Run Away Alternative Facts

 

There’s a famous Chinese curse that’s been translated as, “may you live in interesting times.” In reality this Chinese curse seems to be a modern invention, but it’s stuck around because of its seeming wisdom that interesting times often means troubled times. Regardless of the origins of this saying, these are certainly interesting times to be alive. This saying could be applied to a number of the troubles in today’s world, but first and foremost on most people’s mind is the Coronavirus pandemic. The interplay of this virus and Trump’s constant drum beat of alternative facts are playing out in dangerous and ultimately self-defeating ways for both the country and the Republican party.

We’ve learned much about this virus over the last several months and about how it can manifest itself in wildly different ways in different people. Which combinations of symptoms someone gets is inconsistent and there doesn’t seem to be any way of predicting who will have a severe response and who won’t. We continue to learn new and interesting things about this Coronavirus, but in some ways that’s the easy part of the COVID-19 equation. After all, a virus is a physical thing with physical properties that can be studied and understood. 

Where it starts getting really complicated is in the psychological reactions of people to the virus in the age of Trump, the internet and social media. The interplay of these ever-evolving elements has led some people to form bizarre conclusions that are undermining society and may pose as significant of a long-term threat to the nation as the physical suffering that many are currently enduring.

The thing that really inspired this article is the rise of some truly loony conspiracy theories lately. There’s nothing really new about that except they seem to be coming from the Republican establishment now and not just a few people on the fringes of the party. This has been coming on for a while now but being confronted by the harsh reality of COVID-19 seems to have kicked it into hyperdrive. Anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and deep state conspiracists are being combined in new and exciting ways to come up with some Coronavirus conspiracies that boggle the mind. Four years of Trump’s fake news rhetoric has been internalized by many rank and file Republicans so that an anonymous video on YouTube carries the same weight as a CBS News report or Washington Post article.

The problem with this is the modern world is based on trust. Ten thousand years ago most people were either subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers. With a global population of only about 5 million they could largely live independent of a greater society. However, over the last 200 years the world’s population has grown from about 1 billion to over 7 billion. That level of population cannot be supported without a complex interconnected web of relationships grounded in trust. When you go to the grocery store you have to trust that they will have food and that it’s going to be safe to eat. You

have to trust that the police will try to protect you and that paramedics will show up if you have a medical emergency. You have to trust that when you buy a house that it was built to certain standards, that when your doctor gives you a prescription it’s based on a sound medical diagnosis, and when your college professor presents a lesson that’s it’s based on reason and facts. Nearly everything we do is based on layers of trust in our societal norms. Of course, that trust occasionally gets violated and we have to take some precautions to protect ourselves, but without that underlying level of trust, society will stop functioning.

This is where Trump’s constant assault on the media and other societal norms is so insidious. Trump has made it acceptable to disbelieve anything you don’t like or is inconvenient. Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway famously coined the term “alternative facts” which has come to describe non-facts that are more agreeable than actual facts. The White House has distanced itself from the term but has embraced the concept. It’s not just with the news media either, but with any disagreeable fact. The Coronavirus will just disappear in April and May as temperatures warm up, there will be a vaccine by fall, there won’t be a second wave of the virus, with alternative facts you don’t need evidence, just say what you want to believe and boom, you have an alternative fact.

The spreading of false information isn’t exactly a new thing. Fake news has probably been around as long as news, but at least in the modern history of America it’s been primarily limited to the fringes of society. Presidents of both parties might like to focus on the news that puts them in the best light or take the negative coverage and try to reframe it to make themselves look better, but usually the underlying facts are grounded in reality. 

The normalization of alternative facts throughout the Trump administration is causing a significant portion of the American population to start doubting any information coming from traditionally reliable sources. It’s not only mainstream news outlets but NASA, the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, the FBI, the military, university researchers, charitable organizations, basically any organization that might have information that some people would rather not believe. For many followers of Donald Trump, the reliability of a source is based on if they like what it’s saying, not the objective veracity of the information. This is why some will take the word of a YouTuber who makes their money selling dietary supplements more seriously than the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. This is dangerous, not just to the immediate issues surrounding the pandemic, but for the long-term health of our nation.

Up until now Trump has been able to get away with this because there hasn’t been any major crises during his Presidency. There have been instances when Trump’s denial of objective truth has caused issues with Republican lawmakers and other Republican officials, but they’ve been isolated events. However, the current crisis is forcing some of these conflicts into the open. Trump is even frequently at

conflict with himself. He tends to default to the “I’m doing great, there’s no problem, don’t believe the experts mode” when speaking ow the cuff. However, the current situation has forced him to listen to some of the experts to avert a disaster. The result is he often says drastically different things at different times and frequently must be corrected by his own Coronavirus Task Force members.

The dilemma facing many Republican governors is they must make practical policy decisions for the people of their state while also trying to avoid drawing the ire of the President. All this is leading many Republican officials to both downplay the severity of the crisis while also issuing stay at home orders and social distancing measures. They know the potential results of not taking action but are also often facing a majority of Republican voters who believe the right-wing conspiracies that the pandemic is a media creation designed to wreck the economy and undermine Trump’s re-election prospects. Essentially the Republicans have backed themselves into a corner where they’ll anger their base if they acknowledge the danger and take protective measures, but if they don’t take those measures they’ll be condemned for not taking action if the virus spreads and overwhelms the medical system and leaves many dead.

Sometimes you can bullshit your way through a situation, other times reality comes crashing down on you like a ton of bricks. This virus doesn’t care about political niceties or party loyalty, it’s a force of nature that will do what is in its nature to do. The President’s Coronavirus policy has devolved into a confusing morass with many of his supporters buying into his alternative fact based reality. This world of delusion Trump created has spun out of his control with the anti-vaxxer movement taking firm hold despite Trump’s constant nattering about a vaccine being right around the corner. In the short-term Trump and the GOP are likely to be the losers in this storm of confusion they’ve created. But the weakening of the bonds of social cohesion that Trump has set in motion represents the very real beginnings of a downward trajectory of American democracy. It’s not necessarily irreversible, that will depend on the results of this election and how our political leaders from both parties react. Trump’s re-election would be a reward for his behavior, and as we’ve seen before he’ll only be emboldened. If Biden and the Democrats win the landslide victory I expect, it will depend on what happens next. Will the Democrats learn Trump’s lessons of bypassing democratic checks on power and will the Republicans put all their energy into creating a false narrative to explain away their defeat and to undermine the Democrats? If that’s the case, then we’ll likely continue our current downward path. If the Democrats remain committed to government transparency once in power and the Republicans recognize where following Trump’s game plan took them then, perhaps some of the damage of these last four years can be repaired and American democracy can continue to limp forward into the future.