Why Trump’s Supporters Will Believe Any Lie He Tells
From Kavanaugh to Khashoggi, they are immune to the truth.
President Donald Trump has been bending and breaking laws all of his life. Michael Cohen, his longtime personal lawyer, stated under oath that Trump directed him to violate federal campaign finance law; the state of New York has evidence that Trump and his family have been cheating on their taxes for years; the Trump family’s “persistently illegal conduct” and “repeated and willful self-dealing transactions” have led the New York attorney general to file a lawsuit against the Trump Foundation. The list goes on.
Trump is open about his disdain for law. In April, he told an audience in Michigan that “our laws are so corrupt and stupid.”
Trump is also clear about why he is breaking these laws. The entire point of Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again” is to lead us back to a time before the civil rights movement, before laws against insider trading, before the New Deal and federal agencies that regulate the commerce of plutocrats. This was an era of white male supremacy. ....
... It’s easy to conclude that Trump has lost his mind and his lawyers are asleep at the switch. In fact, there’s a method to what appears to be Trump’s madness: The president intends to beat Mueller and his would-be interlocutors in Congress by torpedoing factuality and the rule of law itself.
... Robert O. Paxton, in his classic work The Anatomy of Fascism, defines a cult of leadership as one in which the followers believe the leader’s instincts are better than the logic used by elites. The followers are willing to give up their individuality and freedom in exchange for the leader’s “protection.” And what is Trump protecting his followers from? Scholars Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt offer an explanation. In their essay “Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness but an Eternal Dynamic Within Liberal Democracies,” Stenner and Haidt describe the psychology behind the fervor of the embrace of authoritarians. A certain percentage of the population has “bias against different others” including racial and other minority out-groups. The authoritarian leader stokes their fears, creating a normative threat. These people then turn to the leader as something of a savior. The leader embraces the mythic destiny of the nation. He doesn’t follow laws. He is the law. ...
... Steve Bannon explained a broader administration strategy for dispensing with facts. “The real opposition is the media,” he has said. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Yale professor Timothy Snyder, in his groundbreaking book The Road to Unfreedom, explains in detail how leaders like Vladimir Putin and Trump undermine factuality by flooding the zone in this way. Putin dominates Russia by propagating grand lies that take the entire society off balance. For example, when Ukrainians protested against Putin’s puppet ruler, Viktor Yanukovych, Putin’s press reported that the protesters were organized by an LGBTQ group attempting a “homodictatorship.” Enough people believe the lie—or pretend to believe the lie—that a shared reality becomes impossible. ...
... Trump’s final aim isn’t simply to escape accountability for his crimes. The final aim is to replace democracy itself with a form of autocracy, under which he and his cronies are forever unaccountable for criminal actions. Normalizing lies and flooding the zone shatters the public sphere upon which democracy depends. Without that shared reality, Mueller poses no threat to Trump. Similarly, without a shared public sphere, Trump doesn’t have to worry about resistance. As Yale professor Jason Stanley says, without truth it is impossible to speak truth to power, so there is only power. ...
The United States is on a steep learning curve. Because truth, factuality, and our very public sphere are under attack, our democracy (and republic) is in danger. The attack is devastatingly effective, partly because we have never experienced anything like this and thus are largely unprepared. Our task now is to save our public sphere. The way to do this was demonstrated by how the Chileans got out of the far more extreme Pinochet regime and reinstated democracy: All sides opposed to authoritarianism and committed to democracy worked together. That means they started actually talking, and listening, to one another. In the United States, this would mean that all groups that claim to be committed to continuing our democratic republic, from supporters of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Never Trump Republicans, would need to join forces. We will likely soon find out if the nation is up to the task.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018...lEuV9H5jumpNL8o
Neue Antwort erstellen
| 23.327 Beiträge
| 3.633 Beiträge
Besucher
Forum Statistiken
