CT Blue

I’ve been reading Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland, which argues that the United States, for a number of historical reasons which he explores, is particularly vulnerable to irrational behavior including, without limitation, extreme religiosity, susceptibility to grifters, and belief in conspiracy theories. It’s an entertaining read, and though sometimes I think he may be engaging in just a bit of exaggeration to support his arguments, he makes a reasonably compelling case for his thesis. After reading his book one would have to conclude that the QAnon folks and the religious fundamentalists of our era are solidly within an American tradition that has beeen around since the pilgrims landed.

But not everyone in America has embraced irrationality, as Anderson notes in the book. The forces of reason have battled the forces of ignorance for centuries, sometimes winning and sometimes losing. Anderson argues that they were winning in the twenties and the thirties, citing as an example the tendency of the press of that day to mock folks like Billy Sunday and Aimee McPherson, and the derision heaped upon the state of Tennessee, William Jennings Bryant, and other anti-evolutionists during the Scopes trial. H.L. Mencken called them what they were: morons.

Which leads me to my modest proposal for the day. It’s time for the Democrats and their fellow travelers to stop trying to reason with the forces of irrationality, be they Republican politicians, their evangelical enablers, or conspiracists of any other sort. You are not going to persuade them of anything. As Andersen argues, there is a certain strain of American that insists it is their god-given right to believe what they want to believe, evidence, lack of evidence, or rationality be damned. The cult of Trump is not a new thing.

It’s the folks that are not engaged with the irrationality one way or the other that you need to win over, and one way to do that is by adopting a strategy of mocking the irrational. It wouldn’t be hard to come up with some good lines to parrot over and over. After all, we already have our own H.L. Menckens. They are, for the most part, late night comedians, who have had a sort of monopoly of straight on truth telling, while the punditry desperately clings to both siderism.

At this moment in our history, most of the mockery is coming from the folks who are, in truth, most susceptible to mockery. Remember, it was just a few months ago that Matt Gaetz was mocking the rational for wearing face masks. It’s best to be on the attack in this political age, and treating conspiracists, dupes and religious nutcases with the derision they deserve would be a winning political strategy for the Democrats. The fact is, making fun of people works, especially if they are, in fact, ridiculous. I realize that national Democrats have lived in a defensive crouch so long they are having a hard time coming out of it, but there are signs that it’s happening. For instance, who would have thought, a mere year ago, that Joe Biden would essentially be telling the Republicans to shove it when they start whining about his failure to reach out to them for bipartisan solutions. The only bone I have to pick with him on that is that he’s doing it, for the most part, implicitly when we have reached a time when it is to our advantage that he do it explicitly.

C’mon Democrats. We can do this. You can start with Matt Gaetz since he’s so easy, but you can quickly move on to Mitch and the rest of them.