Sunday, March 7, 2021

 

Truth is Essential to Democracy

          The case can be made for explaining America’s political divide on failure of the body politic to agree on the truth of facts.  For example, the American Enterprise Institute’s January survey finding that 66 percent of Republicans believe that Biden’s victory was illegitimate. The truth of the matter is that the presidential election of 2020 was well conducted and remarkably free of tampering or distortion.  So, what are we dealing with?  Are we dealing with an instance of mass brainwashing?  Is it possible that a president can condition the collective minds of his party and followers to believe an outcome by repeating month after month that defeat could only be due to manipulating the results of a national election, whose voting system has been through the years remarkably honest?  I find it almost impossible to know how to think about this issue. I do not know where to start, but let us by sidestepping the journalists, pollsters and pundits, and begin with the social scientists.

          Rasmus Klein Nielsen, Director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford writes that, “First, on social science, I don’t think we can understand the 2020 election outcome without putting identity in center place, especially if we are to understand why many white Americans have responded favorably to Trump’s explicit racial appeals.” He goes on to elaborate that, “voting has its origins “in ethnic, sectional, class, and family traditions” and is a matter of sentiment and disposition rather than “reasoned preferences”, an approach further develop in the “Michigan model” that put party identification at the center. I think I can understand that summation in that in my own family growing up in the last mid-century in western New York State, in sum, believed in the Catholic Church, General Motors, and the Republican Party—sort of a cultural triad. Nielsen cites Ashley Jardins’s White Identity Politics as a likely cause and not for any of the other crazy reasons. We can at least start there and ask if consultants, pollsters, lobbyists, and think tankers, if they have anything to add to the social scientists’ conclusion have anything to contribute. We know that social science may not be as precise as medical science, which has many forms of quackery, but “white identity politics” is a strong argument, in my research, the strongest.  Trump is clearly not the cause, but certainly the latest symptom of a very bad disease corrupting Truth.  I cannot believe that white identity politics is the entire reason for the irrationality of the rampant conspiracy theories permeating the social media of the country. What of the incredible irrationality of Republican party leadership?  An example is the criticism faced by Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey after voting to support the second impeachment of former President Donald Trump.

          Washington county (PA) Republican Chair Dave Ball in a TV interview [1], viciously attacked Senator Toomey for justifying his vote to convict Trump on the charge of inciting the violent January 6th riot at the US Capitol with the absurd statement,” We did not send him to Washington to vote his conscience   We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he was doing.  We sent him there to represent us, and we feel very strongly that he did not represent us”.  That statement stands as a marker for all time. The same reference continues reporting that, “York County, PA Republicans voted to censure Toomey over the weekend, arguing that he is out of touch with the core beliefs of the people of Pennsylvania.  But Not Out of touch with Truth!  The message is, we have to solve this problem or we will not keep our democracy.

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[1]. Santucci, Jeanine. Impeachment Vote Brings Censure. 2021. USA TODAY, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle Feb 18, 2021.

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