The Very Real Threat to our Way of Life: Part 1 (The Decline in Trust and the Big Lie

Turning and turning in the widening gyre  

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity.

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

These words by Yeats have always been frightening to me: “the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Never has the future been so frightening for the American experiment. Dystopia is all around us: movies, television, and especially in young adult literature. More importantly our roiling politics is threatening the very existence of our democracy. Here are five disturbing trends:

1. Trust in all our institutions (except the military) continues to fall.
2. The belief in the “Big Lie” is undermining trust in elections.
3. It is likely that at some future date doubt in election fairness will lead to a rejection of election results; in other words, we are likely to see more behavior like Trump’s.
4. The biggest threat of the Republicans’ voter suppression movement is the removal of independent election commissions as arbiters of election results and their replacement by partisans, particularly state legislatures.
5. The declining trust in American elections have meant that more people, especially on the right, say that violence (as in the January 6 insurrection) may be needed in order for justice to prevail.
6. Truth in the political realm has been mortally wounded, and may never recover.

The decline in trust.  A 2021 Pew Research Center study finds that trust in the federal government has been declining since the Eisenhower Administration for both Republicans and Democrats. In 1958, about 75% of Americans trusted the federal government; since 2007, that number has not surpassed 30%. For each party, trust increases when that party is in power, but over all, the decline has been steady for sixty years (see chart below).

For example, the peaks of Republican trust declined from 79% under Eisenhower to 57% under Reagan, to 69% under G.W. Bush (inflated because of the 9-11 attack), to 32% under Trump.  Meanwhile Democrat’s trust eroded from 80% under Johnson to 31% under Carter, 43% under Clinton, 34% under Obama, and 36% under Biden.

The Big Lie.  A big lie (German: große Lüge; often the big lie) is a propaganda technique used for political purposes, defined as “a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the facts, especially when used as a propaganda device by a politician or official body.” The German expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, to describe the use of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Joseph Goebbels said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

In fact, a Washington Post/ABC poll found that about two-thirds of Republicans (and 30% of all Americans) believe that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 presidential election.  These Americans believed “the Big Lie.”

After the 2020 election, Donald Trump became the first president to refuse to accept the results. The major elements of Trump’s claim that he actually won the election include the following:

1. The election was stolen because it’s not possible Trump didn’t win. In Trump’s telling, it is not possible that he could have lost the election.  Consider, for example, the large and boisterous crowds that attended his rallies, dwarfing those of Biden (who kept his crowds small because of social distancing because of Covid), and who regularly campaigned from his basement, which Trump never ceased to mock. These crowds clearly prove that vast numbers of the American people adore Trump.

2. There was a massive technological conspiracy to rig the election. This lie has taken many forms but was described in its glorious improbability by Trump conspiracist Sidney Powell. On November 19, 2020, in a memorable press conference held together with Rudy Giuliani, Powell told reporters she was here to talk about “Massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China and the interference with our elections here in the United States. The Dominion voting systems…were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he didn’t want it to come out.”

“The Dominion Voting Systems, the Smartmatic technology software, and the software that goes in other computerized voting systems here as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez,” Powell declared.  “With that claim foundering, Powell and the Trump internet grassroots became fixated on a totally different voting company: Smartmatic. In a Nov. 13 appearance on Fox Business, Powell promised to “release the kraken” on both companies, a term that’s been embraced on the right as the lead-up to proving widespread election fraud.

Intriguingly, Powell has turned these claims into an attack on American elections more broadly. She has declared that any Republican who lost by less than six percent of the vote shouldn’t concede, with the implication that they were probably conned by voter fraud machines. At the Thursday press conference, Powell said that “Republican or Democrats candidates” may have given Dominion and Smartmatic money to “have the system rigged to work for them.”

3. There are sufficient allegations of illegal behavior to constitute a “smoking gun.” 

1. There were more votes than voters in a number of precincts.  Congressman Russ Randland published a list of Michigan counties where votes exceeded registered voters.  However, as the BBC, found out, these counties were in Minnesota, and the actual turnout was under 100%.  Republicans were particularly exercised about the Democratic stronghold of Detroit of which Trump tweeted, “In Detroit, there are FAR MORE VOTES THAN PEOPLE. Nothing can be done to cure that giant scam. I win Michigan!” In fact, voter turnout in Detroit was less than 50%.
2. Biden ballots arrived at voting precincts late in the day and in large numbers.  For instance, a claim was made by an election worker in Michigan, alleging she saw two vans which were meant to bring food, but she says she “never saw any food coming out of the vans; coincidentally it was announced on the news that Michigan had found over 100,000 more ballots — not even two hours after the last van left.”  However, this claim – and other allegations – were rejected in a ruling on 13 November, with the judge deciding they weren’t credible.
3. Many Trump votes were unaccountably switched to Biden votes.  For example, Trump tweeted “Data analysis finds 221,000 votes were switched from President Trump to0 Biden.”  The source of this accusation is One American News, a right-wing news outlet.  An OANN report refers to an “unaudited analysis of data” obtained from an election monitoring group, Edison Research, which allegedly showed millions of votes were flipped. However, the company’s president, Larry Rosin, said: “Edison Research has produced no such report and we have no evidence of any voter fraud.” 

According to the Washington Post, Trump’s legal efforts to challenge the election results have been struck down in federal cases in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania and in state courts in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. At least 96 judges from across the political spectrum, including some appointed by Trump, have rejected a number of post-election lawsuits filed by Trump or supporters, a Washington Post review found.     

Moreover, election officials, including those appointed by Trump have stated that the election of 2020 was fair. According to Vox, “The 2020 US election was the most secure in American history, according to US elections officials.

“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double-checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result,” the coordinating bodies on election infrastructure and security said in a joint statement issued by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“In the statement, election officials noted that though some states may do recounts, “All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary.” This beefs up the security of the vote and allows officials to correct and identify mistakes in the counting process.  But the statement made one thing very clear: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Or as Chris Krebs, the head of CISA, put it: “America, we have confidence in the security of your vote, you should, too.” “The 2020 general election was one of the smoothest and most well-run elections that we have ever seen, and that is remarkable considering all the challenges,” Ben Hovland, a commissioner on the Election Assistance Commission, told the Associated Press.

The New York Times spoke to election officials in every state, including plenty of Republican officials, and all stated there was no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities in this election. “There’s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections,” Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state in Ohio told the Times. “The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology.”