My brain is about 80 to 85% comic books these days, but I kinda missed the boat on posting about Episode 5 of X-Men '97, and now I'm stuck waiting until the end of the season. I could have written about The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl series by Ryan North and Erica Henderson, but decided it might be better to write about something else (although I'll get to Squirrel Girl at some point soon).
So you're getting a post about politics instead. Specifically the amount of foolishness that pervades electoral politics in our current age. I hinted at my thesis in a post I wrote last year, in which I wondered what the heck was up with Britain, but the main point for today is that American voters are oddly forgiving of absolute nonsense.
I should qualify that I'm mostly referring to, erm, one side of the aisle, though I do think that most establishment Democrats also fall for their own brands of, dare I say, malarkey. It's kind of built into the whole exceptionalism thing, which is why Britain seems to suffer from this malaise too.
But what do I classify as guff, nonsense and malarkey? It goes beyond structural disagreements about economics. I do think that most conservative/libertarian economic ideals are built on fantasy, at best, as when the UK pushes through a bunch of unfunded tax cuts (as Liz Truss tried to do last year), or when entire financial sectors are given carte blanche to gamble with everyone else's money (as we saw with the savings and loan collapse of the 80s, or the subprime mortgage credit crunch in 2008).
Rather, I'm talking about some of the more outre behavior of the West's populist leaders. I've seen a number of variations on the idea that "I never thought the apocalypse would be this stupid", and it's hit home for me. I'm talking about conspiracy theories that Sandy Hook was a false flag operation, or that the Uvalde shooter was a trans person, or that when Barack Obama told the people of Britain that Brexit was a bad idea, some dummies thought it was a set-up because he said leaving the EU would put Britain "at the back of the queue" for trade deals, and Americans don't say "queue", so he must have been coached by Remoaners, ergo and QED.
I could also go into the fact that people were setting fire to 5G masts during the pandemic, or that they were listening to some roided up idiot agree with his podcast guests that they should be taking an anti parasitic to not get Covid (which is, er, a virus), or that some folks were blaming the 2020 and 2021 wildfires on Black Lives Matter because they forgot that BLM can also stand for Bureau of Land Management... though I don't understand why the Bureau of Land Management would be setting fires.
(Don't try to explain it. If you give this theory any credit, you're stupid and I don't want to hear it)
(Also, I could list all the QAnon conspiracy ideas but we'd be here all day. Though I'm particularly fond of the idea that JFK Jr faked his death and that he was all set to make his return at Dealey Plaza a couple of years ago, where he'd immediately join Donald Trump's presidential ticket)
It seems to me that Americans are particularly susceptible to falling for nonsense. Part of it comes back to Richard Hofstadter's essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", which I haven't read but from what I know of it encompasses this idea that "they" are all out to get "us" and we need some demagogue to protect us. "They" could be communists, Black people, LGBTQ people, foreigners, or simply the favorite target of bigots throughout the ages, Jews (who are supposedly the ones behind communists and foreigners anyway).
I get that conspiracy theories come from people feeling disempowered, whether politically, socially or economically. What I don't understand is why feeling disempowered means blindly swallowing every false and/or incoherent thing Donald Trump says. Trump is not exactly disempowered himself - he shits on a golden toilet and has a bunch of buildings with his name on them all over the world. He does and says some of the crudest things you can imagine, but a not-insignificant portion of American Christians think he's basically the Second Coming of Christ.
This is why I think Americans are particularly susceptible to nonsense. Nobody in Britain thought Boris Johnson was Jesus, or particularly smart - they just voted for him because he's an edgelord with an Oxford degree and they thought it'd be a laugh. Geert Wilders and Giorgia Meloni are deeply weird individuals (she's part of some Italian Neo-fascist strand that has built its identity on the radical agrarian society of Tolkien's Hobbits), but no one has built a quasi-religious conspiratorial framework around either of them.
Hell, Australians are probably the most naturally libertarian people I've ever encountered, but because the idea of a "fair go" is so ingrained in the national psyche, they found the political will to ban assault weapons after Port Arthur and have made great strides to attempt to atone for what they did to the Indigenous Peoples from the First Fleet through to the 20th century. Whereas in America, supposedly the land of the free and a place where "all men are created equal", we give undue attention to people who say that their right to buy assault rifles outweighs children's right to not be shot to pieces in school.
I don't know why exactly Americans fall for stupid and lazy arguments so easily, but I do know that this tendency is what underlies the big threats to our society. Trump may run around telling people that he should have won the election, but for some reason a lot of people are prepared to believe him, despite, or because, his arguments are so flimsy. If so many people are willing to disbelieve their own eyes on the say-so of the Party, at least the Party could come up with some lies that are internally consistent and not the deranged power fantasies of people who should know better.
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