What we are seeing now finally is the reckoning for America’s self-delusion, and more specifically conservative America’s self-delusion.
Yes, I’m singling out conservative America because if you look at all the acts of self-delusion that have led us to this point, they have often been done at the behest of or with the overwhelming support of conservative America. Furthermore, conservative Americans, who are overwhelmingly White and mostly clustered in small population and rural states and districts, have had outsize influence and power due to the founders’ design of our system of government (so much for their genius).
When you have a group of people who:
Think that tax cuts will pay for themselves.
Think tax cuts for the rich boost the economy.
Think tax increases on the rich is bad for the economy.
Think that Iraq had WMDs and ties with al Qaeda.
Think that a wall will prevent illegal immigration and slow the demographic changes that are inevitably making America less White.
Think that you can somehow deport 11 million illegal immigrants.
Think climate change is a hoax despite what climate scientists say.
Think evolution is a hoax or just as credible as creationism.
Think the Earth is 6,000 years old.
Think pumping unprecedented levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has no impact on the environment.
Think that Obamacare, a modest reform that preserved private insurance, was a government takeover of health care and contained death panels.
Think Medicare is not a government health care program.
Think American health care was fine before Obamacare.
Think America has the best health care on the planet despite spending far more than and having worse outcomes than other countries, and has 50 million uninsured.
Think making America’s health care system more privatized and deregulated will miraculously lower health costs and expand access to health care.
That universal health care is communism even though perfectly capitalist, democratic countries all over the world like Germany, Canada, France, and Japan have universal health care, not to mention much better outcomes and lower costs.
Think the economy was in shambles before Trump took office and think it has made some kind of miraculous turnaround since he took office.
Think Barack Obama was a communist Muslim who was born in Kenya.
Think that curbing the usage of plastic straws is dumb.
Think Michelle Obama’s program to have kids eat healthier was an outrage.
Think more people packing guns is the solution to mass shootings.
Think our country having 300 million guns in circulation and easy availability of guns has nothing to do with rampant gun violence that plagues our country.
Think deregulating banks had nothing to do with the financial crash.
Think poor minorities were to blame for the financial crash.
Think cutting funding to public education is a good idea.
Think homeschooling is a better option for everyone than public education.
Think cutting funding and programs for the poor will be good for them.
Think it wise to spend more on defense spending than the next ten nations combined.
Thought it was a good idea to pursue austerity during an economic crash caused by a drop in demand.
Thought defaulting on the country’s debt was a good idea.
Voted for Richard Nixon who was impeached over Watergate.
Voted for Ronald Reagan who began the era of skyrocketing wealth inequality, neglect of public services and infrastructure, and tax cut-fueled debt.
Voted for George W. Bush who pursued a war in Iraq over non-existent WMDs and al Qaeda ties and then presided over the worst financial and economic crash since the Great Depression.
Voted for Donald Trump who is now presiding over another financial and economic crash, and a disastrously inept response to a global pandemic.
Think Donald Trump is a truthful and moral man.
Think Donald Trump is wise.
When you have people who are this deeply in denial and who are so immersed in an alternate reality, sooner or later there will be a reckoning. You simply cannot deny reality forever. These are people who have willfully believed all of Donald Trump’s lies however fantastical.
I hate to do this, but I have an extended relative who is a Trump-supporting Republican.
I recall back in 2006 him insisting that we’d found WMDs in Iraq.
I recall the same relative saying in 2009, while Obamacare was making its way through Congress, that it was socialized medicine. When I reminded this relative that he, as ex-military, was on TriCare, a government-run health care program, he responded “but I earned it” as if people only deserved health care if they earned it.
This same relative and his wife believed Sarah Palin to be more intelligent and qualified to be president than Barack Obama.
This relative insisted that lending money to poor minorities caused the financial crash, to which I pointed out that in fact the banks who lent money irresponsibly in the first place and fraudulently packaged junk mortgages as AAA rated securities were to blame (he offered no response to that).
This relative said climate change is a hoax because the weather is so unpredictable.
This relative in 2016 said he opposed Hillary Clinton “because she’s a liar” yet without any hint of self-awareness he supported Trump.
This relative said he liked Trump because he was a self-made billionaire, but when I pointed out that Trump received hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from his father and likely was not a billionaire at all, his response was “but he’s still rich!”
The thing is, there has long been a strain of self-delusion in America’s DNA. It’s the self-delusion that believed we could be an almost Utopian republic of self-sustaining yeoman farmers, that we didn’t need or even desire a robust industrial economy, that we didn’t need a centralized bank, that we didn’t need a strong federal government to make “internal improvements” which is what they called infrastructure in the 19th century, that we did not need taxation along the lines of other developed nations, that we could claim to be a free nation while keeping tens of millions in bondage and then treating such people as second-class citizens ever since, that we could forever expand into a frontier that would never end, that we could forever consume resources from buffaloes to timber to whales without those stocks being depleted, that the power dynamic between employers and workers was completely fair and balanced and did not need collective bargaining, that we could just isolate ourselves from the world because the oceans would protect us, that we didn’t need a standing military, that we didn’t need a strong public safety net such as what they had in other industrialized nations which is why American has been the last among such nations to have unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and we still do not have universal health care, and so on.
But for a time, starting somewhat in 1932 but really taking effect after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and lasting through 1968, America did seem to finally get it a little. We finally seemed to somewhat understand that we needed to invest heavily in our people, our infrastructure, and our institutions, that we needed to make the wealthy and the powerful pay up much more so that wealth could be more equitably distributed.
Unfortunately, however, this period would not last, the reason being America’s cardinal sin of bigotry. The social contract I refer to above, which was called the New Deal Coalition or the liberal consensus, was ultimately a fragile one because it was dependent on the beneficiaries being almost entirely White and dominated by White males while all other groups remained as a permanent underclass. When the members of that underclass began to assert their right to society’s’ benefits during the mid-1960s, the social contract came apart.
That is when we reverted once again back to the self-delusion that characterized American society prior to 1932. We unlearned the lessons of that period between 1932 and 1968 because the White/White male-dominated society of that period did not want to share their power, wealth, or status. And everything they’ve done since that point has been to restore that old world and to deny the realities of the modern world.
But all those efforts have only had the effect of eroding the social contract and the institutions that created the unprecedented and fairly shared prosperity of the postwar era, which has eroded the quality of life for all but the wealthiest and most powerful Americans, and ironically perhaps no one has seen their standard of living decline more in relative terms than those in conservative White middle America.
Fortunately for people like this and for all of us, by sheer luck this revival of mass delusion never actually brought our country to the point of near collapse, although it obviously nearly brought our economy to full collapse in 2008. But at least it did not result in an event that could potentially result in mass death, economic catastrophe, and societal breakdown for our country.
That is, until now. This relative I spoke of has for weeks been going on about how coronavirus was just a bunch of overwrought hysteria, that it was no worse than the common cold or seasonal flu, that the media and Democrats were exaggerating it to make President Trump look bad.
But last week I informed this relative and his wife, who are in their late sixties, that they should be wary of coming over my house to visit because the spouse of my co-worker tested positive for coronavirus, and that while I have no symptoms and feel perfectly fine, there was a small risk that I may have been exposed since I shared the same office floor as this co-worker, used the same bathroom and kitchen area.
Of course, they came over anyway for a quick lunch although I stayed away from them as much as possible. Looking at their social media I could see they still believed all this to be a result of liberal wussification and a desire to take down President Trump.
Well, today I learned that another co-worker tested positive for coronavirus, except I actually spoke face to face with this co-worker just eight days ago. I informed my doctor of this and she said that because I have no symptoms, and because of the extreme shortage of testing capability, I cannot get tested until I do show symptoms, and only then if I show symptoms for 48 hours. In the meantime I have to live in a state of uncertainty, living under the same roof as my wife and daughter, not knowing if I have actually been infected.
I then had to inform these extended relatives that I may have been exposed to coronavirus, and thus they, by insisting on coming over for lunch the other day, may also have been exposed. Furthermore, I had to explain to them that due to the health care system that they’d repeatedly touted as the world’s greatest, one they have adamantly refused to support even the most modest reforms of, they and I will be unable to get a test, that here in the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation we cannot test more in total than South Korea can test in a matter of days.
As coronavirus continues to wreak havoc and spread and kill over the coming weeks, this realization will dawn upon more and more people like my extended relatives. God forbid they become infected given their age. But it shouldn’t take something deadly like coronavirus to snap these people out of their denial.
Still, I fear they and others like them will not be snapped out of their denial. The problem when you allow yourself to get so deep into the rabbit hole of denial is that you must confront the horrible reality of what you have done. For many people, their psyche simply cannot take it, it is too horrific and shameful and devastating for them to realize how disastrously wrong they have been. So in all likelihood they will simply double-down on crazy. If they did not realize this when the last person they chose as president destroyed the world economy and financially ruined many of these same people, it’s not a stretch that even this new terrible chapter will not do the trick either.
Whatever the case, this mass self-delusion must come to an end, conservative White middle America must snap out of it, or they must be kept from the levers of power before their delusion consumes them and all of us. But depressingly, as I’ve mentioned, the way our system of government has been designed, they have power far beyond their numbers.
I hate to despair, but if this coronavirus epidemic and the way Trump has downplayed it and pretended time and again that it was a hoax or under control does not cause them to finally snap out of their delusion, and especially if they maintain their stranglehold on power and their ability to veto any serious efforts to rebuild and improve upon the social contract and institutions they tore down, I fear our country will not escape from the downward spiral that this conservative, White nationalist America has put us in.
Democrats and progressives must do everything in their power to prevent this, and more importantly, they must have the requisite imagination, vision, courage, and boldness to put us on the right path to escape this madness.