This Country Can't Survive If 43% of Us Live in Unreality

I wasted 90 minutes of my sorry existence Monday watching a live feed of Rudy Giuliani and company "testifying" before a rump committee of Arizona legislators on the subject of "election integrity." The pattern of the hearing was easily discerned: the legislators asked questions about stuff they don't remotely understand, an "expert" baffled them with bullshit for a couple minutes, then they moved to the next clueless legislator. This made me dumber by the second. And the punchline was that, in the middle of all this, Arizona certified its election results. So, basically, the rest of the hearing was meant to construct an ongoing, slow-acting poison of a narrative concerning the basic unreliability of American elections. This is a not-inconsiderable problem going forward.

The country can't survive in good health if between 43 and 45 percent of the electorate lives in a weird Dungeons and Dragons political reality that they have been encouraged to enter by the powerful forces of politics and media. Although, I must say that none of this should come as any real surprise. It has been an article of conservative faith for 40 years that "government" was the problem. (This catechism was permanently put in place during Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address.) This ignores the fact that "government" in this republic is basically us. Which was the whole point—to frighten people of the alien power of something called "government," so the people would decline its help even when that help was offered, which was increasingly less often as the years went by. That those same people are only now getting around to delegitimizing elections, too, makes you wonder what took us so long to notice the scope of the project.

Listening to these people speak darkly of Hugo Chavez and his family, reaching to steal an American election from Beyond the Grave, while their state government, its feet planted securely on Mother Earth, certified the results of that election, was a truly depressing episode. As Arizona's Republican governor said, via the Washington Post:

“The pandemic and covid-19 brought new unprecedented challenges for our state. But as I said before, we do elections well here in Arizona...The system is strong, and that’s why I have bragged on it so much.”

Brag on it all you want, governor, but realize that you belong to a political party hopelessly gone, sinking into the deepest consequence of the prion disease it allowed to fester for decades, and that you're going to pay a price for it down the line. As one of the legislators said during the hearing on Monday, speaking, I believe, for everyone there: "This isn't a conspiracy theory and I'm not a nut." This is not an assurance commonly deemed necessary for elected officials, let alone one not readily believed.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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