JUNE 14, TUESDAY

THE BIG LIE

I have written about this before and am sounding like a broken record. But what I have been thinking about with two hearings about the January 6th insurrection having focused on the Big Lie that Donald Trump and his followers told before and after the election. The Big Lie was that Donald Trump really won the election and only fraud of one kind or another made him lose the election.

But this Big Lie was predicated on what seemed to be a basic truth to half of America. And that was the feeling by half of America that Donald Trump’s assumptions about basic American values were the core values of the United States and that these values were under threat, and because of this it was unthinkable that he could have lost the election. The election was over basic American values and those values had to endure and if they didn’t, if they were threatened by liberal, progressive, socialist, degenerate values that the election process itself must be wrong and corrupt. Only a corrupt elections process could cause Donald Trump and all the basic American values that he believed in to lose. The system must be corrupt.

As I have watched the replay of the hand to hand battle over the Capitol and the ernest and deeply felt feelings of the men wrapped in red, white and blue, I realized that if the election had actually been fraudulent on the part of Dominion voting machines or crooked election administrators finding corrupted ballots, if there really had been basic fraud, those men wearing Trump banners and wrapping themselves in the American flag in their patriotic zeal would have been honored in American history as supremely patriotic defenders of America right up there with defenders of the Alamo or Iwo Jima or any of the battles that we glorify in American history. They were sincere patriots called by their President to defend America, you can see it their assertions that they were saving the country and had to destroy Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi and forces of evil.

And I began to wonder about the Big Lie. The Big Lie at the root of the hearing was not who won the election but who had to have won the election. Were the forces of American greatness going to win or were the Democratic progressive socialists, the rot at the center of America, going to win.

That was what the fight was about.

I am beginning to believe that the Big Lie that really mattered was the Big Lie that Americans have been telling themselves about themselves for 250 years, the Big Lie that up until recently almost all Americans believed and taught in schools and preached on Sunday and honored at football games, the Big Lie that held America together was the Big Lie that Americans are exceptional, different from people in other inferior countries, that it was white Americans, particularly white male Americans that built this country and maintained its greatness, protected it from the threat of first Native Americans, then the threat of southwestern Mexicans, then the threat of enslaved Africans demanding equal rights, then the threat of the feminist sufferage movement and femininist demands for equality and control over their own bodies, then the demands of gays and transgender people for equal rights even though their behavior was intuitively all wrong, then dark skinned immigrants of every kind, then secular intellectual undermining of fundamental Christian beliefs. All of these are threats to the Big Lie that we have told ourselves for 250 years that the only real Americans are white, male, straight, fundamentalist, patriotic Americans. We have believed that big lie, the people who stormed the Capitol believed that big lie, the Republican Party believes that big lie because we have all been telling ourselves that big lie for 250 years. That is the Big Lie that is at the heart of our polarization, those that defend the Big Lie and those who are beginning to doubt the Big Lie either because they are marginalized by the Big Lie or they realize that the Big Lie is being undermined by the realization that we live in a multicultural world in which all people are special and no one is exceptional and that all the ways in which the Big Lie marginalizes people other than white, straight, fundamentalist, patriotic men is harmful to those marginalized people and can’t be sustained in a shrinking world in which the lie cannot be maintained.

The United States is not alone in telling itself the Big Lie. German’s have told themselves the Big Lie, the Brexit English have told themselves the Big Lie, Indians have told themselves the Big Lie, the Chinese have told themselves the Big Lie, the Russians are certainly telling themselves the Big Lie. The Big Lie is based on tribalism and is everywhere that there is nationalism and racism and sexism and religious fundamentalism and blind patriotism. It seems to me that the Big Lie is everywhere and we breathe it in every day and that it is going to take a great effort to rid ourselves of it which many of us are weakly trying to do. The status quo is too comfortable and shifting the way we believe too threatening to our identity for us to shift even incrementally.

But it won’t happen by calling those who believe it stupid or blind because we are all in this boat together and before the ship sinks have to find a way to live together and accept each other.