[I suspect not many people will be convinced by my main point here. I'm writing this more in a spirit of hoping that ten or fifteen years from now, some readers will recall this post and think, "well whaddaya know, he was right."]
Since the election, a common theme on liberal blogs has been, "
How the hell are we going to deprogram these people?" Some large chunk of the US population, evidently in the tens of millions, has been brainwashed into what I call the "fever dream" -- an alternate reality of conspiracy theories, bizarre baseless beliefs, cultish loyalty to Trump, fantasies of armed violence, disdain for science and logic, hostility toward anyone who doesn't subscribe to the alternate reality, and avoidance and rejection of any source of information that contradicts it. The most prominent and consistent feature of the fever dream is a sustained tone of hysteria and paranoia -- it's less a belief system than an
attitude.
Getting so many people out of this state of mind seems impossible. How do you argue with or persuade people who dismiss logic, insist on made-up facts, reject any conflicting source of information as "fake news", believe almost everything outside their own alternate reality is part of some vast evil conspiracy -- and cling to all this with the kind of fanatical passion normally associated with religious cults? Surely it can't be done. Experience shows it's
pointless to try. Many cultists will
abandon and attack even figures they trusted who turn against the fever dream in some way. Some cling to a cherished delusion like "covid-19 is a hoax"
even while dying of it.
But deeply-held beliefs and attitudes, even religious ones,
can change, and surprisingly fast. We've seen it happen. A couple of decades ago the taboo on homosexuality was still deeply entrenched in the US; today it has eroded to such an extent that even gay marriage, once barely imaginable, is now accepted by at least two-thirds of the US population -- even widely accepted in the South. Preachers who still rant against homosexual "sin" are generally seen as fringe bigots similar to the KKK. Twenty years ago "nones", people with no religion, were negligible in numbers in the US and often viewed as weird and suspect. Last time I checked, we've reached 26% of the population and still growing fast -- and in some parts of the country and some social levels, being non-religious is not only accepted but practically the default assumption. (Comparable changes are also happening in seemingly-unpromising places like
the Arab world.)
This is more relevant than you might think. I've argued before that the ultimate roots of the wingnut fever dream mentality are religious. For decades fundies and their ilk have cultivated a disdain for science and evidence and expertise in order to preserve their belief in concepts like creationism, Noah's flood, and a 6,000-year-old Earth which were long ago refuted by science. Once entrenched, that disdain for evidence was easily expanded to reject global warming, the immutability of sexual orientation, and any other unwanted fact, the latest example being the seriousness of the covid-19 pandemic. Rejection of evidence to sustain one irrational belief can and will eventually metastasize to sustain
any irrational belief a person or population cares to embrace. Trump didn't cause or start the fever dream -- most of it has been in place for much longer than five years. It has embraced him because
he embraced
it, calling it out of the shadows by offering it legitimacy and a high-profile voice, stepping into the role of its advocate, its
prophet.
We can't
argue tens of millions of people out of this world-view any more than we argued them out of homophobia or argued a quarter of the population away from religion. People weren't argued
into those things in the first place. Religion and bigotry are mostly imparted in childhood, by parents and community. The wingnut fever dream was built up and inculcated over time by the dank ecosystem of talk radio, Fox News, and far-right internet sites and forums of varying degrees of lunacy. Neither case involved logical persuasion or argument.
I've long observed that political junkies are foolish to disdain mass pop culture. The latter, in one form or another, reaches most of the population, including the substantial majority that doesn't follow politics closely and hardly looks at political news or ads. If you're not familiar with the case I make on this point, please read
this,
this,
this,
this, and
this. The drastic decline of homophobia and religious belief over the last two decades was not mainly caused by people reading and being persuaded by logical arguments against those things. Rather, they were eroded by the steady, subtle, almost subliminal effect of movies, TV, popular music, etc. presenting gay characters as normal and likeable, showing religious extremists and traditional values and prejudices as weird, comical, or menacing, and otherwise depicting a new reality and set of attitudes as an existing default. People naturally absorb their attitudes and values from their cultural environment, and pop culture is so vivid, colorful, and attractive that it can to some extent form a kind of substitute cultural environment, swaying those attitudes and values little by little. Younger people are more malleable to such influences, so the younger generation even in conservative regions of the country has developed more progressive views than their elders, and generational turnover is part of the process of change.
It's a slow process. It has to be subtle, because people react to being preached at by putting their guard up. Any hint of explicit politics or argumentation would kill the effect. It works because pop culture is light, fun, colorful, entertaining, and non-political. And its reach is nearly universal. Fundies and Trumpanzees actively avoid MSNBC, CNN, liberal blogs, or anything else that explicitly reminds them of the reality outside the bubble -- but except for those few who are in literal cults, nearly everyone consumes some kind of pop culture. The global reach and popularity of American (and Japanese) mass culture has even helped foment such changes in attitudes in regions like the Middle East, Latin America, and parts of East Asia.
And the enemy has no power to fight back in kind. The talent and skill are simply not there. Efforts to create a countervailing wingnut pop-culture scene -- "Christian movies", "Christian rock", PureFlix, etc. -- have produced nothing but clunky, preachy embarrassments with no appeal beyond the circle of those who already believe.
I believe the people who create and shape mass culture
know exactly what they're doing and have a fairly consistent agenda, even if there is no overall leadership or coordination. It's not a conspiracy; shared values and aesthetics make a conspiracy unnecessary. Dismantling the wingnut alternate-reality bubble hasn't been a priority, but now that the Trump episode has made clear the magnitude of the danger lurking in the hinterlands, I expect that we'll start to see the same kinds of influences and imagery that have been eroding homophobia and fundamentalism brought to bear against the various delusions and attitudes which comprise that threat. It won't be fast. It won't be obvious. It will hardly be noticeable. But over time -- not with all of them, but with many -- it will work.
