IS A DREAM A LIE IF IT DON'T COME TRUE

Or Is It Something Worse

“A glooming peace this morning with it brings,
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.”

Mark Rothko, 1968 “There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: one day, the black will swallow the red.” Quote is from play Red by John Logan

To get things so wrong. Well, at least I am not alone. Tens of millions of people as well as professional pundits got it wrong as well.

But readers, I apologize for missing the possibility that this would happen.

I was certain that women’s anger over the assault on their rights which had been the driving force for the Democrats since Trump’s first term and his appointment of three Supreme Court Justices to overturn Roe v Wade had only intensified. But I missed out on a countervailing force.

There is no one reason why Trump has won — or why I and so many others felt confident that he would lose — but on this gloomy morning I want to focus on this: the lie he told about the 2020 election being stolen.

Dismissed by those who despise him, its effect on his supporters was clearly galvanizing. Through constant repetition, on-air, in social media, at churches, the lie that Trump really won in 2020 became a truth for them. Over and over during this campaign, prominent Republicans refused to refute the story.

The idea that 2020 was stolen has become a bloodless “Dolchstoss im Rücken”, the “stab in the back” story that motivated early supporters of National Socialism. Then it was the belief that the German Army had not been defeated in World War I but had been sold out by weak civilian leadership and robbed of victory.

For MAGAts Trump, the leader, had been robbed of victory by “them” the elites who control media and the political discourse and his supporters must avenge this corruption of democracy.

Many — most — Democrats saw this election as existential: either the US would remain a democracy or it wouldn’t. MAGA Republicans were using the same words throughout this campaign, this was an election to save democracy. Don’t let “them” steal it again.

The fear about democracy being taken away provided the extra motivation to bring out Trump’s voters in enormous numbers. When he told the lie about the election being stolen he often framed it by boasting he had received more votes than anyone else in history. Almost true. Joe Biden got eight million more. But no Republican had ever won more votes. This time around MAGAts were leaving nothing to chance.

I should have at least included that possibility in assessing who would win. 18 months ago I interviewed Pastor Brian Gibson who runs HIS Church in Owensboro Kentucky. He had preached at the foot of the Capitol on January 5th, as the Stop the Steal mob arrived in Washington DC. We had an amiable conversation but he assured me he knew the election had been stolen. He tried to peddle other lines — anitfa were acting agents provocateurs on January 6th — I didn’t buy that and I don’t think he did either, but his belief in the lie seemed to be sincere.

The first inkling I had that my assumptions were wrong about the election came early last night. I was at the count in Cumming, Georgia for Forsyth County. This is a Red district but one undergoing dramatic demographic change and, confident in a Harris victory elswhere, I thought it would be interesting to talk to people observing the count about these demographic changes.

At Forsyth county board of elections. Sorry the pic is boring. Counting votes is a boring activity. ©M Goldfarb

When the early voting ballots had been tabulated Trump was running 2 and a half percent ahead of his total in 2020. So much of the story Democrats had been telling themselves for weeks about the election was that the record-breaking number of early voters meant they would win. But it seems that a lot of early voting this time around was done by Trump supporters, although precisely how many is not clear. It will be a while before the numerical how and why of his victory is thoroughly parsed.

But going back to the lie. Why was it allowed to persist? After the mob Trump incited trashed the Capitol on January 6th why wasn’t that an end of it? Why wasn’t Trump barred from holding office again? Why was he allowed to act as if he was still in office by conducting an alternate foreign policy from Mar a Lago?

And since these things didn’t happen then every time Trump or a MAGA politician made the claim in an interview, why didn’t the journalist say, “That’s a lie”, or interrupt and ask, “Why do you persist in lying about this?” Why wasn’t the embedding of the lie, this phenomenon, reported on during the campaign, or discussed in opinion pieces, with no both-sidesing?

Maybe it might not have been possible to squash the lie completely before he ran for office again, but to not even try?

In any case, there were obviously other reasons for Trump’s victory. Back in June, while filing FRDH newsletters from the border, I noted light-heartedly in my fund-raising pleas at the end of each post that inflation was still a beast. It is coming down from its 2022 peak but for many the price of basics is still too high. An over-reliance by legacy media opinion writers on the big numbers of economic data — GDP, employment, interest rates — obscures the reality of how the economy is experienced by far too many in America’s precariat. I am one of them (even though I live in Britain). It stings to write about how well the US economy is doing statistically when my own situation barely changes.

Another reason: elite university campuses — even before Israel and Hamas went to war — were perceived as having lost their minds over pronouns and gender identification. They were considered islands of privilege with no connection back into the wider society. Campuses have been suspect in Republican minds since the days when Ronald Reagan was governor of California and UC Berkeley was a hotbed of genuine political radicalism. It doesn’t matter what the reality of campus life is like, this is how they are perceived by the society as a whole after events on campus are filtered through the rumor mills of social media and the right-wing propaganda machine.

I started by apologizing to you for being so wrong about the election result but yesterday I did publish a Substack note that I think contained an insight that is correct:

The American economy is healthy but American society is sick. Politics, which is meant to represent the members of society is dysfunctional.

There will be more to write in the days to come about this soul sickness devouring American society but I need to stop now, otherwise I won’t stop until I have written a book. Actually, I am writing a book. It’s called History of a Calamity: How America Went from Victory in World War 2 to Donald Trump and a cold Civil War. You can read chapters from it here at Substack.

Introduction: An Exile’s Story

This is the eighth and last of my dispatches from Georgia and North Carolina but it is certainly not the end of my writing about this election. More than Trump’s win in 2016, this ushers America and the world which it has dominated throughout my life into a new era. I will keep reporting and analyzing it but I need your support.

Please take out a paid subscription or: