The vast distance the mind must travel
Jonathan Chait looks at the question of why our minds boggle so stubbornly when we’re presented with the truth about Trump’s captivity to Russia.
The cause of this incredulity, I have come to suspect, lies in the vast distance the mind must travel between the normal patterns of American politics and the fantastical crimes being alleged. The Russia scandal seems to hint at a reality of fiction or paranoia, a baroque conspiracy in which the leader of the free world has been compromised by a mafiocracy with an economy smaller than South Korea’s.
The flaw lies in the assumption about what constitutes “normal.” In this case, the baseline should not be previous American elections, but other foreign elections in which Russia has intervened.
It’s that so-often useful concept/reply “It depends what you’re comparing it to.”
I suspect that we Americans, even the relatively unillusioned of us, have a hard time comparing even the shitshow of 2016 with “other foreign elections in which Russia has intervened.” We unconsciously think – in spite of everything – we’re better than that. Why? Other than the automatic narcissism of me mine ours? I don’t know. Generations of post-WW2 dominance, maybe, or unusual levels of credulity maybe, or both maybe; I don’t know. Anyway, what’s the pattern?
Moscow has cultivated right-wing parties overseas through a combination of covert payments to their leaders (often disguised as legitimate business transactions), illegal campaign donations, and propaganda support through traditional and social media. Russian election corruption scandals pop up in Europe all the time. Russia secretly and illegally funded Ukraine’s “Party of Regions”; France’s National Front party got a secret 2014 election loan from a Russian bank; the Brexit vote benefited from a huge donation from a British businessman who has secretly met with Russian officials dangling lucrative business deals. Just last month, Italian journalists discovered the leader of a right-wing party had negotiated a lucrative secret transaction with a Russian firm.
The fact that the same person who managed the campaign for the pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine next turned up (after a brief disappearance) to run the campaign of the pro-Russian candidate in the United States is merely one of an overwhelmingly long list of clues placing Trump in the pattern.
We’re not special.
Because America is The Greatest Country In The World™, and the American constitution is the greatest piece of political writing that birthed the strongest democracy the world has ever seen. U! S! A!
It’s not just the automatic narcissism of me, mine, ours; the USA has a particularly intense and ferocious case of nationalistic narcissism – especially in reference to its democratic institutions – that goes way beyond the narcissism of nearly all other countries on the planet. The dictators of some other countries can propagandise about their greatness very well, but I think that the main reason that the USA leaves them in the dust is how much the general population, of nearly all socioeconomic classes, has drunk that particular flavour of cool-aid.
Karellen, that has been my experience too. Even among liberals, who almost instinctively knee-jerk anti-Western sentiment, I still frequently hear things that suggest that, in spite of themselves, they have taken in that mindset. It is a shock and a horror if I suggest that the Constitution is flawed; oh, only in its implementation! Well, if it hadn’t been so flawed in its writing, there might not have been that flaw in the implementation. Etc.
It’s weird, though, because let’s be real, our history is not Unalloyed Glorious Progress Toward Justice, now is it. Slavery? Genocide of the people who were here first? So it’s odd that we’re more WE NUMBER ONE than others. That’s why I mentioned the aftermath of WW2; before that we were a backwater.
Furthermore, how can the Constitution possibly be flawed when so much of it was written to accommodate slaveowners?! It’s a logical impossibility!
/sarcasm
The story goes that the mathematician Kurt Godel, shortly before being interviewed for US citizenship, discovered a logical flaw in the constitution that could lead to a dictatorship. He planned to bring this up in the meeting, thinking he could solve that problem for Americans.
Fortunately for Godel, his sponsor was Einstein who either managed to convince him to keep schtum or to smooth things over afterwards. Godel got his citizenship only to later die of starvation because he believed everyone other than his wife (who was hospitalised at the time) was trying to poison him.
There isn’t a logical flaw in the constitution because it is not a statement of logic. But that just makes what’s happening in politics around the world today even more terrifying. Lots of people joke that Trump won’t leave office when he’s required to. Others take that concern seriously. It is not at all clear what will happen if it comes to that. AND HOLY SHIT THIS IS NOT SOMETHING EVERYONE IS TERRIFIED ABOUT ALL THE TIME.
I mean, we Brits are gleefully diving off a cliff with Brexit but at least we expect that we’ll have a conch we can pass around to enact violent edicts afterwards. We do have some standards.
The classic ‘Under Cover’ by John Roy Carlson, 1943, and the recent ‘Hitler’s American Friends,’ Bradley W. Hart, 2018, both show that 2016 isn’t the first time Republicans accepted the help of foreign dictators in elections. Senators used their franking privilege to mail propaganda from Berlin. A German agent, who had served time after WWI, operated inside the capitol.
1936 and 1940.
But for many of us, that is what we were taught in school. For those of us who proceeded to college history, and didn’t sleep through it, the truth might come through, but most people simply go along with what they have learned from parents, grade school teachers, movies, and television. Once they are committed to that idea, it seems nothing can change their minds.