Is the present-day right-winger a product of disinformation poured into an empty vessel? Or does disinformation land on fertilized ground, a type of pre-existing condition that makes its sufferer believe in unbelievable things? Should the distinction matter to the competent half of the citizenry which remains persuadable by reality? No and no. Right-wingers are a threat to all regardless of the source of their affliction. The rest had better accept this; sooner is better.
The proposition that there is a such thing as an empty vessel cannot be true. By the time it reaches adulthood, the human mind will have accumulated two decades of experiences and attitudes — including dents, bruises, and scars — produced by its family and community environments. Its susceptibility to disinformation life will reflect those attitudes and, by extension, define a person’s dealings with others and society at large.
Disinformation, then, affirms a person’s existing views. Repeated and unchallenged public expression gives them credibility. The more often expressed, the more legitimacy disinformation acquires in the eyes of the susceptible who, with rising numbers of the like-minded, find comfort in belonging to something that they are convinced is worthwhile. In some cases (see US Capitol, January 6), it stirs to violent action those already impulsive enough and lacking in the self-restraint essential to the proper functioning of democratic society.
If free expression is the supreme value, how do those still tethered to a fact-based world protect themselves against the potentially lethal intentions of the disinformation-driven? When a survey shows 47 million to believe that the 2020 election was stolen, and 21 millions of them say force is justified to restore Trump to the presidency, is it not suicidal to see them as people who simply have views on another point on the political spectrum?
Assuming it is, what action does the community take to protect itself? It’s small comfort to say that, when violent individuals cross the line between speech and incitement of imminent lawless action, we will rely on law enforcement to protect us. This is too late. It also overlooks mounting evidence that law enforcement is part of the 47 million. Whether that portion makes up a significant-enough element of the 21 million is unknown, but reliance on it to uphold its sworn duties is naïve and based on assumptions less and less justified.
What to do? First, unglamorous a solution as it may be, Democrats must get out the vote in the 2022 mid-terms. Getting 81 million votes was indeed a marvel, but it will be a wasted effort if not sustained for all future elections. Whether the leadership of the Democratic Party is coherent and competent enough to meet the challenge remains, as usual, in doubt. That doubt arises, in part, out of the not unjustified perception of an ossified party leadership preoccupied more with retaining sinecures than coalescing around clearly expressed values and the mundane but vital street-level organizing in order to win.
Second, there must be relentless pressure on the press to stop mischaracterizing the dynamic as a political dispute and the false equivalence with which it is presented. Only one party threatens democratic norms. Only one party nurtures contrived grievances, and does so with thinly-veiled support for its constituents’ threats of violence. Journalists’ preference for the both-sides-do-it narrative to avoid jeopardizing revenue and access cannot be permitted to obscure what has long been clear, never more so than on January 6. We have a duty to register our objection early and often.
We know that at least 74 million Americans confuse fantasy and reality, perhaps an inevitability in a juvenile, entertainment-driven culture. But that they do so willfully in an age of unlimited access to facts points not to a political crisis — and even less to the deluded assertion by virtue-signaling types that the problem is a lack of civility and bipartisanship — but to what is clearly a mental health crisis staggering in scope. Empty vessels or not, these people, many of them armed, are a menace and must be treated accordingly. To counter their malign influence means, for starters, accurately defining them as head cases.
