10 The New York Review
West in late summer found a sudden
interest in the long-disdained concept
of a government safety net. “The pan-
demic has created an opening—among
rural residents—for large-scale social
and economic reforms,” the lead re-
searcher reported. We need to find the
way to institutionalize that insight be-
fore the memory fades, to reclaim gov-
ernment as an affirmative communal
good, not as a burden to be shed. The
momentum is there, waiting to be har-
nessed: people in Missouri went to the
polls this summer and, in defiance of
the state’s Republican establishment,
voted to extend Medicaid to 200,
fellow Missourians.
In this forum four years ago, Mari-
lynne Robinson wrote, “We cannot
sustain our civilization on cynicism and
resentment.” Indeed, cyni-
cism about government has
been conservatives’ friend.
We need to provide the
reason for shaking off its
bindings. Speaking on Mi-
chelle Obama’s podcast this
summer, Barack Obama ob-
served that “the danger for
this generation is that they
have become too deeply
cynical in government.” Or
as he might have said—as,
in fact, candidate Obama
did say back in 2008—“We
are the change we seek.” Q
Hari Kunzru
In the days since the death
of Justice Ruth Bader Gins-
burg, the temperature of
American politics, already
high, has become danger-
ously elevated. The oppor-
tunity for Donald Trump to
nominate another Supreme
Court justice has once
again rubbed the noses of
the Democratic Party es-
tablishment in their shock-
ing complacency of 2016.
The failure to seat Merrick
Garland, and Ginsburg’s
own decision to delay her retirement
so that her replacement could be nom-
inated by an incoming Democratic
president, now seem like relics of the
long hazy summer before World War I,
the political behavior of aristocrats at
play, blithely unaware that their world
was about to crumble around them.
Half- hearted appeals to honor, prece-
dent, and the nonexistent “McConnell
rule” of delay during an election year
have foundered against raw political
realism, encapsulated by the right- wing
blogger Matt Walsh in a Twitter post on
September 19:
To be clear, I wanted McConnell to
refuse to hold hearings for Garland
because I didn’t want Garland on
the court. I want the hearings now
because I do want Trump’s pick on
the court. That’s the way the game
is played, you dumb whiners. It’s
not “hypocrisy,” it’s just politics.As the president and his surrogates
methodically sow doubt about the in-
tegrity of the coming election, the
possibility that the winner could be
determined by a court with a 6–3 Re-
publican majority opens the way for a
genuine crisis of legitimacy. The idea
that an election result might not rep-
resent the will of the people is pro-
foundly destabilizing to Americans on
the center- left and center- right, who
have already had trouble accepting that
many of the vaunted checks and bal-
ances of American democracy rely on
norms of behavior easily disregarded
by an administration that prefers not to
observe them.
Over the years since we turned to so-
cial media as our primary news filter,
we’ve come to understand the so- called
silo effect, the way that both algorithms
and personal choices tend to build
around users information environments
that reinforce their biases. This election
is a contest not so much of ideologies
as realities, dueling world- pictures that
rely on different sources of informationand are often not even visible to adher-
ents—perhaps a better word would be
“inhabitants”—of the other.
After the announcement that the
killers of Breonna Taylor would not
face meaningful justice, two parallel
strands of anxiety- inducing coverage
emerged out of Louisville. Left- leaning
commentators shared video of heav-
ily armed paramilitaries stalking the
streets of the city, evidence of the
growth of “Boogaloo” and race- war
rhetoric on the far right. These groups
have been encouraged by Trump, who,
in the first presidential debate, refused
to denounce white nationalism, instead
exhorting the far- right street gang
the Proud Boys to “stand back and
stand by,” a phrase widely taken as an
endorsement.
In the alternate reality, the gun-
toting men in Louisville were “patriots
defending their homes” and the real
danger came from elsewhere. A short
clip of masked protesters distributing
picket signs advocating for police abo-
lition out of a U- Haul truck has been
promoted as evidence that the move-
ment against police violence is funded
and organized by sinister forces.
Given that the price of an AR- 15 can
range from $500 to well over $2,000,and renting a 10- foot moving truck in
Louis ville costs $19.95 a day plus mile-
age, this is an argument that could con-
vincingly be reversed, but adjudicating
truth or falsity in the era of “alternative
facts” is a fraught and thankless activ-
ity. People are often unaware that nar-
ratives like this, pushed out by figures
with large followings, may be flat- out
fabrications, and the figures may even
be fabrications themselves. The term of
art among social media monitors is “co-
ordinated inauthentic behavior.” That
inauthenticity combines human agency
and technological amplification in a
way that is often impossible to unpick.
With the additional strain imposed by
the pandemic, the costs in time, effort,
and mental well- being of fact- checking
are beyond most voters. Instead, manypeople are understandably trying to
find comfort by retreating into their
existing interpretative communities,
refusing information that challenges
their biases.
The experience of anxiety is almost
the only thing Americans are able to
agree on, and in an election cycle in
which policy discussion is largely ab-
sent, much of the conversation is about
the nature and causes of that anxiety.
Our political debates follow the form of
the pandemic debate. What is the true
level of risk? What precautions should
we take? The deliberate destruction
of the integrity of the nation’s public
health information system has taught
the bitter lesson that in the absence of
universally trusted sources, all facts are
alternative, open to contestation. So it
is with our assessment of the risks of a
disputed election. How will intimida-
tion and voter suppression affect the
polls? Will mail- in ballots be fully and
accurately counted? Would the presi-
dent concede a loss?
A common format of clickbait jour-
nalism is to promise that a post con-
tains “the truth about” something or
other. We’re offered “the truth about”
masks or mortgages or China. It’s a
pitch that betrays this contemporaryanxiety, presupposing as it does a con-
text of lies against which the truth-
telling post stands out. As we enter the
last weeks of the election campaign,
the performance of truth- telling is ev-
erywhere. Yet for all the heroic rheto-
r ic, tr uth itsel f seems to be sl ippi ng ever
further out of reach. QMark Lilla
It’s been four years now and you have
not been yourself. You were no more
prepared for Donald Trump’s election
than anyone else was. It left you stupe-
fied and outraged. It also left you with
an unwelcome sense that you no longer
knew your country.
You had grown accus-
tomed to the right- wing
road- rage media, though
you never watched or lis-
tened to it. You knew the
cast of characters from the
Reagan and Bush years, and
still fumed against those re-
sponsible for the Iraq wars.
You knew that a significant
chunk of the white working
class had moved from left to
right over the years, joining
evangelicals, right- to- lifers,
and gun fanatics as part of
the Republican base. You
had even read articles that
tried to explain why that
happened.
But the surge for Trump
that carried him over the
top didn’t come from the
right. It came from below,
from some dark American
id you had no access to. The
moment Trump took office
your life changed. You fol-
lowed the press conferences,
which were unlike any you
had ever seen. They felt like
daily beatings, but still you
submitted to them. You read
the torrent of tweets com-
ing out of the White House
and watched the Saturday
Night Live parodies, and
shared the funniest ones with friends.
Until they no longer seemed so funny.
You obsessively checked MSNBC and
Democracy Now! and Twitter, pass-
ing untold hours with people who were
just as appalled and obsessed as you
were. The Mueller investigation began
and you were transfixed. Later, the
impeachment trial. Both fizzled out
without anything changing. The hyenas
howled in celebration and the outrages
continued. You slept badly.
Then, at a certain point, you gave up.
You were tired of every conversation
turning to Trump and everyone agree-
ing. Yes, even unanimity came to seem
an embarrassing badge of impotence.
The Republican Party, including mem-
bers who had denounced Trump during
the 2016 primaries, followed him
zombie- like on his pillage- and- burn
mission. Why? You had no idea. A pan-
demic hit the country, threatening their
constituents, and they played it down.
They promoted crackpot theories and
medicines, and proudly went maskless
in public. That was when you learned
the useful term “vice signaling.” A
group of armed jackasses in camou-
flage fatigues descended menacingly on
the Michigan State Capitol to protest a
mask mandate and roamed the marbleJacob Lawrence: We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union,
establish justice, insure domestic tranquility... —17 September 1787, 1955; panel 15 from Struggle: From the History
of the American People, on view in ‘Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
For more on Lawrence see Sanford Schwartz’s review on pages 29 –30.HarvardArtMuseums/FoggMuseum