Something is wrong with Americans. Many of them, anyway. I’m not even going to get into the Q-anon nuts, even though some people estimate that they may comprise as many as 25% of Trump supporters. No, I’m talking about the fifty million people who believe the 2020 presidential election was “stolen,” “rigged” or otherwise invalid. Does this make them crazy? I’ll make the case that it does.
There’s no credible evidence to suggest it might be true. Maybe they just believe it because the 45th president of the United States told them it was true? Or because right-wing propagandists say so on television? I don’t buy it. I don’t believe that fifty million Americans are so gullible as to believe a baseless cockamamie story so strongly that thousands of them stormed the capitol in the January 6th insurrection.
No, what we have here is a shared fantasy, a case of highly motivated reasoning, or what I’m calling an American psychosis. It’s not a new phenomenon, nor even a uniquely American one. Germany went through a similar time after losing World War One. In their case millions of otherwise rational Germans held the irrational belief that they had only lost the war because of some betrayal of the Weimar Republic and (of course) Jews. According to Wikipedia’s article on the “stab-in-the-back-myth”:
Historian Richard McMasters Hunt argues in a 1958 article that the myth was an irrational belief which commanded the force of irrefutable emotional convictions for millions of Germans. He suggests that behind these myths was a sense of communal shame, not for causing the war, but for losing it. Hunt argues that it was not the guilt of wickedness, but the shame of weakness that seized Germany’s national psychology, and “served as a solvent of the Weimar democracy and also as an ideological cement of Hitler’s dictatorship”.
National trauma leads to widely believed conspiracy theories leads to dictatorship. I think you can see where I’m going here.
But what is the trauma in our case? COVID? The economic collapse that it brought? Yes to all of that, but frankly I believe it has at least as much to do with the biggest elephant in the American room: race.
In fact, I believe the Trump presidency itself is best understood as a direct backlash to having a black family in the White House for eight years. On top of that, we were poised to put a woman in the Oval Office next. These developments and others signaled to many Americans that the social hierarchy they had lived in for their entire lives was changing. The world where white men sit on top of society, white women below, and people of color at the bottom, was under serious threat.
Then throw the Black Lives Matter movement and the George Floyd murder protests on top of all that and you’re looking at some scary shit. At least for some portion of white America.
I hope we don’t follow Germany’s example of trauma leading to conspiracy theories leading to dictatorship, but frankly it all lines up so perfectly that it’s hard to see a more likely outcome.