Dishonesty and denial of reality have been a core part of the Right since longer than this nation has existed, as long as the concept of “the Right” has existed in the first place. Inevitably so since their beliefs are consistently based on falsehoods, so they have to engage in lies and self delusion or give up being on the Right in the first place.
Which is why the decades-long effort of the Democrats to win them over with facts and reason was doomed to failure from the start; they were just unwilling to admit it. If they cared about facts and reason they wouldn’t be right wing.
I’m paraphrasing Lumpy and countless other conservatives I’ve heard on this board. It’s an endlessly repeating pattern. They are the “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd until you start hitting them with actual facts, then it’s “who made you the decider of facts, are you just going to ban all the bad facts, that’s elitist censorship.”
It’s never about adjudicating meaning with these people, it’s about adjudicating control over meaning. This is why they support Trump. At a moment when conservatism seems at the brink of losing control over shared reality, Trump is there to simply annihilate every shred of meaning, so that nobody knows what’s real or not. In the short term it’s a tie, in the long run the tie is awarded to the powerful.
If anyone’s confused about my position on what can be done here, my answer is: nothing. This is a postmortem analysis. The battle over meaning as we previously understood it, is utterly and hopelessly lost. We’re now entering an age of consumer politics and audience-defined meaning. There is no stopping or even deflecting, the only question is what flavor of fascism America is getting, and how it integrates or conflicts with other international fascist movements. Resist if you want, but the tickets have been bought and we’re all on this ride now.
Actually, in the long run the winner is reality, one way or another. All their denials didn’t keep COVID from infecting right wingers like anyone else. It’s a major reason they are such disasters when give power, they over and over make disastrous decisions because they think they can define truth by fiat, and are blindsided when objective reality just ignores them.
Unfortunately that doesn’t keep them from grabbing power and hurting many, many people with it.
Once upon a time, the extreme-right paranoids e.g the John Birch Society were rightly dismissed as a nutty fringe even by less extreme conservatives. So what changed? Maybe what changed is that the Left made conspiracy theories seem less implausible. If you had presented to the people of fifty years ago the world of 2024, they would have dismissed it as a comically impossible dystopia.
It’s the Left’s fault that prominent conservatives think that Jews are using space lasers to cause forest fires to make climate chance seem worse, obviously. Also, the government can control the weather to punish red states with flooding and hurricanes – it’s also the Left’s fault that prominent conservatives believe that.
So, you’re blaming “the Left” for the Right’s belief that 2020 election was stolen or the Right’s belief that the Covid vaccines are more dangerous than the Covid virus? Those Millions of people who belief things that have no basis in fact whatsoever are to blame the Left for their condition?
Culture has ALWAYS posited a counterfactual reality. Example: the belief that black people are inherently less than white people. That is clear an untrue, false belief, objectively ridiculous, and also (historically) a cultural truth in the USA. Nobody in the white community would have questioned it in 1850, and probably a ⇊minority in 1950. Society has made innumerably decisions based on this counterfactual belief, but not the reality, that black people and white people are inherently equal in abilities. [And if you want to argue with me about that fact or demand proof, pit me. I’m asserting that it is true here, but you don’t need to agree with me to accept the basic argument.]
That vaccines work is also an objective truth, but really equally easy for society to allow the counterfactual belief. Yes, people die from covid / measles / polio / smallpox, but if we train ourselves not to look at or discuss those deaths and disabilities, or to reinterpret them as something else (“they just had a weak constitution!”), we can have a thriving society with easily demonstrated counterfactual beliefs at the core.
See also: smoking is good for you, universal healthcare is impossible, America is exceptional, anything about guns…
Every society I’m aware of has SOME of these untrue beliefs as a part of their culture, either as mythology or more generally. Every society can stand some of these. I think that right now, we’re developing a subculture with an unusual and problematic amount of these, and I think that’s more of an issue than the fact of.
They CAN, but they don’t have to. If you just want to talk about objectively false medical beliefs, have a look at the humoral system of medicine or, again, smoking. Or alcohol. I mean, they do obviously weaken the culture to some degree, but “cripple” and “outright ruin” is overstated. Human society can withstand a LOT of bullshit. See also religion.
I do think that, in the current USA, things are rapidly progressing to the point where it is unsustainable, but it’s a mistake to tacitly assume that irrationality is a completely new feature. It’s the degree, and the differening subcultures, that make it a problem. In particular the later: I wonder if this is ethnogenesis, where “American” is bifurcating into “Red American” and “Blue American”? I think it’s a bit too early to tell.