Renewed Hope in Democracy’s Survival Supercharges the Campaign Against ‘Comprehensive Dishonesty’*
After the infamous debate, watching the news or reading the papers and editorial pages was arduous, at least for me. President Biden’s enduring patriotism and matchless magnanimity, however, resulted in an equal and opposite reaction that was on full display this week at the DNC. Events over the last month have treated us to renewed hope in the survival of liberal democracy, kindling the energy and enthusiasm to reject the extremist-turned-mainstream campaign to end the American experiment.
I was conflicted because of my tremendous respect for President Biden’s historic accomplishments in a deeply divided country and his administration’s course correction and reversal of the previous four disastrous years. I also appreciate that President Biden and the Democratic Party revere principle and process over personality, although having one — a personality — helps, especially if it’s authentic and endearing, as Vice President Harris and Governor Walz have shown.
I remain perplexed that the race is close, that any rational mind could settle on the chaos, incoherence, criminality, mendacity, and tyranny Trump and his party represent, that democracy could give way to this manifestly wretched alternative. In that vein, I juxtaposed this week’s DNC with Steve Benen’s Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past, narrated by Rachel Maddow. Benen is a brilliant producer of The Rachel Maddow Show who also authored The Imposters, How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics.
In the novel 1984, by George Orwell, Big Brother’s Thought Police engage in “omnipresent government surveillance” to control and manipulate facts and history and “persecute individuality and independent thinking.” (Sounds like Project 2025 schemes, including the plan to monitor menstrual cycles.) Benen uses the fictionalized dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 to analogize and explain the increasingly radicalized Republican successes in rewriting their ugly recent history more to their liking. Benen explains:
“When George Orwell wrote 1984 in the aftermath of World War II, the hero of his novel, Winston Smith, works for the ruling party’s propaganda arm. It was called the Ministry of Truth, and it was responsible for, among other things, rewriting history. Among the lessons Smith was told to embrace was the notion that ‘the past was alterable.’
“It’s a principle the former president and his party have embraced with unnerving enthusiasm. . . .
“[T]he book is intended as a lens through which to see GOP misinformation campaigns, contextualizing partisan efforts that were, and are, intended to convince people they do not remember the events Republicans would prefer they forget.
“The point is to shine a spotlight on how the Republican Party has tried to rewrite our recent history, why the GOP has grown so dependent on the tactic, the degree to which the partisan campaigns have succeeded, and the consequences of the party’s alternative narratives challenging reality. . . .
“The stakes could not be much higher: The foundation of democracy rests in large part on a shared understanding of current events. When that understanding is deliberately corrupted by brazen partisans, the consequences can be dire.
“The more Republicans attack the recent past, the more a larger political crime comes into view: the party increasingly sees the tools that the electorate relies on to make sound decisions — facts, memories, records, an ability to apply lessons learned — as little more than annoyances to be discarded. To allow the GOP to succeed is to tolerate an offensive that’s pushing our political system to the breaking point.”
Benen explains the rationale and process through which Republicans successfully rewrote the history of the most troubling events of the Trump presidency, false narratives the GOP continues to recite — all in CAPs with exclamation points — in the 2024 campaign. We are familiar with that history and those events because we witnessed some of them in real time or close proximity and were presented with the raw, harsh data through comprehensive investigations. History rewritten, the Mueller Report totally exonerated Trump: the Russia thing was a complete hoax; Trump’s call with Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy was nothing short of perfect; Trump’s response to the pandemic and his leadership were masterful; Trump won the 2020 presidential election and Biden took office only by cheating; January 6 was a group of righteous patriots attempting to prevent the overthrow of the U.S. government; Trump created the greatest economy in the history of the world; Trump took no classified documents as he left office; and he certainly has never attempted to obstruct justice.
And if you don’t think it works, check the polls.
Oh, and it was Trump who achieved substantial benefits for veterans with the passage of the VA Choice Act (passed in 2014 and signed by President Obama), and who singlehandedly took on big pharma to reduce the cost of insulin for Medicare recipients to no more than $35 per month (part of the Inflation Reduction Act President Biden signed into law).
Benen explains how and why these disinformation campaigns work:
“The motivations behind such campaigns are hardly subtle. The more recent events can be altered to fit a political agenda, the easier it becomes to present failures as triumphs and fiction as fact. What’s more, scandals and investigations can be made to disappear just as soon as a party agrees to tell its supporters that it’s been exonerated — even when the opposite is true.
“This campaign of rewriting recent history is built on a foundation of pernicious pillars. The first is a wholesale indifference toward reality. If a skirmish in this conflict is going to succeed, its warriors must make a deliberate choice not to care about what the public already knows to be true or what independent fact-checkers are going to say when the dust clears.
“The second is the absence of shame. Campaigns to rewrite history fail if those doing the rewriting express a degree of embarrassment, betraying their mendacious goals. The public will pick up on sheepishness, so Republicans who intend to replace a factual series of events with fictional ones must fully commit to the new narrative, no matter how ridiculous it is.
“The third is the role of allies. No one person, no matter how powerful or politically influential, can rewrite history on his or her own. The GOP’s war on the recent past relies on a comprehensive approach, incorporating conservative media allies and like-minded partisans willing to echo the preferred, made-up story.
“Indeed, it’s this point that helps separate contemporary propaganda efforts from their predecessors: Republican officials can rely on Fox News and related outlets to help disseminate their rewritten stories — quickly and efficiently, exploiting the partisan benefits of information bubbles — in ways previous parties would’ve envied.
“Finally, there’s the importance of repetition. Recent history isn’t rewritten overnight. It takes a sustained effort, reinforced over time. In his 1938 book, Propaganda Boom, British author A.J. Mackenzie emphasized the importance of repetition in a successful propaganda campaign, and nearly a century later that hasn’t changed.
“Taken together, a picture emerges of a Republican Party that’s grown reliant on a brute-force rhetorical strategy, taking developments that unfolded in recent memory and replacing them with a politically advantageous reality.
“To be sure, Crisis Management 101 is filled with familiar lessons for parties and politicians caught up in dilemmas of varying degrees of seriousness. The rhetorical ploys are tried and true: Countless actors have done their best to put a positive spin on difficult circumstances. Others have peddled dubious denials. Some have come clean while begging the electorate for forgiveness, while others still have tried to change the subject, hoping to get away with transgressions by giving the public something else to talk about.
“Contemporary Republicans have launched a war on the recent past, however, for a couple of inescapable reasons. Part of the GOP’s dependence is born of uniquely indefensible circumstances: too many contemporary scandals have simply proved unspinnable. It’s one thing to try to change the subject in response to a routine controversy; it’s something else when a White House fails spectacularly to respond to a pandemic and more than a million Americans die from a dangerous contagion.
“In such instances, the Crisis Management playbook sits on a shelf. It’s not enough to simply try to negate such controversies through traditional public relations tactics; it becomes necessary to overhaul the canonical understanding of what actually transpired.
“GOP voices have grown dependent on this approach because they’ve found that rewriting recent history can be incredibly effective. Rank-and-file Republican voters have become conditioned to distrust independent sources of information, and with the help of allied far-right outlets, the party now believes, with good cause, that counternarratives can become the prevailing accounts — at least among those the GOP relies on for support, money, and votes.
“Such tactics have become a staple of Republican politics in the era of Donald Trump . . . .
“Rewriting events from the recent past, however, requires a different kind of audacity and ambition. At issue are events most Americans saw and remember. These aren’t subjects of debate for historical symposiums, or obscure developments that an average person might have a superficial understanding of. Rather, at issue are events from the last few years that people lived through and experienced firsthand.
“Republicans have nevertheless taken on the bold challenge of convincing people that their eyes have deceived them; their memories are wrong; independent sources of information are not to be trusted; and partisan changes to the recent past deserve to be embraced without question.
“It reflects a radical vision that Trump and his allies have imposed on Republican politics. This is, after all, the party of ‘alternative facts’ And ‘polls are fake, just like everything else.’ ‘Truth isn’t truth.’ ‘Over time, facts develop’ and its rhetorical cousin, facts ‘are in the eye of the beholder.’
“The point is not that the Democratic Party is filled exclusively with angels who would never dare to consider putting a misleading spin on mortifying missteps. Most fair-minded observers know better. But the qualitative difference between the parties is unavoidable. It didn’t occur to Obama and his White House team to tell the public that the Affordable Care Act’s website worked flawlessly from the start, and anyone who says otherwise is promoting a lie. It also didn’t occur to Hillary Clinton to launch a mind-numbing crusade based on the idea that she’d secretly won the electoral college vote in 2016, pointing to evidence of systemic fraud that existed only in her mind. . . .”
Who are these “like-minded partisans willing to echo the preferred, made-up story”? Who have fully committed to the new narratives, “no matter how ridiculous they are,” to replace factual series of events with fictional ones? Where I live, the Senior United States Senator from Utah and the state’s Attorney General eagerly joined the cacophony of comprehensive dishonesty to rewrite ugly histories more to their liking. And in Utah where a patriarchal authoritarian mindset is deeply and religiously entrenched, it works.
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.
**Richard J Van Wagoner is my father. His list of honors, awards, and professional associations is extensive. He was Professor Emeritus (Painting and Drawing), Weber State University, having served three Appointments as Chair of the Department of Visual Arts there. He guest-lectured and instructed at many universities and juried numerous shows and exhibitions. He was invited to submit his work as part of many shows and exhibitions, and his work was exhibited in many traveling shows domestically and internationally. My daughter Angela Van Wagoner, a professional photographer, photographed more than 500 pieces of my father’s work. The photographs of my father’s art reproduced in https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner are hers.