We are The Great Fear

What is the source of the delusions that pervade so much of American life today, from the Big Lie about the 2020 election, to the QAnon conspiracy that purports that cannibals and child abusers abound among Democrats, to dozens of other false narratives about Covid, vaccines and much else?

We are The Great Fear: Us; the immigrants; the African Americans; the queers; the feminists; and all the other others.

Manifestations of the Great American lunacy are endless and don’t end with narratives but include actions like the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol and the fascist Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, an event convened by multiple racist and anti-Semitic groups that resulted in the death of a peaceful protester and which President Donald Trump said involved “good people on both sides.”

This is a false equivalence. There can be no equivalence between the SS and the anti-Nazi resistance. Good people don’t ram crowds with pickup trucks. Good people don’t chant “the Jews will not replace us.” That’s what Nazi goons do.

A significant percentage of whites, Euro-identified, red-blooded, proudly monolingual Americans believe narratives like the equivalence between fascist aggression and anti-fascist resistance, among other bizarre narratives. In a sense, they must. The truth is psychologically unacceptable. The truth, that after 400 years of being on top they are no longer the absolute and unquestioned masters of the country and will never be again, is too much for them to wrap their brains around.

Thus, they will believe almost anything before they believe that. Believe almost anything and do almost anything. Fears of White People Losing Out Permeate Capitol Rioters’ Towns, Study Finds reads a headline in the New York Times earlier this week.

The study by political scientist Robert Pape found that “counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists. This finding held true, Mr. Pape determined, even when controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.”

This is no great surprise, no breakthrough social science. From the time the first contemporary xenophobic movement, the 1980 English Only movement in Miami, to the Tea Party movement during the Obama years to the Trump travesty, researchers and journalists have looked to economic distress as the key factor. The research has contradicted that consensus hypothesis and has consistently and pointed to a different reason, ethnic and cultural resentment.

It seems that journalists and theorists have suffered from a parallel distortion when looking at xenophobia. They cannot look at the thing in the face, avert their eyes, look for other reasons. Anything to avoid calling fellow citizens bigots. I have no such compunctions.

The reason for the Great Delusion is not economic deprivation but The Great Fear. The existence of The Great Fear became evident when Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the presidency by spewing venom against Mexican immigrants and on the strength of that quickly became the Republican frontrunner.

The Great Fear is a kind of vertigo. It is not that whites are moving down because of the actions or presence of the “other,” or even moving down at all. It is that when the other is rising it can look as if you are moving down, and that is scary for a lot of people.

The reason for the Great American Delusion is the Great American Fear, what right-wingers call “replacement” embodied in the mantra chanted by the fascists in Charlottesville: “The Jews Will Not Replace us.”

The anti-Semitism is no surprise either. The Great Fear is nothing if not perverse and paranoid. Its core grievance is not downward mobility but black empowerment (thus the fierce, irrational hatred of Obama), Jewish success, and especially, the new post-1965 immigration and the increased diversity it has brought.

The classical German sociologist Max Weber described the transition from traditional to modern society as involving a “disenchantment of the world.” Disenchantment for Weber meant the replacement of magical, religious, and mystical explanations of the world by scientific ones. The coming of modernity also meant the management of society and the state by a rule-bound apparatus—bureaucracy—that replaced forms of authority based on tradition, force, or charisma.

The rise of the Great American Delusion amounts to a re-enchantment of the world, a revival of irrational ways of seeing and understanding and a devolution from a society managed by laws, rules, and norms to one run by a personalistic authority endowed with a perverse charisma like that possessed by Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump

As Michael Gerson, a former Republican speechwriter and Washington Post columnist wrote this week in a column that links the GOP demonization of Anthony Fauci to the Republican’s false master narrative, one that tries to turn reality on its head. (“Why tearing down Fauci is essential to the MAGA myth”).

“Perhaps the most remarkable distortion concerns the MAGA view of covid-19.”…We have all seen the basic outlines of pandemic reality. Experts in epidemiology warned that the disease would spread through contact or droplets at short distances, which is how it spread. The experts recommended early lockdowns to keep health systems from being overwhelmed, and the lockdowns generally worked. The experts said Americans could influence the spread of the disease by taking basic measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing. The disease was controlled when people did these things. The disease ran rampant when they did not, killing a lot of old and vulnerable people in the process.

We have all seen it but some through clear lenses and others through fun-house glasses.

Gerson concludes this discussion by writing that “American citizens have witnessed one of the most dramatic vindications of scientific expertise in our history.” But not all that have witnessed it have accepted its reality. Thrashing Fauci was a necessity to buttress the fallacious GOP narrative:

“If Fauci has been right about covid, then playing down the disease, mocking masks, modeling superspreader events, denying death tolls, encouraging anti-mandate militias and recommending quack cures were not particularly helpful. If Fauci has been right, they presided over a deadly debacle.”

Fauci was right. The Trump administration not only passively presided but actively fomented policies that predictably led to a deadly disaster of world-historic dimensions, a minor holocaust.

Political survival obligated the GOP to deny this truth by crafting a different narrative that true believers could hold on to believe what they needed to believe. Gershom:

“When former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro claims that Fauci is “the father of the actual virus” or former chief of staff Mark Meadows complains about Fauci’s indifference to the (nearly nonexistent) flow of covid across the southern border, the goal is not really to press arguments. It is to create an alternative MAGA reality in which followers are free from the stress of truth — a safe space in which more than half a million people did not die and their leader was not a vicious, incompetent, delusional threat to the health of the nation.”

But he was and is. Gershom invokes a brutal but apt image to convey the psychotic nature of the Trump-Republican narrative.

“Metaphorically (but only barely metaphorically), there is a body on the floor with multiple stab wounds. The Trump administration stands beside it with a bloody knife in its hand. It not only claims to be innocent. It claims there is no blood. There is no body. There is no floor.”

We should never forget that there was blood and a body on the floor, and that it was Trump who wielded the knife. For that he deserves the most severe punishment legally possible and we must make sure that Trump never again holds another knife in his hand.