Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see
I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy
Because I’m easy come, easy go, little high, little low
Any way the wind blows doesn’t really matter to me, to me– Bohemian Rhapsody
I saw an article the other day in New York magazine. The headline was: Trump Is Preying on Low-Information Voters. And, of course, my first reaction was: No shit. Trump has in his thrall a very good chunk of the ignoramus demographic, which is why he fills rally venues and why Jordan Klepper has a career.
“There’s evidence,” writes Ed Gilmore, “that disengaged and/or deeply alienated folks who may nonetheless vote in a presidential election (if not any others) don’t know as much about Trump as you might assume.”
Oh, don’t they? Oh, might I? Here I begin to realize the real problem. It’s not that Kilgore belabors the obvious. It’s that he entirely misses the point. Several points, actually.
First of all, the phenomenon of low-information voters is as old as voting itself. The term, credited to political scientist Samuel Popkin in 1991, is described by researcher Robert Lingley thusly:
Voters who know little about government or how the outcomes of elections might alter government policy … . [They] see little reward in collection and evaluation of new information or consideration of competing issue positions.
But they have feelings, impressions, beliefs and/or simple party affiliations that guide their votes. In 1960, millions of people who voted for John F. Kennedy did so because he was the Democratic candidate. Period. Millions more because he had charisma. Millions more because Nixon looked heavy, bearded, shifty eyed and sweaty in their famous TV debate. And probably some because of the Democrats’ platform of closing the US-USSR missile gap. Lack of citizen rigor? So what else is new?
The second oddity of New York’s big discovery was what apparently triggered it to begin with, a New York Times piece by my old colleague Patrick Healy about a Times focus group. I quote from that:
Our latest Times Opinion focus group discussion with 13 undecided independent voters included a striking result: 11 of the 13 said they would vote for Donald Trump if the election were held now, and only two said they would vote for President Biden. The reason: overwhelming concern about the economy.
Seriously? A focus group? Here’s something I’ve been screaming at the top of my lungs for 39 years: a focus group is not a poll. It yields no data whatsoever. None. Zip. A panel of 13 subjects together in a room is not a population sample; it is a book club. Every now and then somebody will say something yielding an insight worth pursuing, but no focus group has ever represented statistical significance and never will.
The third issue is the underlying premise of divining the thinking of “undecided voters.” I could go on and on about that quixotic exercise, too, but Saturday Night Live beat me to it in 2013. If you do nothing else today, watch this video. The extremely hilarious payoff is that some people literally have no idea about the politics and government happening around them. They are low-information voters because they are too overwhelmed or indifferent to pay attention. Which is pitiful, but has its bright side. For those still identifying as undecided, Trump’s Big Lies, and the tens of thousands of little ones, probably aren’t much on their radar.
So, no, the problem here is not particularly the low-information voter. It is the low-reality voter. They are paying attention, but not to anything backed by evidence or even common sense. Here’s an excerpt from Comedy Central’s roving MAGA ridiculer Klepper.
MAGA Guy: “Donald Trump is president right now.”
Jordan Klepper: “He’s currently the president …”
MAGA Guy: “Absolutely.”
MAGA Woman: “He is still the president. There’s a lot of things this Biden person doesn’t have, like, he doesn’t have the presidential seal and things like that. It’s pretty obvious.”
Klepper: “Biden doesn’t have the presidential seal? When he speaks he has the presidential seal in front of him.”
MAGA Woman: “It’s not real.”
She then explains that Trump runs the military, thanks to an executive order he signed in 2018 — adding that there are two militaries, “a good and a bad.” Trump’s in charge of the good one.
Now there’s your problem: Cult of (extremely bad) personality — and not just the freaks outfitted head to toe in MAGA gear whom Klepper singles out for glorious self-owns, clowns who will in confusion but also dead earnestness hold forth on Democratic pedophiles, “chemtrails” and lizard people. The most entertaining are simply morons, riding the far right not just of politics but also the bell curve.
The nightmare is that the mentality of that lunatic fringe has crept into and taken over the GOP mainstream. Whether Christian zealots, or out-of-the-closet racists and antisemites, or xenophobes, or homophobes or white supremacists just fed up with the incremental erosion of their treasured “traditional values” thanks to woke tyranny from the Magna Carta to women’s suffrage to DEI, they have embraced a sociopath and his liturgy of lies.
They live in denial so enslaving they dismiss his crimes, fictions, fantasies, moral outrages, naked fascism and constant, pathological dishonesty in favor of imagined conspiracies and preposterous accusations. The most jaw-dropping to me, far beyond even Jewish Space Lasers, is the description “Marxist,” which Republicans in Congress and GOP governors routinely call Joe Biden and his fellow Democratic traitors (or Communist, or sometimes Marxist/Communist/Fascist). Say what, DeSantis?
Jesus Christ. Look up Marxist. Really, do none of these teeming assholes even bother to look it up? No. Because they have chosen to seethe in the infuriating, yet deliciously self-validating, plasma of unreality.
– 60% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was illegitimate, no matter the rulings of every court, red-state elections agency and investigative agency scrutinizing it.
– 80% of Republicans believe the prosecutions and lawsuits against Trump are a witch hunt, despite mountains of smoking-gun evidence and court judgments against him.
– 64% of Republicans believe Trump is “a person of faith.”
– 14% of Republicans believe Trump bears a “great deal” or “good amount” of blame for January 6. Note: That is a small percentage. Not that the party is wringing its hands about January 6. About 40% of Republicans believe political violence may be necessary to suppress radical-left tyranny. By the way, they should probably look up “radical-left,” too.
None of these results can be traced to low information. They can be traced only to the most perverse pathologies of grievance, identity and blind devotion, and the willing acceptance of “truths” conflicting not only your own best interests but what you have personally seen with your own eyes. It is exactly the same mechanism as religious faith, which requires you to accept as sacred truth that which contradicts experience and reason.
The differences are that religion 1) forbids the worship of false idols, and 2) at least when used as directed, has an architecture of kindness, generosity and essential humanity.
Versus, you know … revenge.