Two simple statements

At this point, I am fairly comfortable making two statements with a fairly high degree of factual confidence, that will nonetheless alienate me from broad swathes of the American electorate. The first is that Russiagate was, is and remains a hoax. There is no evidence that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election in any way that even approaches criminality, let alone one that would have had any statistically-significant impact on the outcome. Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 is – pardon my French – her own damn fault. Further, Democrats can expect to continue losing to Trump-like demagogues as long as they continue flying pride flags and spouting wokety-woke nonsense slogans instead of focussing on bread and butter issues that affect all Americans. Blaming Russian meddling for their own dismal failure to convince Americans that they are competent at governing is not only factually wrong, but psychologically pathetic.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I view Trumpian coping strategies and scapegoating of foreign agents for their own political failures as equally obnoxious and pathetic. There is no new evidence that the novel coronavirus that put the whole world on lockdown in 2020 is manmade or that it was leaked from a biological weapons research lab in Wuhan. Despite the eagerness with which the American intelligence apparatus leapt on the possibility that the Chinese government might be to blame for the virus, thus in some measure exculpating the American government from blame for its own dismal performance in combating it, they simply haven’t found anything substantive that might support that conjecture. The people who leapt on Lableakgate as fact did so, not because that conjecture was better-substantiated than other hypotheses that better conform to the data we have on the virus, but because it provided them with a just-so story about why Daddy lost the election.

One reason that American politics is so grotesque right now, is that we keep feeding ourselves these accounts of reality that are not grounded in the way things actually are, but in wishful thinking about the way things should be. And then when reality fails to indulge our fantasies, we turn ugly and begin abusing one scapegoat or another. One reason why I was attracted to conservatism in the first place was observing that liberals are not very good at understanding conservative thought-processes, and actually lack the empathy they claim to embody. But I soon came to discover that conservatives are not only not that much better at understanding others, but they also simply aren’t interested in understanding. The entire political noise machine here, including even the ‘populist’ pundits that are now cropping up on places like The Week, is driven not by a search for truth, but for the angle of biggest impact for gain.