If it wasn't obvious before, it is now: the Trumpian cancer on American democracy's has not abated but is metastasizing. I've been watching with dread as small men (it's men, mostly, though they have their publicity-loving gals too) make nests for themselves in the big lie. More than frightened and saddened, though I'm those things too, I'm just confused. What do these people believe, what do they think they're doing? They know it's a lie, don't they? They know that their man tried every sleazy trick in the books and still lost the election, surely? They know that it's a lie and that he's a liar, with a demonstrated contempt for truth and democracy, don't they, a prophet of desparate American carnage loyal to nothing but his own vainglory?
I was going to add that they know that the assault on the Capitol in January 6th, answering a losing candidate's siren song to overturn an election, was a near-death experience for American democracy... but they don't know that. Many evidently believe what the insurgents believed: they feel called to bludgeon into submission a system that doesn't produce the outcomes to which they feel entitled. The battery of "election integrity" laws from state Republicans, competing to outdo each other in cant and cruelty, are like elaborate bandages over feigned wounds; each is also a shot in the arm of the insurgents' distrust of the structures of American democracy. 70% of Republicans think the election was rigged, though nobody can say just how. How can one reason with such unreason?
It's hard now to imagine that January 6th wasn't just a dress rehearsal for what's to come, what is indeed already happening, a hamstringing of American democracy by people convinced that it has become their enemy who somehow don't realize that they have have become the enemy of the civic trust they claim to revere. But I don't actually know what they are thinking, hence my confusion. I don't know what game they think they're playing, though Masha Gessen and Timothy Snyder have shared the playbook of their nihilistic masterminds. Imagine finding a home in a big lie, whether embraced or tolerated, reluctantly or enthusiastically, whether as truth or fiction... Imagine imagining there's no life or future for you in truth, only in lies.
