The Delusion Factor
Why have so many Republicans taken a plunge into paranoid conspiracies?
In a recent post, I explored several aspects of Donald Trump’s political magic touch. How is it that he’s managed to take over, transform, and maintain his grip on the Republican Party?
There is, to begin with, The Policy Factor—Trump’s decision to move away from longstanding Republican support for relatively open immigration, free trade, and hawkish internationalism in foreign policy. This appealed to voters in the GOP who were furious about the failures of the Bush administration and the party’s inability to defeat Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Then there’s The Bellicosity Factor—the 45th president’s harshly combative persona, which demonstrated a willingness to fight Democrats and their media apologists with uncommon ruthlessness. For members of the party angry about the left’s political and cultural gains over the past few decades, the commitment to do unrestrained battled against liberals and progressives was hugely appealing.
Finally, there’s The Trash Factor, which I cribbed from Jonathan Last at The Bulwark (who was himself building on something a guest had stated on a podcast with Last’s colleague Sarah Longwell). This is Trump’s willingness to say anything on stage at a rally or in a press conference standing beside a foreign dignitary. He might hurl a crude insult, or call journalists the “enemy of the people,” or suggest Americans ingest bleach to rid themselves of a potentially dangerous virus. There was no telling what garbage would spew from his mouth from moment to moment. Trump’s supporters adore this because it makes him demotically entertaining and demonstrates contempt for the norms of propriety affirmed by members of the political establishment in Washington.
But now, Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times has put her finger on a fourth aspect of Trump’s appeal—one which, like the others, has by this point metastasized throughout the Republican Party. This is what might be called The Delusion Factor. It’s the tendency of a growing faction of the Republican electorate, along with the most Trumpian politicians in the party, to indulge in “wild exaggerations or outright fantasies” in order to justify extreme behavior and excuse political setbacks. Think of “antifa supersoldiers, totalitarian globalists, satanic pedophiles,” and of course the vast election-fraud conspiracy that, though it lacks any foundation in reality and fact, has become widely accepted among Republican voters as an account of how Trump ended up getting booted from the White House.
Republicans Uniquely Deceived?
Goldberg’s reflections were prompted by reading a new book, The Storm is Here: An American Crucible, by seasoned journalist Luke Mogelson, and by interviewing him about it. Mogelson has long reported from some of the world’s worst war zones. Does he think the United States is poised to plunge into a period of serious political unrest? Mogelson isn’t sure, but one reason he’s inclined to doubt it is that “every civil conflict that I’ve covered has been rooted in real injury and grievance.” Republican injuries and grievances, by contrast, are delusional. “Whether or not … these very unreal threats would be enough to sustain a hot conflict and people killing and dying for those projections of their own paranoias, I don’t know,” Mogelson told Goldberg. But he tends not to think so.
That sounds reassuring—but is the underlying analysis sound? I’m not so sure. Were Al Qaeda’s injuries and grievances rooted in fact during the run-up to the September 11 attacks? How about ISIS, with its bloodthirsty drive to establish a new Islamic Caliphate? Did Hutu militias butcher several hundred thousand Tutsis with machetes and rifles during the Rwandan civil war for empirically grounded reasons? Did the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s break out and rage viciously for years because Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians, Slovenians, and Kosovars made a clear-eyed, factual assessment of injuries and grievances that laid dormant through the decades they lived side-by-side as members of the sovereign state of Yugoslavia?
I’m afraid I’m unconvinced either that violent civil conflicts around the world typically arise from hard-nosed reasoning about factual injuries and grievances or that the tendency of Republican voters in recent years to get swept up in forms of mass delusion is all that unusual when viewed in a global context. I think it’s more accurate to say that civil violence sometimes breaks out when one faction of the population begins to obsess over injuries and grievances, whether or not they are grounded in reality.
The Elite Origin of Republican Delusions
Mogelson notes that he’s been struck in talking to ordinary people on the American right by just how scared they genuinely are. That comports with what I’ve heard talking to right-leaning friends and acquaintances in recent years. Threats are everywhere—on the streets (in the form of crime and violent left-wing protestors); in Washington (in a Democratically controlled White House, Congress, and the various arms of the “deep state”); in public schools (which supposedly push sinister ideologies designed to encourage children to hate their country and mutilate themselves against their parents’ wishes); and even in the marketplace, where so-called “woke capital” seeks to indoctrinate as many Americans as possible, and especially the young, into a left-wing program to tear down and remake society from the ground up.
Where have these Republican voters gotten the idea that so much of the political, social, cultural, and economic world is united in a conspiratorial effort to defeat them? In her outstanding new book, Partisans, historian Nicole Hemmer suggests that this paranoid outlook, which flourished during the Cold War in groups like the John Birch Society, received a new lease on life during the 1990s. At the time, it was encouraged and popularized by a number of the Republican officials elected to the House in 1994, by Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, by various other writers and media personalities, and by Fox News. Two decades later, it would thrive as never before on social media and, of course, in the campaign and then presidency of Donald Trump.
A Receptive Audience
But it’s not as if the Republican electorate was simply brainwashed by conservative elites telling fanciful stories. Any account of social contagion needs a theory of reception. Why have Republican voters bought what these elites have been selling rather than dismissing it as unpersuasive and condescending demagoguery? Part of the answer must be that these voters like what they’ve been hearing—because they think it explains something about their experience of the world better than other, less delusional accounts.
If I had to speculate about what it is that appeals to these voters, I’d say that the conspiracies make sense of their perception of their own powerlessness in the face of American culture and society changing very rapidly and in a direction that horrifies them. The conspiracy theories give this experience coherence and meaning, while also assigning blame for these unsettling changes to political opponents. This has the effect of giving the right permission to act out ever-more boldly and recklessly against people and groups they consider to be enemies.
Trump’s insistence on blaming his loss in the 2020 election on an election fraud conspiracy illustrates this dynamic perfectly. Trump lost the election, but rather than accepting this painful truth, he plunged into and promulgated a delusion that denied its reality, explained how it came to appear as if he had lost, and blamed the widespread perception of Joe Biden’s victory on the nefarious intent of his enemies. All the delusions currently circulating on the right have similar origins and function in a similar way—as a coping mechanism in the face of defeat.
The country is changing in ways that members of the cultural right detest. Rather than reconcile themselves to these changes and devising ways to live decently within the new order of things, they’ve embraced intricate stories that both explain in ominous terms how things ended up this way and raise hopes for enacting a reversal through an act of political will.
That’s one explanation for how we got here—and for why the radicalization of the right is unlikely to abate anytime soon.
You have put your finger right on the cause of the many delusions shared by those on the right. They see America rapidly changing in ways they don't like. In my almost 80 years, I have seen so many changes that I can understand why people who held various prejudices, to begin with, are now scared of what this country has become. I remember gay slurs, the outcry against feminism, and job losses to overseas work. Still, even now, the blame is being laid on immigrants—no need even to mention the racial slurs against various minorities.
I was happy to see these changes because I thought they would make America a better country, with more opportunities for everyone. I never considered how fearful many people are when confronted by change, especially when these changes bring into question their worldviews.
The question remains, "Are the many people who share these delusions willing to fight and die to try and stop the changes and bring back the world they think they remember?" I believe some will fight, and they will cause a great deal of harm, but the majority will not commit violence in the face of their own imprisonment or death. It's easy to talk about violence but much harder to commit violence. It's similar to what is happening on the internet. It's easy to insult people in writing but much harder to do in person.
Racial integration, the Vietnam war, and the bombing of abortion clinics all produced violence, but the violence never spread past a few die-hard opponents of these changes. Most of us don't want to kill our neighbors, regardless of what we feel about their political views.
There is one more factor that is not mentioned very often. Most of us, myself included, have never been to war and seen the absolute carnage caused by bombs and bullets. TV and movies rarely show the actual effects of violence on the human body. For most of us, real life has a way of tempering our more radical desires.
Flying in from the cultural right to report in. Here’s the deal. Much of cultural left seems to eschew anything to do with responsibility before self. I think I noticed it first with marriage in particular -- the primacy of self over the family unit. Then there was the decoupling of having kids from marriage and often without a two party commitment to raise them. Because, as said by many liberals and conservatives alike, it doesn’t affect me so why should I care?
Here is the thing though, we do live with the result with other people’s choices and, worst of all, children do. I worked for awhile with CASA (court appointed special advocates for children) and trust me, the kids pay the price of their parents behavior often with no ability to change or get out of the situation. Liberals act as if that isn’t a factor, as if it happens in a vacuum or entirely due to economic instability or marginalization. And broken children too often result in broken adults -- and I don’t think I have spell out the results to society of broken adults.
Now I actually vote mostly Dem because I think they have better fiscal policy for the society we have now. On top of that, the MAGA Republicans are cuckoo (as well detailed above) and Trump? Is just plain evil.