Republican Conspiracism Is Hurting America

Today America faces a real prospect that the extreme lunatics withing the House Republican caucus will block raising the debt ceiling, cause a government shut down and a default on America's federal debt.  The consequences would be extreme: a collapse of the stock market - wiping out Americans; retirement accounts and savings - soaring mortgage rates and inflation, and perhaps a global economic meltdown.  In the Republican Party of old, these extremists would never have been empowered to cause such damage and most woud have been blocked from ever gaining the party's nomination. Yet to win the speakership Kevin McCarthy sold his soul and place these nutcases in positions to wreak havoc on the country.  Frighteningly, many in the GOP base are cheering the insanity which exposes a dangerous truth: the GOP is now a party of conspiracy theorists and their followers.  Indeed, objective reality has been throw aside and the more insane the fabricated conspiracy, the more it appeals to many in the party base.  Meanwhile, Republican officials either believe the insanity themselves or are afraid to confront their party base. A piece in The Atlantic looks at this frightening and dangerous situation that now plagues America and threatens the rest of the world.  Here are excerpts:

As an American living in Britain for the past decade, I’ve had a front-row seat to two dysfunctional democracies hell-bent on embarrassing themselves. President Donald Trump warned that a hurricane was “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.” Prime Minister Liz Truss failed to outlast a lettuce at Downing Street. These years have not inspired confidence in democracy.

In Britain and the United States—and across most faltering Western democracies—this democratic dysfunction is routinely chalked up to a catchall culprit: polarization. The reason our democracies are decaying, we’re often told, is that we’re more divided than ever before. And that’s true: Polarization is worsening. Debates over Brexit and Trump tore citizenries—and families—apart.

But Britain’s and America’s democratic woes are not at all the same. The problems in American democracy are worse. That’s because a particularly insidious disease has infected the core of its political system, one that is not present to the same degree in other rich democracies: extreme conspiracism. Other countries, including the U.K., have polarization. America has irrational polarization, in which one political party has fallen under the spell of conspiratorial thinking. Polarization plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral. The battle for American democracy will be a battle over reality.

Within the modern GOP, conspiracy theories—about stolen elections, satanic cults, or “deep state” cover-ups—have replaced policy ideas as a rallying cry for Trump’s MAGA base. . . . They rattle off their accepted wisdom about conspiracies that most people have never heard of, such as “Italygate,” the absurd notion that the U.S. embassy in Rome, in conjunction with the Vatican, used satellites to rig the 2020 presidential election.

In Britain, far fewer people believe in conspiracy theories. According to YouGov polling, a third of Americans believe that a small group of people secretly runs the world, while just 18 percent believe the same in the United Kingdom. Similarly, 9 percent of Americans think COVID-19 is a fake disease. In Britain, that figure is just 3 percent. Seventeen percent of Americans agree with the statement that “a secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles has taken control of parts of the U.S. Government and mainstream U.S. media . . . .

What’s really troubling about this political moment in America, though, is not merely the spread of conspiratorial thinking in the general population. It’s also that the delusions have infected the mainstream political leadership. The crackpots have come to Congress.

When Kevin McCarthy finally became speaker of the House this week, one of the first photos to circulate was a selfie taken with Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former QAnon believer who once blamed a wildfire on Jewish space lasers.

Writing a similar sentence about modern British politics would be impossible. There’s just nothing like it. Instead, in Britain, conspiracy theorists are ostracized by the political establishment. Politicians may disagree about policy, but those who disagree about reality face real consequences.

Last week, for instance, Andrew Bridgen, a conservative member of the British Parliament, tweeted a graph from a conspiracy-theory website, spreading false information about the risks of COVID vaccines. . . . . The response was swift. Bridgen was condemned across the political spectrum. His own party expelled him. The Tories, Britain’s ruling conservative political party, didn’t want to be associated with a conspiracy theorist.

Meanwhile, America’s political right is the leading global source of COVID conspiracy theories. The more outlandish, the better. . . . . Republican State Representative Jennifer Gross compared mandatory vaccination to the Holocaust. Then Gross went much further. She effusively praised the testimony of a quack expert who claimed that vaccines magnetize people, such that spoons will stick to your forehead following a shot. . . . . Gross faced no primary challenger and was recently reelected, with 64 percent of the vote.

Rather than getting expelled from the Republican Party or becoming pariahs on the right, conspiracy theorists have become GOP stars. Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and a former top intelligence official, has falsely suggested that COVID-19 was created by George Soros, Bill Gates, and the World Health Organization . . . . Flynn should be an irrelevant laughingstock. Instead, he’s headlining right-wing conferences and commanding huge audiences.

All humans of all political persuasions are susceptible to conspiracy theories. Millions of Americans, on the political left and the political right, believe in them. But conspiratorial thinking is thriving especially on the right because it’s sanctioned, and endorsed, from above.

This asymmetrical conspiracism has been going on for a while now. The historian Richard Hofstadter noted how “the paranoid style” took root on the right in the mid-20th century, starting with McCarthyism and continuing  through Barry Goldwater’s rise in 1964, shortly after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In the past decade, conspiratorial thinking has shifted from a worrying factor in Republican politics to a defining feature. . . . As Trump took over the party, his conspiratorial lies became Republican orthodoxy. And that opened the door to conspiratorial influencers, who started inventing new lies.

Deranged grifters profit from what the writer Kurt Andersen has called the “fantasy-industrial complex,” in which media provocateurs, including Infowars and Fox News, have cashed in on political messaging defined by a conspiratorial mindset.

They prey on susceptible individuals, particularly those who are lonely and bored, browsing alone, and finding online communities to replace real-world ones. . . . . To solve a problem, you first must agree it exists. Democracy therefore requires a shared sense of reality. Instead, America has splintered into a choose-your-own-reality society, in which citizens self-select into whatever version of the world they want to inhabit, reflected back at them by media outlets that earn most when they challenge worldviews least. Conversely, in Britain, the BBC continues to dominate broadcast-media market share, and outlets that push conspiracy theories have tiny audiences.

On January 6, 2021, thousands of deluded insurrectionists attacked the Capitol because of lies spread by Trump and his acolytes. But the bigger problem was inside the ranks of Congress itself, as most House Republicans voted not to certify the election based on those debunked theories. These were the conspiratorial insurrectionists in suits—and they’re now in charge of the House of Representatives. . . . . Governing will be put on hold for two years.

Until modern Republican politics stops systematically empowering crackpots, America’s democratic dysfunction cannot be considered equivalent to the mere polarization that exists in peer countries such as Britain. In Britain, the political system is broken in ways that are more easily fixed. When reality shifts, people change their minds—and someone as incompetent as Liz Truss gets booted from office in just 42 days.

Be very, very afraid of where these GOP lunatics will take the nation.  They are a clear and present danger.