Desensitization is an amazing thing. At this point, most political observers simply take it for granted that the overwhelming majority of Republicans believe the Big Lie, that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim with nothing to back it up, not even plausible anecdotes.
What I think is not fully appreciated, however, is that the Big Lie is embedded in an even bigger lie: the claim that the Democratic Party is controlled by radical leftists whose aim is to destroy the United States of America as we know it.
And that lie, in turn, derives much from the persuasiveness of a grotesquely distorted view of what life is like in blue, democratic America.
Urban elites are constantly accused of not understanding Real America®. And, to be fair, most big-city residents probably don’t have a good idea of what life is like in rural areas and small towns, though it’s doubtful that this gap accounts for the immense number of stories interviewing Trump voters sitting in snack bars.
But I would argue that the right’s misperceptions of Democratic America run much deeper — and much more dangerous.
Let’s start with politics. The other day, Dave Weigel of the Washington Post, reporting on the election campaign, noted that many Republican candidates claim that Democrats are deliberately undermining the nation and promoting violence against their opponents; some even claim that we are already in a civil war.
Some (many?) of these candidates have been winning primaries, which suggests that the GOP base agrees with them. In fact, I’d like to see some polls along the lines of those showing that most Republicans accept the Big Lie.
How many Republicans believe that President Biden and other leading Democrats are left-wing radicals, in fact Marxists? Likewise, I would like to know how many Republicans believe that Black Lives Matter protesters looted and burned large parts of major cities across the United States.
The reality is that the modern Democratic Party is a moderately center-left coalition, what Europeans would call social democrats, and relatively conservative. To take the measure, I can’t think of any prominent Democrats – indeed, any congressional Democrats – who have expressed admiration for any foreign authoritarian regime.
This contrasts with conservatives’ widespread admiration for Hungarian Viktor Orban, who recently denounced other Europeans for “mixing with non-Europeans” and declared that he did not want Hungary to become a “mixed race” country.
On the domestic violence front, an Anti-Defamation League study found that 75% of extremist-related domestic killings from 2012 to 2021 were committed by the right, and just 4% by the left.
Finally, on Black Lives Matter: the protests were actually extremely peaceful. Yes, there was some arson and looting, with total property damage typically valued at $1 billion to $2 billion. It may seem like a lot, but the United States is a big country, so the number needs to be seen in perspective.
Here’s a point of comparison. In April, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, made a political maneuver on the border with Mexico, temporarily imposing extra security checks that caused major traffic slowdowns, disrupting business and causing damage to many products. Total economic losses were estimated at about US$4 billion; that is, a few days of border security theater seem to have done more economic damage than a hundred days of mass protests.
However, pointing out these facts is unlikely to change many minds. Nor does there seem to be any way to change the perception, also mentioned in that Post article, that a lax attitude toward policing has turned America’s big cities into dangerous dens. It is true that violent crime has increased during the pandemic, but it has increased in both rural and urban areas. Despite this recent increase, violence in many cities is much lower than it was a short time ago.
In New York City, homicides so far this year are just below the 2021 level. And in 2021, they were 78% lower than in 1990 and 25% lower than in 2001.
As Justin Fox of Bloomberg has documented, New York is actually much safer than small towns in the American countryside. Los Angeles also had a long-term drop in homicides, as did California in general. Some cities, notably Philadelphia and Chicago, matched or exceeded homicide rates in the early 1990s, but they are not representative of the bigger picture.
But who in the Republican base will recognize this reality? Whenever I mention the relative safety of New York, I get a wave of emails saying, in effect, “You can’t believe this.”
The fact is that a large segment of the US electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that is unrelated to the reality of what the other half thinks, behaves or lives. We don’t need to speculate whether this dystopian fantasy can cause political violence and attempts to overthrow democracy; already caused. And it will probably get worse.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
