Suspending Disbelief
In the arena of the cinema, the breadth of realizable stories put on film is vast. There are entire genres of film in the SciFi and Fantasy categories that are quite popular. It is often said that the big hurdle these sort of films must cross is the ability to get the audience to suspend disbelief. Technically, this term is used for any sort of piece of fiction for which reality is not deployed. It can be film or written fiction. But I find that fiction is closing in on us in our every day lives more and more. The expressions that “you can’t make this stuff up” and “stranger than fiction” abound in our lives these days. Much of it refers to what is happening in Washington as the world transitions from serious political policy differences to the politics of surreality. In what world would a Senator fly off to a sun resort with his family during a major state-wide catastrophe of life-threatening proportions? In what world would a politician who had been Governor of that state and the Secretary of Energy for the nation, claim that the utter failure of the energy consistency of the state’s utilities and the emergency readiness thereof be a once-in-a-century black swan event…especially since the last such event occurred ten years ago.
We have lived for the last five years suspending one extreme disbelief after another as we have lived through the Republican version of alternative fact reality. I think we owe Kellyanne Conway a great deal for defining our circumstances so well. She is responsible for coining the phrase alternative facts as a redefinition of lies, no matter how bald-faced they might be. This gave license to five years of untruths which culminated in what is being called The Big Lie that the election was stolen through fraudulent voting practices that favored Democrats and anti-Trump forces. The sheer audacity to make that claim when the machinery of government was almost entirely (at both Federal and state levels) under the control of Republicans was one of the most audacious untruths ever attempted. The fact that over the 60 court cases brought forth in the “swing” states lost by Republicans by relatively thin margins were summarily dismissed or rejected by a judiciary heavily representative of Trump-appointed Federal judges was further evidence of the scale of the lie that the Republicans perpetrated and attempted to use to overturn the results of the 2020 election results. It has all failed and the attempt to get the public to suspend disbelief didn’t work with the majority of the public, including a decent number, but not a majority, of Republican voters.
Ultimately, all of these efforts and the efforts which will doubtlessly be ongoing (as evidence by the 150 or so state legislative initiatives underway by Republicans to suppress voting in anticipation of the 2022 election cycle) are a sign of the inability of Republicans to suspend the disbelief of their demographic weakness. As currently configured and evidenced through non-policy and general actions, the Republicans lack compelling policy initiatives that serve the needs of the majority of Americans. That is simple fact and another of the beliefs that Republicans want to suspend. That bring the suspension around to now cover beliefs as well as disbeliefs, all of which makes reality a harder and harder thing to discern. The best hope for Democrats and democratic principles is for the next two and then two more years to prove to an ever-widening array of Americans (an array that must start to include more and more Converted Republicans) that their needs are better served by proactive progressive policies rather than reactive suspension of belief and disbelief.
I tend to think that this configuration is most often the pragmatic case whenever the playing field is too tilted to do political battle through conventional hearts and minds means. The underlying purpose of governance is to serve the improvement of equity, as defined is the simplest of Maslowian hierarchical terms, for the greatest number of constituents. The promotion of the general welfare of the population is a foundational concept in any democratic constitution. The fundamental fallacy of the Republican doctrine is that it rarely, if ever, is concerned about the general welfare, but rather the welfare of a small, elite minority of the population and its leadership. Might makes right under this rubric, so Republican seek to, as Lyndsey Graham has said outright, win at all costs. The amazing thing is that often large swaths of the public can be swayed to believe that their welfare is better served by these elitist policies. This is not so hard to understand a priori, but staggers the imagination after even short history shows it to be what it is. This is where the art of suspending belief and disbelief is so important as a weapon of the Republican entreaty. The one certainty that brings salvation sooner or later is that even a starving donkey sooner or later realizes that it is being starved and refuses to follow orders.
We all suspend belief and disbelief at various times in our lives and that may even serve a valid purpose. Humans are creatures that need encouragement to suffer the regular and ongoing hardships and indignities of life. This is best seen in the adoption of religion. Religion is simply a form of disbelief suspension. It is often said that faith is believing when logic tells you otherwise. We can understand why humans choose to believe in an afterlife since it is one of the things that is valuable to self-preservation and to cause people to trudge forward in life during times of otherwise unendurable hardship. Why else would we stay until the bitter end of the show unless we thought there might be a second act? No amount of logic can cause us to believe that the stories of the Bible are all true as depicted. We can explain some of them as symbolic. Others we must choose to believe because the religious context serves our general welfare as a society.
So, Republicans must feel that if it worked for Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and Krishna, maybe it can work for Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. Donald Trump seems prepared to carry forward with his attempts to lead Republicans to the promised land of Republicanism. He thinks he can make it to 2024 in this leadership role and win reelection despite all of the civil and criminal proceedings that are lining up to take him down by several notches or more. This is the sort of horribly misguiding thinking that is tempting for Democratic to ignore and even wish for since it will bring about a faster decline of the Republican Party than almost anything else. Who would be more feared by Democrats, a candidacy of Donald Trump or of Nicky Haley? I think we all know the answer to that question. So today I am choosing to suspend my disbelief that Donald Trump will succeed in holding onto the remnants of the red side of the country. Who knows, maybe this will be one of those times when suspending disbelief will take us to the promised land.