One day after the midterms, the news reminds us that 210 newly elected Republicans are election deniers—those who believe the “others” stole the last election.
When, of course, it’s they who were in the process of stealing this recent election by any means necessary.
This is how consciousness works: it blames on the ‘other’ what oneself is guilty of. This is a basic insight into human psychology, without which one gets nowhere and is stuck on the endless merry-go-round of blame and victimhood.
It occurs to me that today’s election deniers-cum-election-thieves are the historical consequence of the election of 2000, Gore v. Bush. That election, by any reasonable measure, was stolen by Bush and his minions, by those brown-shirted (by way of Brooks Brothers) Republican activists who banged on the windows to stop the legally required counting of ballots in Florida, by the Fla. Secretary of State, and finally by the Supreme Court, which justices twisted themselves into pretzels to stop the recount and hand the election to Bush.
At the time, I thought there would be payback later—that what had happened was such an outrage to the body politic that somehow, somewhere, this would all have to be paid for.
This is why I take our present-day election-denier-blamer-victims as the historical consequence of 2000. It’s what happens when you don’t acknowledge a problem and instead sweep it under the rug. The nation treated coke-snorting C-student Bush as the real president—who immediately proceeded to lie the US public into an illegal and pointless (logically speaking, but not politically speaking) invasion of Iraq.
The guilt that our country was piling up seemed like a tremendous bill that was going to come due eventually. And we all know that what we deny and repress comes back in worse form—that’s basic Freud.
So we have it—today’s election-deniers are US, in fact: our inability or unwillingness to come to terms with and face the consequences of our own blunder back in 2000. That election set the precedent and the stage for what is happening now—a wholesale denial of the facts and an unwillingness to press the pause button on the system in order to get it right.
Instead of getting it right, what we have today is “getting it right” in the political sense—forget free and fair elections. Instead we go on blaming the other side for the theft of which we ourselves are guilty. The enemy is US and our own exhaustion with democracy, our guilt over having blown it from the start. Liberals reassure themselves that our “experiment in democracy” is a work in progress that we must trust, while the radicals on the right at least are acknowledging the long theft that this country has been engaged in, “right from the start.”
Welcome to the party in hell.