Donald Trump campaigned against consensual reality and won. Every plank of his platform – from the economy to immigration to abortion – was based on easily provable lies.
Despite Trump’s bombastic assertions to the contrary, inflation is down, growth is up, illegal border crossings are down, crime is down, and vaccines work great. Tariffs are taxes on imports and American companies say they’re planning to raise prices.
None of that mattered at the polls because Trump created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore the facts and focus on hate.
Delusion strongly predicted a vote for Trump. An Ipsos poll in the final weeks of the campaign found that voters who falsely believed that we are living through a record-breaking violent crime wave favored Trump by 26 points, while those who knew the truth broke for Harris by 65 points. Those who knew that the inflation rate is back to the historic average favored Harris by 53 points. Respondents who knew that illegal border crossings are down favored Harris by 59 points.
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Part of the problem is the media. Certainly, the mainstream media is shy about stating the truth and the rightwing media-influencer complex is dedicated to disseminating lies. Social media barons use algorithms to maximize their profits at the expense of our edification.
But the problem goes deeper than that: You also have to look at the conspiracist mindset that says the mainstream media is the enemy of the people, the government is controlled by the Deep State, and scientists are on the take, because it’s what makes people turn away from consensual reality.
CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl once asked Donald Trump why he constantly attacked the press. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” Trump replied.
Trump also discredits the government as a source of information. When the latest statistics showed that crime was down, Trump accused the FBI of making them up. When the jobs report was revised, Trump accused Harris of faking it.
The conspiracist mindset allowed Trump’s followers to reinterpret his 34 felony convictions as evidence of the plot against him, rather than evidence of his terrible behavior.
Once you adopt a conspiracist mindset where you can dismiss any evidence that clashes with your prejudices as part of the conspiracy, you are free to create your own reality. Since it’s a worldview that scapegoats your fellow citizens as diabolical deceivers, that reality is bound to be ugly. Worse still, your willingness to discount mainstream sources of evidence in favor of the outlandish claims of demagogues becomes a badge of ideological purity. You welcome the lies.
This is why social scientists have been warning about the link between conspiracism and totalitarianism for a century. There was never any evidence that the Jews secretly controlled the world – but it didn't matter because lack of evidence was proof that the Jews controlled the press, and the universities, and science and the arts. Jews in pre-war Germany didn't control any of those things – but no evidence to the contrary could penetrate the conspiracy theory. And the complete absence of evidence for their hegemony was just proof of their total domination.
Another reason why conspiracism and totalitarianism are closely connected is that conspiracy theories take away our ability to have good-faith debates. If everything you don't like becomes evidence of your opponent's plot to destroy you, you can't discuss anything rationally. Human-caused climate change is a fact. But conspiracism takes the debate out of the realm of evidence and into the realm of character assassination of scientists and their supporters. It paints us as hoaxers and saboteurs. Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives, but instead of debating their merits based on evidence, anti-vaxers portray their opponents as agents of a nefarious coverup to kill children. And it's completely irrefutable within their conceptual framework. When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that's what conspirators to kill our children would say.
There’s a much-needed movement afoot to fix our media ecosystem, but we can’t do that until we address the conspiracist mindset that predisposes people to believe Trump’s lies.
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