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Misinformation and Trumpism
Feb. 15th, 2021 12:09 amI was much more disappointed than surprised by the failure of six sevenths of the Senate’s Republicans to choose their duty over their political interests; those Republican Congressmen who voted to impeach, and the Senators who voted to convict, are likely to face primary opposition, and may lose their seats. It is worth noting that while some of the January Sixth insurrectionists may have been hard-core alt-rightists wrapped in the Confederate battle flag, most of them, and surely most Republican primary voters, would see themselves as decent, patriotic Americans opposed to what they believe to be the Democratic theft of the election. This illustrates once again that Voltaire was right: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
What, then, can be done about the unfortunate situation that tens of millions of Americans are living in an alternate reality? The Internet is often blamed, and it is said that when Middle Americans, whatever their views, got their news from Walter Cronkite, and from Time and Newsweek, we did not have this kind of problem.
This seems to me to be true only to a limited extent. Fifty and fifty-five years ago, there were underground newspapers on the Left and segregationist Southern newspapers on the Right; there were books like None Dare Call It Treason, and millions of Americans voted for George Wallace. Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia contains such gems as that, eighty or so years ago, large numbers of Southern whites believed in a vast conspiracy of Negroes (to use the term then current in polite society) to cut their throats; the Negroes were awaiting the word from the leader of the conspiracy, supposedly none other than Eleanor Roosevelt.
One way or another, facts that are not so and opinions outside the mainstream are likely to spread from one person to another. There are no perfect solutions for preventing the spread of lies, and giving the government more power to do so risks the government using its powers to suppress accurate reports of malfeasance in high places. The best we can hope to accomplish is to try to teach habits of critical thought, and to expose young people to historical accounts of pernicious nonsense being spread and believed, as a partial immunization against whatever new absurdities will be spread next month or in twenty years.
I wish I had better answers.
What, then, can be done about the unfortunate situation that tens of millions of Americans are living in an alternate reality? The Internet is often blamed, and it is said that when Middle Americans, whatever their views, got their news from Walter Cronkite, and from Time and Newsweek, we did not have this kind of problem.
This seems to me to be true only to a limited extent. Fifty and fifty-five years ago, there were underground newspapers on the Left and segregationist Southern newspapers on the Right; there were books like None Dare Call It Treason, and millions of Americans voted for George Wallace. Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia contains such gems as that, eighty or so years ago, large numbers of Southern whites believed in a vast conspiracy of Negroes (to use the term then current in polite society) to cut their throats; the Negroes were awaiting the word from the leader of the conspiracy, supposedly none other than Eleanor Roosevelt.
One way or another, facts that are not so and opinions outside the mainstream are likely to spread from one person to another. There are no perfect solutions for preventing the spread of lies, and giving the government more power to do so risks the government using its powers to suppress accurate reports of malfeasance in high places. The best we can hope to accomplish is to try to teach habits of critical thought, and to expose young people to historical accounts of pernicious nonsense being spread and believed, as a partial immunization against whatever new absurdities will be spread next month or in twenty years.
I wish I had better answers.
