From Thomas Edsall's column a few weeks ago:
Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captured the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”
Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits
a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power
against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”
“One of those two candidates,” Klaas noted, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: It’s somehow not the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges.)”
Klaas asked:
What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?
How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II(which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?
In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he called the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”
I think there is something to the banality of crazy idea, but I don't think this is the MSM's fault in the way that Klass does. There's plenty of anti-Trump stuff in the MSM. The problem lies in that Red America does not trust the MSM. So, for instance, nobody in Red America is going to read Edsall's column because it appears in the NY Times--Red America trusts the NY Times about as much as Blue America trusts Fox News.
And so because there is no shared trusted media source, there can be no shared sense of reality. When there's no shared sense of reality, people believe whoever tells them what they already believe or want to believe. It doesn't matter how detached from Reality it gets because there's no foundation in reality against which nonsense can be contrasted. You believe whom you trust. When everybody one knows and trusts believes nonsense, how can they all be wrong?
I think the basic trust dynamic works the same on the Left as it does on the Right. The difference lies in that the media that the Right consume are largely nonsense, and the media those on the Left consume mostly meet traditional journalistic standards. That doesn't mean that there's no bias in the Liberal media. But the bias lies in the interpretation of the facts not in the fabrication of them. It's been proved time and again that Right media has utterly flouted journalistic standards in its willingness to report nonsense. But that's not reported in the Right media, so the consumers of Right media remain shielded from those facts.
For this reason, I think that anybody coming from Mars who objectively observed the beliefs and behaviors of those on the Right and Left would see clearly that those on the Right are more detached from Reality than those on the Left. You don't find thousands of people on the Left showing up in Dealey Plaza expecting the return of JFK or believing anything like Qanon conspiracy theories or joining plots to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer. There is a cargo-cult quality in what's going on in Red America to which nothing corresponds in Blue America.
When people believe something that is fundamentally untrue, deep down they know it's untrue, but they don't want to face it.Their sense of meaning, purpose, and identity largely derive from believing nonsense, and there is a very real terror associated with learning that they've accepted nonsense as reality. It would be humiliating and identity-shattering to have to face this.
Driven by this fear of humiliation and identity loss, they must resist any information that might lead to the unraveling of their nonsense-based beliefs. It becomes virtually impossible to entertain facts that might prove them wrong, so they double down, and in some cases adopt violent means of resistance to reality rather than to face it and be corrected by it.
Fanaticism and extremism in the service of nonsense become signs of being a truth-teller, and because the fervor of fanatics is respected by the less fervid, the fanatics rise into positions of leadership. Then a competition to out-fanatic the other arises among those who seek leadership and power. Moderation and sanity become signs of weakness. Then the fanatical leaders demand proof of loyalty and commitment from the less fervid. Willingness to break the law or commits act of violence becomes the test of one's belief. Are you with us or against us? Prove it by joining us in our plot to kidnap Grethcen Whitmer or to storm the Capitol or tamper with voting machines.
This is how it goes--the more fragile one's nonsense-based beliefs, the more one has to double down; the more one doubles down, the more the need to violently resist reality; the more one resists reality; the more fanatical one becomes; the more fanatical one becomes, the more detached from reality--and the more prone to become involved in a militia that's planning acts of domestic terrorism.
The not-yet-radicalized will not go so far, but they will show their commitment to nonsense by voting for the "77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection," etc. It's the least they can do.
So here we are.