The Flat-earth Party
Two-third of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen. That is almost as crazy as believing that the Earth is flat. Or maybe crazier. Humans thought the Earth was flat for tens of thousands of years, and no wonder. From our earthbound perspective the Earth appears to be flat. It took astronomy, geometry, and systematic observation—in a word, science—to prove otherwise.
The idea that the 2020 election was stolen has been disproven in a million ways. Voting counts, recounts, even bogus audits carried out to show that indeed it was stolen. Court rulings in the dozens. Getting at the truth doesn’t take math or science. Just read any legitimate newspaper, watch any real news network.
The stolen election narrative is not only false but also implausible; like the idea that you could jump out of an airliner without a parachute and survive. Yet tens of millions of Americans, members of one of the two traditional parties, subscribe to this total nonsense. That number, along with mass vaccine refusal in the face of Covid-19, is a good measure of the extent of idiocy among Americans. It’s impolite and impolitic to say this and that is why no mainstream journalist dares say it. Nevertheless, it is the truth.
When I ask people who are not vaccine refuseniks, “Why so many are?” the answer I usually get is: “I don’t get it?” That’s how I felt at first but as time passed and things became clear I began to see the outlines of an answer to why the flat-earthers believe both the fallacies about Covid-19 and the stolen election lie.
At first blush, my answer may seem off-base. People who don’t say, “I don’t get it” when I ask them about flat-earth beliefs generally say, “It is all political.” This is approximately true. Vaccination rates are high among Democrats and low among Republicans, and attitudes vary in the same way. But what political impulse drives millions to adopt a highly implausible flat earth belief system? My answer, white panic, requires more than a little explanation.
“I don’t feel like I am living in my own country anymore,” is a common refrain among flat-earthers.
For those afflicted with white panic, the demographic and cultural changes that have taken place since the 1960s were once unthinkable, especially for this mostly older demographic. They happened in the historical eye-blink of a single generation, the speed of change disorienting them. An African American in the White House. A woman almost winning the presidency. A woman who did become vice-president, and a woman of color to boot. Immigrants of all religions, colors, and languages running around as if they belonged.
I once asked an older white man why he hated Bill Clinton so much. The answer came immediately: “He let immigrants into this country and queers into the military.”
For these people, the center did not hold, the world was turned on its head. This affected the way they process reality. In an upside-down world, truth is falsehood, and falsehood is truth. Conspiracies replace causality. Dark, covert processes, not publicly available reality, move the world. Science is bunk. Insane QAnon theories about massive kidnapping and sexual abuse of children are taken as truth. A pizza joint was the command center for this outrage.
Idiocy is a necessary condition for flat earth beliefs. Panic supplies the sufficient condition. There is an emotional factor too. Trump is a source of comfort to the flat-earthers. Trump alone is enough to nullify everything else. They are not crazy, and they are not alone. Trump is the font of the final truth; provides them with the warmth they seek, and they are as loyal to him as the most loyal canine, cheering as the alpha wolf disciplines, with its sharp teeth, humans and lesser members of the pack alike.
Flat-earthers swim in a sea of anomie, an old term of art in sociology that means social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values. Rapid social change brings on anomie. Yesterday, homosexuals were perverts. Today they are cool, the cutting edge of culture.
Anomie is a social phenomenon, transmitted and amplified through communication, more rapidly and thoroughly than ever in this age of social media. “I don’t feel like I am living in my own country anymore,” is a common refrain among flat-earthers. They are right to the extent that they are no longer living in a white supremacist, hetero-patriarchal society which for them was Utopia and for us was dystopia.
This world of the flat-earthers is very resistant to almost every evidence of their wrong-headedness. When Covid-19 strikes them, they often deny that is what ails them, they insult those who are trying to save them at the risk of their lives, but finally when they are faced with reality, when they can’t breathe, when they are being intubated, they clamor for a vaccine when it is far too late to save them from their self-inflicted final agony.
Still, there is an element of the flat earth view of the world that partially eludes me. Washington ordered his troops vaccinated against smallpox so they could fight. Republican rhetoric and policy lead to many more casualties among their own ranks than that of their adversaries. What is the point? Republican ideology seems to have become unmoored from even the most basic reality, life versus death.
Perhaps the evangelical cult, and I use the word cult advisedly, leads them to believe that they are immune to death, in this world or the next. That’s what the Heaven’s Gate cult believed, too. No asteroid picked them up. The medical examiner did. It’s hard to swallow but it’s true. Also, insane, idiotic. But there it is. A death cult has moved from the fringe and into the heart of our political culture.
Ideology is no stake that will kill the virus like a vampire. We may not reach herd immunity, but Covid-19 will cull the herd of idiots, sadly, unnecessarily.
