Over the past four years it’s become apparent from my social media feed and some other personal interactions that many of the people I knew in high school have evolved into far different people than the ones I knew when I was sixteen. Or perhaps, more precisely, their political persuasions have taken a direction that I have trouble fathoming given what I knew—or thought I knew—about them, long ago in that “previous” life. Physically, they’re pretty much the same, but what’s inside their heads seems to have changed quite a bit.
I don’t live in the town I grew up in anymore, but I’ve gone back a few times recently to visit, most notably prior to the 2020 election. Coming from a fairly cosmopolitan area it was a bit of a culture shock to see the ubiquity of vehement, in-your-face, pro-Trump sentiment on display. This after the COVID-19 pandemic had already killed about 250,000 people, and while most of the state was still in lockdown. There were a few Biden/Harris signs up (more than I ever saw for Hillary in 2016) but the overall feeling was that my hometown area was now solidly Trump country. I shouldn’t have been that surprised, given what I’d seen in 2016, and what I’d seen since then from my former classmates on social media. But it was still unsettling.
Between then and now a lot has happened: Biden won the election, Trump didn’t concede, and we witnessed the entire “stolen election” debacle unfold, culminating in the shocking, can’t-be-unseen events of Jan. 6. Now, in June, I’m looking for some indication that any of these things had registered with my former high school class, specifically the ones who stuck around my hometown area all their lives. But nothing has changed. It’s still Trump, Trump, Trump, and more bullshit: COVID-hoax bullshit, anti-Kamala Harris bullshit, and stolen-election bullshit.
We have a reunion coming up in a couple weeks, but I honestly can’t get myself interested in going.
One of the more disturbing aspects about living through these profoundly strange times is seeing the extent to which millions of otherwise competent Americans willingly succumb to objectively outlandish right-wing propaganda. The most telling example of this was best demonstrated by the depressing spectacle of 70 million American voters so completely, thoroughly enthralled with Trump that they still believed (and believe to this day) another four years under his auspices would have been a swell thing for this country. This after the most deadly instance of domestic malfeasance in the nation’s history: Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed 600,000 Americans to date.
But as we now know, the mass delusion (or more charitably, “denial of reality”) that metastasized for a huge chunk of the American electorate didn’t end with Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020. Instead, as the pandemic has waned, they’ve simply gravitated to another lie, the so-called “Big Lie” that the previous election itself was somehow fraudulent and stolen. Without missing a beat, millions of those same Americans have, nearly in lockstep, seamlessly adopted this new lie as the gospel truth.
And lately many of those have bought into another less important but equally ludicrous lie for good measure, the idea that the teaching of critical race theory, a rather obscure field of study normally limited to political science and Black studies programs in universities and law schools, somehow constitutes an existential threat to the Republic. It makes no difference that the vast majority of Republicans who ascribe to this newest lie could not even coherently explain what critical race theory actually is.
There are plenty of scholarly analyses that explain the insidious attraction of this type of propaganda. Of course, a polarized media landscape with most Republican voters taking their cues from a single, monolithic source—Fox News—ranks near the top of those explanations (it is not pointed out enough, for example, that the entire Trump administration was, in practical effect, simply “government by Fox News”). The fragmenting of reliable news sources by social media that allows Americans to, in essence, choose their own news conveniently aligned with their prejudices and preconceptions is also hugely responsible.
We now see this distortion of our public discourse intruding, sometimes violently, on established norms of decency and civility; and we see its corrosive effect in our country’s institutions, as the gears of our government grind to a standstill under the onslaught of an endless barrage of polarizing propaganda, nearly all of it emanating from the right, chiefly by Fox News, with results to match.
The fact that this stream of inflammatory right-wing fiction now motivates vast numbers of Americans to countenance violence against their fellow citizens ought to make it the most pressing issue of our time, especially since its tentacles have now invaded the most critical aspect of American society: our aspirations as a fair and functioning democracy. Climate change may be a far more over-arching, existential threat but climate change can only be combated by a citizenry that resolves to cooperate in fighting it. It can’t be effectively addressed by a society riven by the threat of propaganda-fueled violence and stuck in endless cycles of induced polarization.
The Americans who subscribe to this right-wing tripe and cast their votes based on it have already demonstrated they’re willing to believe a criminally incompetent person should again be placed at the pinnacle of American power, despite his lethal litany of failures. They’ve shown themselves willing to believe preposterous, self-contradictory statements about the 2020 election, not because those lies have any logical grounding but simply because they fit in with their own comfortable preconceptions. Their elected representatives have shown themselves not only willing but eager to use these lies to disenfranchise as many Americans as possible in their efforts to retain power. Worse, they have the wholehearted support of their constituents in doing so.
We see these same propagandized individuals now harassing and threatening election officials, school boards, teachers, and their own representatives in Congress, robotically mouthing pure propaganda as if it had some relationship to truth. And we see the people they vote for—who presumably know better—parroting these lies as well to achieve their policy goals. This slavish fealty to propaganda now incorporates the threat of outright violence. Jan. 6 was the most extreme
Trump supporters on Jan. 6
example of this to date, but the right’s embrace of violent rhetoric to further its propaganda-fueled grievances is now a routine feature of our politics, having been established as acceptable by Donald Trump from the early days of his 2016 campaign. Through constant repetition and by example, threatening violence is now viewed as a legitimate means for those on the right to achieve what they want. And almost all of that violence, implicit or explicit, is directed at people of color, Democrats, and liberals.
As Mark Danner, writing for the New York Review of Books, recently observed, this country has arrived at an inflection point, one in which a single spark could immediately inflame millions, thanks to the prevalence and ubiquity of right-wing propaganda:
The right-wing media machine is already laying the groundwork for turning that spark into a conflagration. They’ve found through careful trial and error, by pushing the boundaries at every opportunity, that they can get away with advocating violence, if they simply couch it in legally defensible language. But the import of what they say is not lost on their audience. At this point, all it takes is a meme, a click or two of carefully generated outrage, and a designated target, and they have a whole population that has shown itself willing to nod vigorously in approval, primed and ready to respond.
But it isn’t only the constant “delegitimizing” of liberals and Democrats through Fox News and right-wing social media that threatens to evoke that violent response. While dehumanizing rhetoric has historically been blamed for leading to murderous, even genocidal impulses—in the Third Reich and Rwanda, for example—among populations targeted by such media, another equally, and possibly more important element is simple peer pressure.
Aliza Luft, an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, points out that although the popular perception of genocidal actions committed by private citizens typically attributes such actions to media influence and political demagoguery, what really occurred in Nazi Germany (and much later, for example, in Rwanda) was a combination of such rhetoric with the overwhelming desire to be accepted by one’s social peers. She cites the work of historian Christopher Browning, who in 2018 cannily predicted how the advent of a conservative “information bubble” would play out during the Trump administration as a result of the prevalence and dominance of Fox News. In an essay titled “The Suffocation of Democracy” for the New York Review of Books, Browning convincingly compares the relative functions of the Nazis’ Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, instituted by Josef Goebbels, to the function and tactics of Fox News, Trump’s primary media mouthpiece during his administration.
In an article written for the Social Science Research Council, titled “Dehumanization and the Normalization of Violence: It’s Not What You Think,” Luft notes that Browning’s and others’ prior work in examining the motivations of so-called “ordinary” Germans in perpetrating atrocities toward Jews and other targeted minorities in the Nazi state underscored the key role that social pressure toward conformity played in prompting what ultimately turned out to be genocide:
Luft’s point is that it’s not simply propaganda saturation, but also the role of these “hierarchical pressures” that cannot be discounted in examining why so many people respond to propaganda the way they do.
Which brings me back to my high school reunion.
First, I have a pretty good guess why most of these people voted for Trump in 2016, and why most if not all of them voted for him in 2020. Racism is certainly a factor, but I suspect for many of them their reasons had less to do with racism than abortion. Republicans otherwise possessed of their senses simply made the determination that no matter how bad Trump was as a human being—and many of them are perfectly aware of how awful he was—nothing outweighed his hard-line position against a woman’s right to choose. It didn’t matter at all that Trump’s attitude toward abortion was completely opportunistic and that in reality he couldn’t have cared less about the issue.
Beyond that, though, there is the huge element of peer pressure that comes from living in a relatively conservative area. Their social relationships are now wedded to toeing this line, and a break from that line risks being cast out of the club. Many of the men in particular are socially conditioned by friends and family alike into believing that voting for a Democrat is somehow “unmanly.” None of these sentiments are particularly novel for Republicans; it’s simply how their thought processes work. And if that was all that was going on, I could chalk up our differences to politics, chug a few beers with them, and talk about other things.
But at this point, for me anyway, their rationale for voting the way they do is just a secondary issue. It’s the continued support for a transparent lie to try to negate the fact that their guy lost, that their viewpoint didn’t prevail—and the fact that they’re willing to ratify the Republican Party’s efforts to undermine our democratic institutions in furtherance of that lie—that effectively overshadows any respect, regard, or interest I have in exploring our so-called commonality. Whether that’s because they were too invested in whatever their pet issue was, whether it was their inability to resist the propaganda, in the end it makes little difference, because I’m not seeing any change of heart. In fact, it seems to be getting worse.
The idea that the election was “stolen” is not simply an absurdity—it’s an insult to all the people who worked to get Joe Biden elected, those who worked the polls and the subsequent ballot counts and challenges. It’s an insult to everyone I know who voted for the Biden/Harris ticket. And it’s not only an insult, it’s an attempt to repudiate and erase the legitimacy of our vote, and the reasons that we voted the way we did. Just like the voter suppression laws they champion, it disregards us as human beings. That’s what all this “voter fraud” and ”stolen election” nonsense ultimately amounts to, even if many Republicans don’t consciously perceive it that way.
On top of that, it’s stupid and dangerous. Their representatives—the people many of these high school friends voted for—are literally taking the steps to dismantle our democracy, using this violent propaganda and rhetoric as cover. Do I think that my old classmates will suddenly go full-on ballistic and start hunting down or rounding up Democrats door-to-door, like Rwanda? No. There are still enough social, legal, and professional cues and consequences in place to would make that unlikely. But the easy willingness of many of them thus far to eagerly buy into these violence-tinged narratives is disturbing enough to me that I’m not exactly inspired to spend time with them, even if it’s just to socialize for a couple of hours.
One of the most striking features of this post-election time period has been an utter silence among ordinary Republican voters as their representatives in state legislatures methodically proceed to disenfranchise their fellow Americans. There has been zero outcry among these people, zero protest, zero condemnation of these efforts. Only silence. At some point you realize that this silence is nothing but complicity. They’re silent because they approve of it.
And then you wonder: if they’re silent about this, what else will they be silent about?
I don’t live in the town I grew up in anymore, but I’ve gone back a few times recently to visit, most notably prior to the 2020 election. Coming from a fairly cosmopolitan area it was a bit of a culture shock to see the ubiquity of vehement, in-your-face, pro-Trump sentiment on display. This after the COVID-19 pandemic had already killed about 250,000 people, and while most of the state was still in lockdown. There were a few Biden/Harris signs up (more than I ever saw for Hillary in 2016) but the overall feeling was that my hometown area was now solidly Trump country. I shouldn’t have been that surprised, given what I’d seen in 2016, and what I’d seen since then from my former classmates on social media. But it was still unsettling.
Between then and now a lot has happened: Biden won the election, Trump didn’t concede, and we witnessed the entire “stolen election” debacle unfold, culminating in the shocking, can’t-be-unseen events of Jan. 6. Now, in June, I’m looking for some indication that any of these things had registered with my former high school class, specifically the ones who stuck around my hometown area all their lives. But nothing has changed. It’s still Trump, Trump, Trump, and more bullshit: COVID-hoax bullshit, anti-Kamala Harris bullshit, and stolen-election bullshit.
We have a reunion coming up in a couple weeks, but I honestly can’t get myself interested in going.
One of the more disturbing aspects about living through these profoundly strange times is seeing the extent to which millions of otherwise competent Americans willingly succumb to objectively outlandish right-wing propaganda. The most telling example of this was best demonstrated by the depressing spectacle of 70 million American voters so completely, thoroughly enthralled with Trump that they still believed (and believe to this day) another four years under his auspices would have been a swell thing for this country. This after the most deadly instance of domestic malfeasance in the nation’s history: Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed 600,000 Americans to date.
But as we now know, the mass delusion (or more charitably, “denial of reality”) that metastasized for a huge chunk of the American electorate didn’t end with Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020. Instead, as the pandemic has waned, they’ve simply gravitated to another lie, the so-called “Big Lie” that the previous election itself was somehow fraudulent and stolen. Without missing a beat, millions of those same Americans have, nearly in lockstep, seamlessly adopted this new lie as the gospel truth.
And lately many of those have bought into another less important but equally ludicrous lie for good measure, the idea that the teaching of critical race theory, a rather obscure field of study normally limited to political science and Black studies programs in universities and law schools, somehow constitutes an existential threat to the Republic. It makes no difference that the vast majority of Republicans who ascribe to this newest lie could not even coherently explain what critical race theory actually is.
There are plenty of scholarly analyses that explain the insidious attraction of this type of propaganda. Of course, a polarized media landscape with most Republican voters taking their cues from a single, monolithic source—Fox News—ranks near the top of those explanations (it is not pointed out enough, for example, that the entire Trump administration was, in practical effect, simply “government by Fox News”). The fragmenting of reliable news sources by social media that allows Americans to, in essence, choose their own news conveniently aligned with their prejudices and preconceptions is also hugely responsible.
We now see this distortion of our public discourse intruding, sometimes violently, on established norms of decency and civility; and we see its corrosive effect in our country’s institutions, as the gears of our government grind to a standstill under the onslaught of an endless barrage of polarizing propaganda, nearly all of it emanating from the right, chiefly by Fox News, with results to match.
The fact that this stream of inflammatory right-wing fiction now motivates vast numbers of Americans to countenance violence against their fellow citizens ought to make it the most pressing issue of our time, especially since its tentacles have now invaded the most critical aspect of American society: our aspirations as a fair and functioning democracy. Climate change may be a far more over-arching, existential threat but climate change can only be combated by a citizenry that resolves to cooperate in fighting it. It can’t be effectively addressed by a society riven by the threat of propaganda-fueled violence and stuck in endless cycles of induced polarization.
The Americans who subscribe to this right-wing tripe and cast their votes based on it have already demonstrated they’re willing to believe a criminally incompetent person should again be placed at the pinnacle of American power, despite his lethal litany of failures. They’ve shown themselves willing to believe preposterous, self-contradictory statements about the 2020 election, not because those lies have any logical grounding but simply because they fit in with their own comfortable preconceptions. Their elected representatives have shown themselves not only willing but eager to use these lies to disenfranchise as many Americans as possible in their efforts to retain power. Worse, they have the wholehearted support of their constituents in doing so.
We see these same propagandized individuals now harassing and threatening election officials, school boards, teachers, and their own representatives in Congress, robotically mouthing pure propaganda as if it had some relationship to truth. And we see the people they vote for—who presumably know better—parroting these lies as well to achieve their policy goals. This slavish fealty to propaganda now incorporates the threat of outright violence. Jan. 6 was the most extreme
Trump supporters on Jan. 6
example of this to date, but the right’s embrace of violent rhetoric to further its propaganda-fueled grievances is now a routine feature of our politics, having been established as acceptable by Donald Trump from the early days of his 2016 campaign. Through constant repetition and by example, threatening violence is now viewed as a legitimate means for those on the right to achieve what they want. And almost all of that violence, implicit or explicit, is directed at people of color, Democrats, and liberals.
As Mark Danner, writing for the New York Review of Books, recently observed, this country has arrived at an inflection point, one in which a single spark could immediately inflame millions, thanks to the prevalence and ubiquity of right-wing propaganda:
The right-wing media machine is already laying the groundwork for turning that spark into a conflagration. They’ve found through careful trial and error, by pushing the boundaries at every opportunity, that they can get away with advocating violence, if they simply couch it in legally defensible language. But the import of what they say is not lost on their audience. At this point, all it takes is a meme, a click or two of carefully generated outrage, and a designated target, and they have a whole population that has shown itself willing to nod vigorously in approval, primed and ready to respond.
But it isn’t only the constant “delegitimizing” of liberals and Democrats through Fox News and right-wing social media that threatens to evoke that violent response. While dehumanizing rhetoric has historically been blamed for leading to murderous, even genocidal impulses—in the Third Reich and Rwanda, for example—among populations targeted by such media, another equally, and possibly more important element is simple peer pressure.
Aliza Luft, an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, points out that although the popular perception of genocidal actions committed by private citizens typically attributes such actions to media influence and political demagoguery, what really occurred in Nazi Germany (and much later, for example, in Rwanda) was a combination of such rhetoric with the overwhelming desire to be accepted by one’s social peers. She cites the work of historian Christopher Browning, who in 2018 cannily predicted how the advent of a conservative “information bubble” would play out during the Trump administration as a result of the prevalence and dominance of Fox News. In an essay titled “The Suffocation of Democracy” for the New York Review of Books, Browning convincingly compares the relative functions of the Nazis’ Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, instituted by Josef Goebbels, to the function and tactics of Fox News, Trump’s primary media mouthpiece during his administration.
In an article written for the Social Science Research Council, titled “Dehumanization and the Normalization of Violence: It’s Not What You Think,” Luft notes that Browning’s and others’ prior work in examining the motivations of so-called “ordinary” Germans in perpetrating atrocities toward Jews and other targeted minorities in the Nazi state underscored the key role that social pressure toward conformity played in prompting what ultimately turned out to be genocide:
Luft’s point is that it’s not simply propaganda saturation, but also the role of these “hierarchical pressures” that cannot be discounted in examining why so many people respond to propaganda the way they do.
Which brings me back to my high school reunion.
First, I have a pretty good guess why most of these people voted for Trump in 2016, and why most if not all of them voted for him in 2020. Racism is certainly a factor, but I suspect for many of them their reasons had less to do with racism than abortion. Republicans otherwise possessed of their senses simply made the determination that no matter how bad Trump was as a human being—and many of them are perfectly aware of how awful he was—nothing outweighed his hard-line position against a woman’s right to choose. It didn’t matter at all that Trump’s attitude toward abortion was completely opportunistic and that in reality he couldn’t have cared less about the issue.
Beyond that, though, there is the huge element of peer pressure that comes from living in a relatively conservative area. Their social relationships are now wedded to toeing this line, and a break from that line risks being cast out of the club. Many of the men in particular are socially conditioned by friends and family alike into believing that voting for a Democrat is somehow “unmanly.” None of these sentiments are particularly novel for Republicans; it’s simply how their thought processes work. And if that was all that was going on, I could chalk up our differences to politics, chug a few beers with them, and talk about other things.
But at this point, for me anyway, their rationale for voting the way they do is just a secondary issue. It’s the continued support for a transparent lie to try to negate the fact that their guy lost, that their viewpoint didn’t prevail—and the fact that they’re willing to ratify the Republican Party’s efforts to undermine our democratic institutions in furtherance of that lie—that effectively overshadows any respect, regard, or interest I have in exploring our so-called commonality. Whether that’s because they were too invested in whatever their pet issue was, whether it was their inability to resist the propaganda, in the end it makes little difference, because I’m not seeing any change of heart. In fact, it seems to be getting worse.
The idea that the election was “stolen” is not simply an absurdity—it’s an insult to all the people who worked to get Joe Biden elected, those who worked the polls and the subsequent ballot counts and challenges. It’s an insult to everyone I know who voted for the Biden/Harris ticket. And it’s not only an insult, it’s an attempt to repudiate and erase the legitimacy of our vote, and the reasons that we voted the way we did. Just like the voter suppression laws they champion, it disregards us as human beings. That’s what all this “voter fraud” and ”stolen election” nonsense ultimately amounts to, even if many Republicans don’t consciously perceive it that way.
On top of that, it’s stupid and dangerous. Their representatives—the people many of these high school friends voted for—are literally taking the steps to dismantle our democracy, using this violent propaganda and rhetoric as cover. Do I think that my old classmates will suddenly go full-on ballistic and start hunting down or rounding up Democrats door-to-door, like Rwanda? No. There are still enough social, legal, and professional cues and consequences in place to would make that unlikely. But the easy willingness of many of them thus far to eagerly buy into these violence-tinged narratives is disturbing enough to me that I’m not exactly inspired to spend time with them, even if it’s just to socialize for a couple of hours.
One of the most striking features of this post-election time period has been an utter silence among ordinary Republican voters as their representatives in state legislatures methodically proceed to disenfranchise their fellow Americans. There has been zero outcry among these people, zero protest, zero condemnation of these efforts. Only silence. At some point you realize that this silence is nothing but complicity. They’re silent because they approve of it.
And then you wonder: if they’re silent about this, what else will they be silent about?