Even with Trump out of office, the Republican Party’s leaders and media enablers seem determined to live in a world of lies — a place where democracy can’t live. As host Spencer Critchley says, it’s like life under Soviet domination as described by writers such as Vaclav Havel and Czeslaw Milosz: “Everything is a lie, everyone knows it’s a lie, and everyone goes along with the lie anyway.”
It consists of the continuing Big Lie of a “stolen election,” plus endless others, such as the daily right-wing media “scamdal:” what you get when you build a scandal on a scam.
Ultimately, the liars are harmed as much as the lied-to, as Socrates long ago warned us:
Having so many evils, will not the most miserable of men be still more miserable in a public station? Master of others when he is not master of himself… wanting all things, and never able to satisfy his desires; always in fear and distraction, like the State of which he is the representative. His jealous, hateful, faithless temper grows worse with command; is more and more faithless, envious, and unrighteous — the most wretched of men, a misery to himself and to others.
(Plato, The Republic.)
Sound familiar?
Transcript
Welcome to Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good, I’m Spencer Critchley. This time: Living in a world of Big Lies.
First, I’m going to talk about the scamdal: what you get when you make a scandal out of a scam.
A few weeks ago the right-wing media’s latest scamdal was about the mainstream media supposedly hyping the story of Ted Cruz in Cancun, while burying allegations against Andrew Cuomo.
Surprise, it wasn’t true. The Cruz story is long gone from the MSM, while Cuomo is still leading, because there have been no new developments on Cruz and lots on Cuomo. But RW outlets issued no corrections to their scamdal; they just moved on to the next one.
Hence Dr. Seuss and the Potatoheads.
People who ignore RW media probably don’t appreciate that this happens every day, year-round. The infinite cycle goes like this:
- “Expose” a scamdal.
- Demand to know why the mainstream media isn’t covering it. (If the story has actual news value, the MSM is covering it, but devoted RW media consumers won’t know that. If on the other hand, as is so often the case, the story is just bull, that’s kind of a deal-breaker for legitimate journalists.)
- Go “in depth” behind the “crisis,” filling the schedule.
- As the story starts to feel a little old — scamdals must always be new and urgent — milk it once more in the weekly roundup of “stories the mainstream media didn’t want you to hear.”
- Add it to the “evergreen” stock, along with Birtherism, Benghazi, Hillary’s emails, Fast and Furious, transgender bathroom marauders, and all the other never-corrected, ever-remembered scamdals — all of which add up to just one message, repeated over and over and over, because it’s so lucrative:
“Trust no one but us, so you’ll buy whatever we sell.”
How Do We Stop Big Lies but Keep Free Speech?
Our free speech rights are very broad, which is one of the greatest things about America. Part of what that means, though, is that it’s legal for dishonest profiteers like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and the late Rush Limbaugh to lie every day and, thanks to our free market, get rich doing it.
But those same rights mean each of us is free to object. We can call on radio and TV stations not to carry these liars’ shows, we can tell advertisers we won’t buy their products if they advertise on these shows, and those advertisers can choose to stop.
Free speech and free market.
Would this be appropriate if the issue were simply that the shows are biased? No. I believe democracy works better if we hear opinions of all kinds — especially ones we disagree with.
But I’m not talking about bias, I’m talking about lying.
And not just lying. Flagrant, deeply irresponsible lying that stokes the fear and hatred that have now led to violent attacks on our democracy.
It may be legal, but it’s wrong. Everyone involved is protected by the law, but they should face the shame and rejection they have earned along with all that money.
A few examples, among countless others (many of which are tracked by Media Matters for America):
Glenn Beck claimed on his Oct. 12, 2020 show that the armed attackers of the Michigan state Capitol “are not on the right… are not Trump supporters,” but members of shadowy groups that want to “destroy capitalism, the free market, the United States, and the Western world.”
As these liars so often do, Beck claimed that “This is the story you’re not going hear anywhere else.” The reason you don’t hear stories like that in the mainstream media is because they’re lies.
On multiple shows, Sean Hannity helped spread the fantastical lie about Dominion voting machines supposedly being rigged, a lie which Fox News, along with other right-wing outlets, was frightened into prominently correcting and apologizing for, after Dominion began legal actions over the undeserved damage to its reputation.
Even after the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, Mark Levin continued to profit from the Big Lie of a “stolen election.” On his Jan. 12 show he insisted there were “serious issues” in the election of Joe Biden, and that fellow liars Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley had raised “legitimate concerns” about it.
Levin has also denied ever receiving the memo sent by Cumulus Media to all its hosts, including him, to stop spreading the election Big Lie or face termination.
On Inauguration Day, Rush Limbaugh repeated the Big Lie that Biden “had not legitimately won” the election. Again: after people had died because of that lie.
People of the right, center, and left are and should be free to discuss a huge range of ideas. But if any of them chooses to participate in an attack on the democracy that gives them that freedom, they cross a moral line that we must defend.
And that doesn’t mean we have to take their freedom away, say by having the government crack down on them.
We can simply exercise our freedom.
Each of us can do that. And doing it locally often makes a bigger difference than doing it nationally.
For example, you can contact local talk radio stations that carry shows by people like Beck, Hannity, and Levin.
You might tell the station manager that you support free speech, but it doesn’t mean you have to support the broadcasting of dangerous lies that put freedom at risk. You might also contact local companies that advertise on these shows.
And yes, if you can find media personalities on the left being equally irresponsible, I’d advocate doing the same things.
Will anyone care? Yes. You might be surprised at how quickly even national-scale enterprises notice when more than a few people contact them about a particular issue, especially when money’s at stake.
And money is all this is about. The constant appeals to patriotism are, of course, a con, and a particularly shameful one, given the damage these people have inflicted on their country.
Meanwhile, if the rest of us don’t speak up, it’s taken as a sign that we’re all OK with it.
We can’t be OK with it. Not if we actually do care about the country.
Life in Trumpworld Looks a Lot Like Life Under the Soviets
Watching the uninterrupted dishonesty of Trumpists, like Senator Ron Johnson, for example, I was reminded again how closely life in Trumpworld matches life under the old Soviet bloc as described by dissidents like Vaclav Havel and Czeslaw Milosz: Everything is a lie, everyone knows it’s a lie, and everyone goes along with the lie anyway.
Thus they become both victims of the lie and partners in keeping it going.
In his classic essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel tells the story of a greengrocer. One day a sign arrives from the Party: “Workers of the world unite!” it says. The greengrocer knows the sign is meaningless, but he also knows that he must put it in his window. Quoting from Havel:
[By posting the sign] the greengrocer declares his loyalty… in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.
This also describes those who pretend to believe Trump’s lies because everyone they know pretends to believe them.
Trump is himself a product of a world of lies, one that’s long been inhabited by people across our society: you say what you must, act how you must, to get along. Every interaction becomes transactional, a form of sales.
Many of our children are being reared right now by the principle of “because one must,” so they can become the next generation of adults living a lie, assuming that it’s just the way it is: normal — which means the artificial becomes reality.
In his book The Captive Mind, Milosz describes a friend who had been a truth-seeking writer in his youth, but who had since succumbed to the artificial life. Milosz writes:
In his desire to win approbation, he had simplified his picture to conform to the wishes of the Party. One compromise leads to a second, and a third, until at last, though everything one says may be perfectly logical, it no longer has anything in common with the flesh and blood of living people.
And Havel saw that consumerism could impose such soulless conformism too, as effectively as what he called “post-totalitarianism” ever did. This is him again in “The Power of the Powerless:”
Is it not true that the far-reaching adaptability to living a lie and the effortless spread of social auto-totality have some connection with the general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity? With their willingness to surrender higher values when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civilization? With their vulnerability to the attractions of mass indifference? And in the end, is not the greyness and the emptiness of life in the post-totalitarian system only an inflated caricature of modern life in general?
“The attractions of mass indifference.” It sure sounds like what’s behind the blank unconcern over a President of the United States who tried to destroy democracy.
The Right’s Moral Collapse
I believe we should avoid moralism in politics — making moral judgments of people who just disagree with us — but that doesn’t mean we should abandon morality. And understanding the insurrection of Jan. 6 and what led up to it, and what’s still happening now, requires understanding that it was a moral collapse.
Anyone who excuses the insurrection, and the people who provoked and led it, has abandoned the fundamental moral values that make democracy possible.
We knew that many Trump supporters were deluded. He’s good at only one thing, but he may be the best ever at that one thing: being a con man.
And we wanted to believe that supporters who saw through the con were just gritting their teeth, waiting for him to be gone, calculating the trade-off in lower taxes or more conservative judges. Cynical, but at least recognizing that right might be better than wrong.
We didn’t expect outright sedition.
But it turns out many Trump supporters liked everything about him. Now that he’s gone, they want him back.
And they not only still like Trump, they like morally bankrupt insurrectionists like Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Sean Hannity, and they miss Rush Limbaugh.
They don’t condemn Cruz’s abandonment of his post for Cancun, they celebrate it.
They seem to have confused freedom with raw selfishness, as if it means freedom from any limits on getting what you want.
No ideological definition of freedom, conservative or liberal, has ever asserted that.
But the immoral one does. Many of the people who fancy themselves as libertarians are in fact libertines: just selfish. And as moral conservatives and liberals have always understood, that is not freedom but a form of slavery, to one’s own desires.
Power promises release, but in fact the tyrant is “the most miserable of men,” as Socrates said (in Plato’s Republic). Here’s Socrates:
Having so many evils, will not the most miserable of men be still more miserable in a public station? Master of others when he is not master of himself; like a sick man who is compelled to be an athlete, the meanest of slaves and the most abject of flatterers, wanting all things, and never able to satisfy his desires; always in fear and distraction, like the State of which he is the representative. His jealous, hateful, faithless temper grows worse with command; is more and more faithless, envious, and unrighteous — the most wretched of men, a misery to himself and to others.
Remind you of anyone?
Beyond a certain point, continuing to believe in Trump, and his enablers in politics and media, isn’t a case of simply being misled, it’s choosing to be misled. Truth is just a Google search away, but desire is endlessly tantalizing* and distracting. “Tantalizing” is a word we inherit from the Greek mythological figure Tantalus, who was condemned to spend eternity reaching for low-hanging fruit and fresh water, only to find they were always just beyond his grasp.
Beyond a certain point, people follow Trump, or Cruz, or the others not because they want persuasion, but because they want permission.
It’s not an ideological choice, but a moral one.
And after the near-overthrow of democracy, it should be more than clear that it’s the wrong one.
I’ll leave it there this time. I’m writing about topics like these at spencercritchley.com, and have been doing a lot of interviews for TV, radio, and print. You can find links to some of them at spencercritchley.com as well. And I’ll be back here on the podcast soon.
If you’d like to share your thoughts, I hope you’ll comment at spencercritchley.com, dastardlycleverness.com, or on social media. On Twitter I’m @scritchley and my Facebook page is at spencer.critchley.page.
Thanks for listening.