The Dangers to Democracy in a Post-Truth World
We are living in perilous and dangerous times. The old Modern Worldview is collapsing, and we don’t know how to replace it.
Most people are so befuddled by this that they can’t admit fundamental change is occurring, so they cling to this modern perspective.
In today’s environment that is not all bad. Unfortunately, the biggest momentum is not to face the Modern Worldview problem, by including its best aspects and reforming its worst, but to reject it outright, and go back to a pre-Modern Worldview that throws out reason and facts.
The Problem with Throwing Out Reason and Facts
I want to focus in this article on the dangers of completely eschewing the Modern Worldview of reason in what we call the Post-Truth society.
In the Post-Truth society, anything a person wants to believe, they can. There is no longer anything to measure truth against untruth.
Facts and reason don’t matter. This has led to a profound attack on our Democracy.
Trump and the Central Park Five
This Post-Truth world seems to have gotten a big jump start when Donald Trump decided to run for President in 2016.
I knew something was wrong right off when in 1989 Trump denied the overwhelming evidence in the case that eventually exonerated the Central Park Five. These five Black and Latino teenagers were accused of raping, assaulting, and beating a young woman while she was jogging through Central Park in New York.
In 1989, Trump spent $85,000 on full page ads in the The New York Times, the Daily News, the New York Post, and New York Newsday calling for New York State to adopt the death penalty after the attacks.
But when the real culprit came forward and confessed 13 years later, and the evidence was overwhelming that he did it, Trump refused to apologize for his harsh statements about the Central Park Five, saying as we heard him say before, “You have people on both sides of that.”
There, I thought, is a clear indication as to who Donald Trump really is. He believes what he wants to despite any evidence against it. This is what some in philosophy call, “Willed Ignorance”, and it is a perfect example of what a Post-Truth Society can lead to.
Trump on his Inaugural Crowd Size
We saw it again right after Trump won the 2016 election over his insistence that he had a larger inaugural crowd than Barak Obama. Pictures clearly showed Obama’s crowd was much larger, yet Trump, despite that clear visual evidence, continued to maintain his crowds were larger.
He even sent his new Press Secretary, Sean Spitzer, out to make this ridiculous assertion to the press and the American people, imploring them to believe Trump, and not their lying eyes.
We should have known then we were entering dangerous territory.
There are too many of these instances to cover each one, so let’s fast forward to the aftermath of the 2020 Presidential election.
The Big Lie
Trump lost the electoral vote 306 to 232, and the popular vote by over seven million, yet he continues to maintain there was election fraud, claiming he won the election in a landslide.
There have been over 60 court cases challenging all aspects of the 2020 election, and not one scintilla of evidence has emerged supporting a fraudulent election. In fact, many analysts claim the 2020 election was one of our cleanest elections.
The Big Lie has become so pervasive that almost no Republican can run for office without claiming Biden is an illegitimate president, despite having no evidence to back it up.
Now we see many states trying to overturn election laws to prevent this non-existent election fraud from continuing. In doing this, they are creating the conditions for more fraudulent elections in the future, with perhaps the ultimate goal of ending legitimate elections altogether.
In battling their imaginary fraud, they are actually creating the conditions for more fraud in our elections.
It reminds me of the line used during the Vietnam War that “we had to destroy the village to save it.”
In this case, we have to destroy democracy to save it.
States Make Moves to Rig Elections
We see movements in states that aim to nullify the majority vote of people if that vote isn’t Republican.
Republican gubernatorial candidate from Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, has vowed, if he wins, to appoint a Secretary of State, who in the case of a democratic victory in his state, will turn the election over to state legislatures who will then replace the Democratic electors with Republican electors, giving the state to Republicans.
If he wins and does this, it will be impossible for Democrats to ever win Pennsylvania again, and it will assure other states will attempt to follow in his footsteps.
In Colorado, Republican gubernatorial candidate, Greg Lopez, has a plan that would give far more voting power to Coloradans in rural, conservative counties and dilute the voting power of liberal Coloradans in more populous urban and suburban areas.
He says he wants to do away with the popular vote for statewide elections and instead impose a statewide electoral college. Had his plan been implemented in the 2018 Gubernatorial race, the double digit Democratic victory would have become a runaway win for Republicans.
Shrinking Minorities Are Winning Elections
The Republicans and their financial backers know they can no longer win elections by popular vote. Their minority status is getting smaller, and their policies favoring the rich and the corporations are growing more unpopular.
The Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but have only won five of them.
In 2016, Trump defeated Hilary Clinton in the electoral college vote, but lost the popular vote to her by almost three million.
This enabled Trump to appoint three justices to the Supreme Court tipping the balance in favor of the Republican’s unpopular positions. This was enabled further when Justice Antonin Scalia died almost a year before the end of Obama’s presidency. Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell, refused to hold hearings for Obama’s new nominee, Merrick Garland, allowing Trump to fill that seat along with two others.
In 2020, the Democrats lost nine seats in the House of Representatives despite getting close to five million more overall votes in House races.
The Senate is so lopsided that the 50 Democratic Senators come from states representing 41,549,808 voters, while the 50 Republican Senators come from states representing 20,314,962 voters, less than half the Democrat total.
The reason for this discrepancy is that the 50 Democratic Senators come from states with the largest populations. For instance, both California and Wyoming have two Senators, despite California having 68 times more people than Wyoming. https://www.vox.com/2020/11/6/21550979/senate-malapportionment-20-million-democrats-republicans-supreme-court
This situation has enabled the Republicans to block many bills supported by the vast majority of Americans. If you think they will suffer at the polls for it, then you know why Republicans are working so feverishly to rig elections to prevent that.
NYT Columnist, Jamelle Bouie Frames it Best
In a column in the New York Times entitled, “It’s Trump’s Party and He’ll Lie if He Wants To”, by Jamelle Bouie, he puts it well saying,
“For many Republicans, theirs is the only legitimate political party and their voters, irrespective of their actual numbers, are the only legitimate voters — and the only legitimate majority. Democrats, from this vantage point, are presumptively illegitimate, their victories suspect, their policies un-American, even when they have the support of most people in the country.”
At the end of his column, Bouie concluded:
“Republicans have been trying to write Democrats out of the political community in one way or another for decades. It was only a matter of time before this escalated to denying that Democrats and Democratic voters can win elections at all.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/opinion/republicans-trump-elections.html
These are the dangers of a Post-Truth Society where anything can pass for truth. Is this the kind of country we want to live in? Are we so afraid of facing the future head-on that we would rather retreat into a new Dark Age, needing Big Daddy to take care of us and tell us what to do?
Let’s hope not. Let’s confront our inner fears and anxieties and move forward for our children and grandchildren. The alternative is unimaginable.
To learn more about a new worldview Click this link: The Magical Universe.
