An Informational Reckoning

The Wizard of Oz is a story about a small, emboldened man pretending to be capable of anything. As it turns out in the end, he is just a very small man, capable of the things that very small men are capable of — namely, of self-lionization in the face of reality.

In America, 80 years later, we have our own wizard on whom the curtain is being pulled back now, in the wake of an election he lost, because he’s a loser, and America hates losers like him. Something tells me his supporters, of whom there are a disheartening amount, are in for a moment like the one below — if not today, then soon, and if not soon, then eventually:

These four in the clip, they love the wizard. He gives them hope. They were willing to go to enormous lengths to satisfy them so that he would grant them the prosperity they deserved — the prosperity only he could provide. They are ultimately greatly disappointed. He is, as is Donald Trump, a terrible wizard.

In the film, of course, the wizard makes amends, insists he is a good person, and within 15 minutes there is a happy resolution. America is in for no such luck. The Republican party is launching an assault on democracy and no, that’s not an understatement. It’s a petty assault, consisting of flailing lawsuits and rantings that don’t pass muster even on the airwaves of Fox News, which has capitulated to the demagogue at every turn, until now, sometimes, it seems. (Don’t be too generous — only their newsiest of news shows have taken these steps, Tucker, Hannity, and Ingraham remain staunchly pro-fascist-takeover.) Nonetheless, the goal is to take the results of the election, which were achieved by democratic vote, and reverse them. This would be an almost admirable quixotic effort to turn righteous indignation into national revolution, an American Dream if there ever was one, if it weren’t perpetrated by the current President of the United States for the sake of overcoming the will of the people. Alas.

Republicans have sort of marveled at Trump’s Trumpiness, his ability to take nothing and sell it to millions in exchange for social and political capital. He is a snake-oil salesman, selling security to the least-threatened folks in our society. No one is more apt to be left alone than the rural white male. Yet Trump rose to prosperity on the back of a promise to build a wall to protect that rural white male from the evil other side. (Remember the wall, by the way?) At first, Republicans were disgusted by his thrashing of agreed-upon decorum and scrambling of the subtext into his main message. He said the quiet part out loud, and people felt seen. Some people. In this escapade, Trump is again showing the Republican party that information is relative, and that a landslide victory in one election is a complete hoax in the next.

If Trump has a superpower, or if a set of circumstances happen to work perfectly in Trump’s favor to give off the appearance of having a superpower, it is that he has exploited the dissonance in information to a tee. He sniffed out how weakened our national media had become by the social media revolution which equalized the platform playing field, and he attacked. He sniffed out how petty and frivolous the rules of play were in the political stratosphere, and he attacked them. He sniffed out how racist the country was and he ran on that. He sniffed out how conspiratorial thinking was spreading through the country and he rallied those troops to his corner. You can hold all the world’s truth in your hands, and Donald Trump knows he can look at it and call it nothing, and people will believe that. Trump’s unwitting lieutenants in this fight — Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and their many successors, right-wingers who rant about the conspiratorial left wing, a wing that is far too fractured and complex to execute a successful presidential campaign, let alone a national election fraud conspiracy — paved the way for his demagoguery by launching an informational assault on the American people. Of all the news networks, only Fox News will tell you what “the left” “wants.” The initial intent, of course, was to steer these simple people into the waiting arms of purportedly pro-life, purportedly pro-gun, purportedly pro-Christian politicians who would continue tilting the field of play toward the most vicious of capitalists. Sure, the average farmer pays more in taxes than the average Fortune 500 company, but at least you have your guns. Trump saw that this strategy was more popular than the moderated version of Republicanism that made its way to debate stages. Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, John McCain? These were reasonable people, and the frothing victims of talk-show hypnosis were not. Rather than translate their anger into something palatable, something that democrats could maybe accept losing to, Trump decided to just cater to that crowd. He has built the entire plane out of that indestructible black-box base of angry white lower-middle class people. Trump sucker-punched America with his election win in 2016. People stood up and defeated him in 2020 because they realized how vulnerable America actually was. The narrative is actually pretty simple.

Trump holds rallies for people to allow them to come together and feel accepted and not unreasonable. The democrats do not. Trump has either provided for, allowed for, or solicited an army of social media deepfakes to spread radical views on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms to give the impression that more people hold his views than truly do. The democrats have not. Trump has learned that the 24-hour news cycle processes too fast to detect and punish hypocrisy, and so he doesn’t bother with integrity and consistency. The democrats do. Trump has conceded the moral high-ground because he realized, somehow he most completely out of anyone, that the moral high-ground is figurative. It doesn’t exist, not here, in a country so steeped in white supremacy. The only high-ground to gain is convincing yourself you’ve never done anything wrong. That is the America of our history courses and military parades and national heroism fables. That ground will get you somewhere.

This party is almost over. The coup is failing. Eventually, Republicans will reckon with the fact that Trump had four years in office, was limited in what he could do, and was ousted by a democratic majority (in the popular vote for the 2nd time, and the Electoral College — which absolutely must be abolished — for the first time). We will have a democratic (and Democratic) president. These people’s lives are likely to improve as social programs provide a measure of relief from the economic disaster we’ve found ourselves in, which partisan Republicans seem loathe to do anything about without an avenue to forward the interests of the richest, most comfortable Americans.

President-elect Joe Biden seems intent on unifying the country, or rather, convincing the country to unify itself. And while that’s a noble thought, it’s utterly worthless without an infrastructure for making it happen. How do you de-hypnotize people in Middle America who have been convinced through years of nights listening to the jeers of conservative preachers who claim the Left Agenda to Promote Socialism and Communism is nigh? A casual conversation can’t do that. A moment of community can’t do that. Wajahat Ali’s column in the New York Times expresses the futility of a grassroots movement to connect with the other side. When you try to talk to these people, these Trump-supporting God-fearing Americans, they will be decent with you. They will be nice. They will be human. But they won’t listen to that. They’ll assure themselves that you’re just misinformed about certain things, that maybe you have a good heart but you are naive and don’t see the deep-state conspiracy for what it is, as it’s been laid out so plainly by Tucker Carlson and friends. The right-wing media ecosystem is unrelenting and unforgiving. It has caused the beliefs of millions of Americans to skew into fringe territory, all for the purpose of increasing the wealth of rich Americans (by mobilizing a broad base under a decoy agenda that they’ve co-opted to de-regulate and cut taxes).

It’s not on us to help those folks. It’s on them. They’ll have to realize that Donald Trump is a liar. He says he won the election. He didn’t. That referendum is coming. Maybe it’ll open doors to doubt in the right-wing media machine that has nurtured and protected the radical president. For most people, it won’t. Someone will think of a clever explanation, and they’ll move on to the next bogeyman. They’ll have something to attack again, and they’ll forget that they spent four years defending a wizard who wound up capable of giving them nothing at all. Until we come up with a plan to dismantle the media machine (which, for what it’s worth, would allow the supposedly liberal media outlets like CNN to better assert their objectivity), we will keep living in a world where things like healthcare, education, and literally saving the planet are demonized and made to seem irrational. The post-Internet world has been said to have entered the “information age.” We are beginning to realize what that means. When we are saturated with information, we lose the ability to process and decode what information matters, what information is true, and what information makes us feel good for long enough to ignore the difference.