A post-election note

So here we are. Stuck with a convicted felon, one who lied continuously throughout more than a year of campaigning while invoking Nazi rhetoric. His lies about the people he was targeting were spotlighted and disproved again and again. The people who voted for him knew he was lying, and wanted him to win anyway.

Poll-sniffing post-mortems will have important uses, but we already know one larger truth. This election wasn’t about inflation or the economy, or the actual effects of immigration on the country as a whole. There isn’t any plank that can be added to a party platform to lure away people who want to be lied to—not while someone from the other party is willing to tell them ever more spectacular and outrageous falsehoods.

Trump’s followers want the lies he tells more than they want the reality currently available to them. They want to live inside the bubble in which he will lie to them and pretend to confer on them a status they believe they’ve been denied.

It’s a familiar dynamic. This political transaction fills a deep need that many people have because of how they’re wired, how they were raised, or how they’ve been misinformed or mistreated in their own lives. Many seem not to care if others are harmed in this process. For some, hurting others would be a bonus.

When it comes to Trump, the U.S. system has failed at several key points, as officials in various capacities proved fearful or corrupt (or both): when a major political party took him seriously as a candidate then during the first impeachment, the second impeachment, the legal efforts to disqualify Trump from running after his actions on January 6, the Supreme Court backstopping his conduct, and the many other criminal cases. But an electorate should also be able to recognize on its own that a grifting, hush-money paying, illegal-vote seeking demagogue who commits sexual abuse and actively targets vulnerable groups for violence is unworthy of elected office and a danger to the country.

That a majority of Americans who voted yesterday didn’t draw that conclusion is disturbing, but hardly unique. It’s a pattern we’ve seen across the entire century in which modern psychological propaganda has been injected into mass media. It’s a mechanical process, one that can occasionally be stymied. But stopping it requires a functioning system and hard work or luck (or all of the above).

Americans have mocked banana republics abroad, but we are as susceptible to the lure of the strongman as any country. We are special only in our capacity for a home-grown authoritarian to unleash even greater damage worldwide.

With constant exposure, all humans can be vulnerable to strategic lies, and once captured, have a difficult time escaping the cult of disinformation. Propaganda works, and the longer the window of exposure, the more effective it is.

This isn’t a message to say everything is hopeless. More than half the country doesn’t live inside the world where hate and lies eclipse reality, and we’re in this together.

While doing reporting for my first book, I met the archivist at Neuengamme, a Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of Hamburg. He talked about his early days in historical research and the reluctance in Germany among some senior historians at the time to delve into World War II, as it was considered too recent for objective study.

I sat down with him to talk about his scholarship and what he thought it would accomplish. It surprised me when he said that he didn’t do his research out of any confidence that it would keep the same anguished history from repeating. Instead, he suggested that all it was possible to do was to establish what had taken place and write about it, so that people would know.

Whether that would be enough to stop the horrors that had been committed at Neuengamme from returning, he wasn’t sure. But he thought he had a valuable contribution to make, and he was making it.

As the blame game starts over the 2024 election, bear in mind that the people who are responsible for this outcome are those who put forth the lies, those who profited from them, and the voters who embraced them. When it comes to this sad, lost election, there’s no magical thing you could have done to change the events of the last 24 hours.

But there are things you can still do to preserve our rights and our ability to stand together. If you can’t guarantee the outcomes, there are still tasks that may help keep certain options and possibilities alive. I’ll write more about them in the coming days.