many of the most popular pieces of the For the People Act — which has a slim change of passing in the first place — will face challenges by conservative and libertarian legal groups. “Republicans are going to litigate the hell out of it,” he says.

As pressure builds inside the American democratic system because of hyper-partisanship, the nationalization of politics, and many other factors, what’s needed are release valves, Drutman says. He supports reforms that might break the “two-party doom loop,” as he puts it. Those include Alaska’s model of a top-four primary election and ranked-choice voting like in New York City but applied to, say, the U.S. Senate. “I think you’d see opportunities for more political parties and new coalitions forming,” he says. “You’d get the release valves.”

Rick Hasen says lawmakers should focus for now on the most immediate threat to American democracy: election subversion. He says the country narrowly avoided such a disaster in the 2020 election despite Trump’s attempts to pressure state and local election officials, like when he asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,870 votes to give him the victory in Georgia. But with the Trumpist wing of the GOP in full control, and Republican state legislatures moving to pass laws that empower partisans to dictate how elections are run and counted, subversion remains a threat, whether it’s the prospect of a state legislature selecting a rival slate of electors, a president pressuring election workers to change the count, or members of Congress disrupting the certification process in Washington, D.C.

Hasen says the universal use of paper ballots, tougher penalties for anyone who interferes with the election-counting process, and reform of the antiquated Electoral Count Act could all help prevent a future attempt to overturn or change an election outcome. It’s also a more narrowly tailored solution that, he says, could win over 10 Senate Republicans.

“We may not know until January 2025, when Congress has counted the Electoral College votes of the states, whether those who support election integrity and the rule of law succeeded in preventing election subversion,” Hasen wrote this spring. “That may seem far away, but the time to act to prevent a democratic crisis is now.”

After losing the presidency and the Senate thanks to Donald Trump’s disastrous management of COVID, Republicans look determined to try to ascend again in Washington by parroting his stolen election lies. If you can’t snap out of a slumber, it seems, the second best thing is to dive back into the delusions of your dream.

Consider Ohio, where a recent two-term Republican governor named John Kasich spoke up with intelligence and strength against Trump, and where the current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, correctly diagnosed the Jan. 6 insurrection, saying that the ex-president ”has started a fire that has threatened to burn down our democracy.”

The Kasich-DeWine GOP is nowhere to be found among the current crop of Republicans vying to replace the retiring Sen. Rob Portman next year.

Jane Timken, former state GOP chair, has boasted of turning the party into “a well-oiled, pro-Trump machine.” Another Senate candidate, former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, called Rep. Anthony Gonzalez a “traitor,” the likes of whom should be “eradicated from the Republican Party,” after Gonzalez voted to impeach Trump.

Then there’s J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy.” The Republican golden boy who grew up poor in Appalachia, went to Iraq, then graduated from Yale Law School and became a venture capitalist is in the midst of a bout of self-flagellation for telling the truth about Trump in 2016. Back then, he tweeted that Trump was “reprehensible” for his views on “immigrants, Muslims, etc.” and told NPR, “I can’t stomach Trump.” In his desperate bid to get on the right side of the monster, Vance has deleted the offending tweets, saying “I regret being wrong about the guy.”

If the Republican Party in not-long-ago-swing-state Ohio has been swallowed whole by Trump, even as his free-fall dive off the deep end continues, even as he and his confidantes, buying into a clinically insane conspiracy theory, seem to think his return to the Oval Office could come as soon as August, what hope does the national GOP have?

The wealth of the richest 0.00001% of the U.S. now exceeds that of the prior historical peak, which occurred in the Gilded Age, according to economist Gabriel Zucman.

In the late 19th century, the U.S. experienced rapid industrialization and economic growth, creating an inordinate amount of wealth for a handful of families. This era was also known for its severe inequality; and some have called the period that began around 1990 a “Second Gilded Age.” Back then, just four families represented the richest 0.00001% – today’s equivalent is 18 families.

Zucman, a French economist whose doctoral advisor was the historical economist Thomas Piketty, author of bestseller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” released data this week showing that as of July 1, the top 0.00001% richest people in the U.S. held 1.35% of the country’s total wealth. These 18 families include those of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.

Zucman used real-time data from Forbes for the calculations. In 1913, at the end of the Gilded Age, the Rockefeller, Frick, Carnegie, and Baker families – names all tied to monopolistic power – held 0.85% of the country’s total wealth.

The richest 0.01% — around 18,000 U.S. families — have also surpassed the wealth levels reached in the Gilded Age. These families hold 10% of the country’s wealth today, Zucman wrote. By comparison, in 1913, the top 0.01% held 9% of U.S. wealth, and a mere 2% in the late 1970s.

The increasing concentration of wealth comes as the ultra-rich face more scrutiny for the money they’re not paying in taxes. Recent reports have highlighted that because so much of their wealth consists of unrealized gains in stocks and real estate, they pay little or nothing in income tax. Many CEOs and founders take small salaries given their outsized stock holdings, as lower capital gains tax is preferable to a higher tax on ordinary income.

Zucman gained fame in 2019 as an architect of then-presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax plan, which aimed to address the fact that the extremely rich pay little in taxes compared to their net worth. The plan would have imposed a 2% tax on net wealth above $50 million and 6% above $1 billion.

Since the pandemic began, the stock market’s gains have widened the gap between the wealthy and non-wealthy because stock ownership is largely concentrated among wealthy people. The number of millionaires globally jumped 5.2 million to 56.1 million, according to Credit Suisse. Though the pandemic’s wealth gains largely benefitted the richest Americans, “most” Americans did fare well financially during the pandemic, according to the Federal Reserve. Around $13.5 trillion of wealth was added to all households. Still, while a large portion of the country got somewhat richer, the rich saw most of that, with the top 1% seeing a third of the $13.5 trillion and the top 20% seeing 70% of it.

Ethan Wolff – Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumer issues, personal finance, retail, airlines, and more. 

For a certain kind of American liberal, it’s almost a reflexive gesture to wish the United States were more like Europe. There, health care is provided on a more egalitarian basis and a university education is much cheaper, if not free; sexual mores are more relaxed and gun ownership is rare; religion is vestigial and militant nationalism is strictly taboo. Widespread European distress over the presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump only confirmed what American liberals knew: that the Old Country was also the dreamland of their imagined liberal American future.

I wonder how it will feel when Europe becomes distinctly more right-wing than the United States.

It’s not an inconceivable prospect. The United Kingdom has a Tory government right now, and based on current polling their position looks increasingly secure. France’s centrist president Emmanuel Macron would likely be re-elected if the election were held today, but Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally party polls considerably higher today in a one-on-one contest with Macron than it did in 2017. Italy’s fragile coalition could be followed by a right-wing coalition of Matteo Salvini’s Lega and the neofascist-derived Fratelli D’Italia.

Even in Germany, where the Christian Democrat Angela Merkel’s 16-year rule is coming to a close, the next government may once again be a coalition led by the CDU/CSU, if not with the center-left SDP, then in a “Jamaica coalition” with a reinvigorated center-right FDP joining the Greens by their side.

Of course polls can and do change, and one election does not imply a radical cultural shift. But the overall political climate in Europe has been trending rightward for some time. After the financial crisis, and the austerity that followed, the traditional left-wing parties began to collapse, and more nationalist and extreme-right alternatives to the mainstream — the AfD in Germany, National Rally in France, UKIP in England — began to arise. The surge in immigration that followed Syria’s and Libya’s collapse into civil war were further sources of fuel. These parties and movements — critical of the European Union, strongly opposed to immigration, frequently more friendly to Russia — were initially and in many cases still are opposed by all the mainstream parties, but that opposition did little to stem their growth. Eventually, in countries like Hungary and Poland, they began to win elections and assume the powers of government.

In Europe today, the most viable traditional parties are often mainstream right-wing parties that have sought to coopt the nationalist right’s issues — most notably Boris Johnson’s Tory Party, which eclipsed UKIP by adopting Brexit for itself — or parties self-consciously constituted around the technocratic center so as to unite the mainstream against the far right. True left-wing parties like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s in France or Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour have largely fizzled. Meanwhile, the far right continues to produce new phenomena, most recently France’s Eric Zemmour, who has outflanked Le Pen on the right by being even more nationalist than she is.

If the result of all this ferment is a European political realignment that contains the far right by reviving a more inward-focused traditional conservatism, that would be good for Europe and, ultimately, for European relations with America. A Europe that was more oriented around national solidarity than global humanitarianism, open immigration, or free markets is a Europe America could readily live, work, and trade with. If by that means the continent achieved greater political stability and democratic accountability, most observers would consider it far preferable to either a lurch to the far right or a descent into civil strife.

But it might be startling for the American left to hear even centrist European politicians like Emmanuel Macron blame them for undermining national solidarity with their “woke” leftism. They might have to get used to it, though. Nothing is more useful for promoting national unity than a foreign threat. And while America’s foreign policy establishment would likely prefer that China be that threat, it makes far more sense for a Europe turning inward to decry pernicious American influence on their social fabric than China’s threats to Taiwan or its oppression of the Uyghur people.

The question then would be whether America’s left will take a lesson from the demise of their European cousins, and rethink their own approach to politics before they face a similar eclipse, and downgrade cultural questions in favor of bread and butter issues. Or, perhaps, whether Europe’s turn to the right will inspire America’s left to see unique promise once more in our own country’s distance from nationalism of the Old World, and redefine their own vision of a culturally egalitarian future not as a necessary redemption of our nation’s sinful history, but as a hoped-for fulfillment of distinctively American promise.

Former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) on Tuesday rejected the idea that there’s currently “a fight for the soul of the party” between moderate Republicans and sycophants of ex-President Donald Trump.

“There is nothing left of this Republican Party other than a party that’s able to embrace and to elevate an undemocratic, anti-republic theme that somehow we can engage in a fraud on the American people as long as it supports our guy winning an election,” Jolly told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace during a discussion about GOP support of Trump’s election lies.

“Every election is so important, but it does make the next presidential election so important because is that part of the Republican platform?” he asked. “And do we now live in a two-party America where only one supports a true democratic republic or not?”

Jolly, who left the Republican Party in 2018, said America was now “a long ways” from being a multiparty democracy. He added that the GOP that celebrates Trump would continue to be “anti-republican, anti-democratic” until “someone wrests control of the party from the former president.”

Watch the interview here:

"This notion that somehow there's a fight for the soul of the party… there is nothing left of this Republican Party other than a party that's able to embrace and to elevate an undemocratic, anti-republic theme" – @DavidJollyFL w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/HI31AOVzRU

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) July 6, 2021

How could so many Americans believe in “the Big Lie?” We see the numbers and we shake our heads. Poll after poll shows that one third of all of us believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Even though the matter has been adjudicated in scores of courts. Even though not a single scintilla of evidence exists that the election was anything but fair.

Six months after the attack on the Capitol triggered by that lie, commentators, political scientists, and families around the dinner table still struggle to come to grips with perverse reality. It is natural to want to understand how we got here. The fate of our democracy turns on not just what our electorate believes but why they believe it. Why are a third of us such gullible rubes?

It’s a question serious enough that it deserves a straight answer, even if that answer makes us uncomfortable. And I warn you, dear reader, the answer will make you uncomfortable. So, if you are tender-minded or sensitive to self-criticism, or a credulous stooge yourself, this might be a good time to stop reading.

Trump’s Big Lie Isn’t About 2020 but All the Elections to Come

Because even the most modest amount of analysis and introspection will reveal that buying into the nonsense peddled by the former president and his clown college of cronies is not an aberration, not due to some momentary lapse on the part of the American electorate. We were raised on lies—including many lies that are much, much bigger than the big one that troubles us today.

That’s the problem. We are as a society—and by “we” I mean virtually all of us on the planet —brought up to believe howling absurdities, ridiculous impossibilities, and insupportable malarkey from our very first moments on Earth. We have massive lie-delivery systems that are the core institutions of our society. And we have created cultural barriers to even questioning those fabrications which are most deserving of skeptical scrutiny. For example, we regularly label as sacred those ideas that are least able to stand up to scrutiny. (Heck, we have folks in our society who can’t even handle the idea that the history we teach our kids might actually be based on what happened, you know, back in the past.)

Our parents lie to us. Our churches, synagogues, and mosques lie to us. Our schools lie to us. Hollywood lies to us. Madison Avenue lies to us. The media lies to us. Our leaders lie to us. Our friends lie to us. (They do. Going to the gym couldn’t hurt.)

What is more the lies they offer are not always big lies (e.g. Buying a particular brand of beer will not make you more attractive) while some are just gross oversimplifications (e.g. The Founding Fathers did a lot of good… but they were not the figures carved out of marble we were sold for years). Some have a seed of truth within them but are gross distortions (e.g. Columbus did not discover America). And some of the time we invite the lies because they open the door to enjoyment (e.g. Keto? All the bacon I can eat? I’m in).

But one of the key reasons we buy into so many small lies is that we have been force fed so many big ones. I mean really big ones. I mean ones that make the current Big Lie look like one of those low-calorie snacks that is actually a high-calorie treat shrunk to a smaller size and repackaged.

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The original big lies are so big that if you are like most people some of them are ingrained in your identity, they are who you are. They come from religions and heritage. They are cooked into the primal soup of our minds. Many of them have been around for longer than many of the “facts” we have and as such are so covered in the dust of history and tradition that they appear to be as substantial as what is true. Indeed, some have a timeworn patina that makes them seem almost more important than that which is verifiable or even knowable.

Social science research gives a variety of reasons for why we are inclined to believe “alternative facts.” (Studies show a person is “quick to share a political article on social media if it supports their beliefs, but is more likely to fact check a story if it doesn’t.” We tend to vote for what we want to be true or what our friends believe. According to Peter Ditto, a social psychologist at the University of California, “our wishes, hopes, fears and motivations often tip the scales to make us more likely to accept something as true if it supports what we want to believe.” That said, another reason is often cited for our willingness to buy into the bullshit we are being fed. According to a 2019 University of Regina study, “People who believe false headlines tended to be the people (who) didn’t think carefully, regardless of whether those headlines aligned with their ideology.” So, one way or another, we fall for fake news because it’s easier for us, socially or intellectually.

Many of these lies were created out of necessity. Life is finite. (OK, I’m sorry. It is. Take a deep breath if you need to and then continue reading.) If we don’t come up with a good story about what happens after it ends or why we are here we will all go mad. So we make up preposterous stories about magic people in the sky and then immediately say that we cannot question those stories, that “faith” in them is more important than knowledge of what is real. Why? Because they will not stand up to scrutiny.

QAnon at a Crossroads: Leaders Try to Rein In the Crazy

When challenged, the defenders of these original big lies say the truth is unknowable. Good try. Hard to argue with that. We don’t know there is not an omniscient rule-maker beyond the clouds or a heaven filled with virgins to give pleasure to the faithful so how can you question it? But of course, selling what is unknowable as a truth is one of the most important categories of lies we encounter in life. Indeed, it is the foundation of much of (speculation-based and often hooey-ridden) human philosophy. And it works.

According to a 2011 poll from the Associated Press, nearly eight out of 10 Americans believe in the existence of angels and a 2015 poll showed 72 percent of Americans believe in Heaven and 58 percent believe in the existence of Hell. A 2019 YouGov poll showed that almost half of all Americans believe in demons and ghosts… and 13 percent believe in vampires. (Note: Over half of Republicans believe in demons, whereas only 37 percent of Democrats do. How far is it from there to a similar percentage of Trump voters, according to an Economist/YouGov poll, believing that the Hillary Clinton campaign was a hotbed of “pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse?”)

There are other big lies, of course. Some are related to the religious lies—like the divine right of kings or the lie that the clergy somehow are more in touch with truth than, say, scientists who actually devote their lives to studying the truth. Some come from political leaders. For example, the lie that to die in war is glorious is one that has done irreparable damage for eons. It has been disproven for thousands of years and yet remains so essential to getting young men and women to give up their lives to serve the ambitions of the rich and powerful that it endures. You know many of the other lies that have lived for centuries—about the superiority of races or genders or nationalities, about patriotism, about comforting ideas like that everything is for the best or things work out in the end. It’s not. They don’t. Read a book.

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We dress these lies up in protective cloaks. You will burn in Hell for all eternity if you don’t believe one set of lies. You are betraying your country if you don’t believe in the merits of a particular war. Don’t question your elders. If a teacher says it it must be true. Priests and rabbis and imams are tighter with the Alleged Almighty than you. (Do you capitalize the “a” in alleged when you are using it to question the existence of a God?)

All these lies are aided and abetted by the fact that simply believing in what you are told to believe is much easier than actually figuring out the truth. What is more, if your family and friends believe in a lie, challenging that lie might make you an outcast, might alienate those with whom you have or wish to have a bond. With the advent of social media, where like-minded friends become “editors” and select the news their followers see, lies spread among audiences inclined to believe and thereby endorse them. We live in an age of media “echo-systems”, ecosystems that reinforce disinformation spreading it from dubious sources like QAnon to Facebook to TV propaganda networks to you.

And of course, when lots and lots of people adhere to a lie it is seemingly validated. And to help that along for millennia, the purveyors of lies have made it clear that not believing those lies makes one an other, apart, the enemy, an infidel. It’s not just wrong to question these big lies, by doing so you actually side with evil, with the enemy. We have created a world divided and left bloody by the differences between the lies to which different groups of people adhere.

Which brings us back to today and to our own Big Lie of the moment. (Although I would argue Trump is responsible for two big lies at least—the other being that the pandemic was not serious, that science was not necessary to combat it.) When that lie is preached from the pulpit, propagated by elders and friends and neighbors, pumped up on your favorite quasi-news network and rejected by your enemies—by the other—of course you cling to it as though it were, well, gospel. That’s what you have been taught to do all your life.

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We have the Big Lie because we have so many big lies. We have the Big Lie because many of the most powerful institutions in our society teach lies and condemn critical thinking. And herein we get to the central problem of our democracy. If we are to have a government of the people—and that is for the moment, an open question, I am afraid—and those people thrive on lies, follow liars, reject the search for truth, fear science and history and math, don’t want to do the work required to figure out what is really happening around them—then we will have an irreparably fucked-up government.

We have known this is a special challenge of democracy and good governance since the Enlightenment. It’s just a bit of a sensitive subject. It calls more than just the ugliness and ignorance of Trumpism into question. Rather it notes that Trump is just like generations of other demagogues who sought to profit from the easy appeal of deception for the intellectually lazy, lock-step indoctrinated masses. Trump, like so many others since time immemorial, peddles lies because he knows people are buying, he knows lies are easy and the truth is hard.