Against Delusion-Based Politics

Back in January 2021, I wrote a three-part series of posts [One, Two, Three] about how the Republican party was cementing itself as the bastion of delusional conspiracy theorists. Things have remarkably only gotten worse since. Various commentators have now made the same point about the current political realignment.

Richard Hanania

wrote The Rise of the Dale Gribble Voter and

Matthew Yglesias

wrote The crank realignment is bad for everyone.

I feel like I have to wade into this topic with kid gloves on because it upsets so many, perhaps understandably so. As a general rule, you should try to avoid concluding that your political opponents only disagree with you because they’re delusional crazy people. Psychologically soothing narratives like that can be really effective at smothering our critical thinking faculties, and epistemological vigilance is especially paramount in this arena. No dispute there. The problem is that delusional crazy people actually exist and, sometimes, they coalesce around meaningful political movements. Being epistemologically cautious does not preclude us from describing reality, but we need to marshal impressive evidence if we’re going to wade into such a thicket.

I also feel like I’m insulting everyone’s intelligence if I regurgitate through the plethora of examples of the delusion I’m referring. I think the best calibration exercise is to take real scenarios of Republican crankery and conjure up the countervailing Democratic hypothetical as Hanania did:

To take another example, when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked at his home by a man wielding a hammer in 2022, The New York Times put together a nice graphic of prominent figures in Republican politics and the conservative movement who started spreading conspiracy theories about the story, including the idea that he was attacked in the midst of having a gay affair. Look, Democrats may have flaws. But if tomorrow Ivanka Trump got into a car accident, I promise you that you would not have rampant speculation by Chuck Schumer, Rachel Maddow, and Barack Obama that she was actually buying crack or driving to get an abortion at the time. Some left-wing influencers might suggest things like this, but they wouldn’t have the status of Trump, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson, and members of Congress.

If you still don’t believe the conspiratorial capture of the GOP has been obvious, that’s going to require a significantly longer conversation. I’m just going to post this one screenshot of the “AI airport crowd” and move on with the premise.

Debate is a vital mechanism for unearthing good ideas from bad, but how are you supposed to debate crazy people, or grifters pretending to be crazy? No one would normally waste their time on such a venture when the crazy faction is an inconsequential fringe within society, but the current Republican party continues to be very popular in vast swathes of the country. The sheer idiocy on display with some issues just sucks the air out of the room and wastes everyone’s time.

For example, one of the most interesting and thoughtful debates I’ve ever had was my conversation with Hoffmeister on policing (Kulak was there too) on The Bailey. I didn’t advocate for defunding the police but I still argued some enforcement needed to be significantly pared back, while Hoffmeister wanted to dramatically expand the death penalty and the length of prison sentences. We had virtually no overlap with our positions, but it was refreshing how our strong disagreements hinged on a difference in values, rather than a disagreement over basic logic or reality.

Similarly, I’m happy to debate immigration with anyone rational. I’m in favor of 100% open borders, which is an extreme fringe position that can have plenty of reasonable pushback. The good news is that I can have a conversation with someone who disagrees, and through better understanding what values we prioritize, maybe we can come to an agreement about a keyhole solution.

But right now a depressingly popular talking point from Republicans is Democrats are intentionally opening the borders in order to gain an electoral advantage by registering illegal immigrants that pour through to vote for them. I’m sorry but…what in the fuck? The basic premise of this specific scheme is so patently inane that it crumbles in response to elementary questions. If the accusation is one of fraud, why would you even need real flesh and blood people? If you are going to use real people, why use a demographic explicitly criminally prohibited from voting? This is embarrassing to even try to address, because it feels like I’m being pranked. The genre of conspiracy theories that are now a regular fixture within the MAGA sphere only resonate with people who are either experiencing delusional psychosis or are otherwise hopelessly gullible (along with the grifters play-acting because they rely on the financial support of the credulous). I can intellectually appreciate, in the abstract, how much work

Walter Olson

put into very patiently refuting this illegal immigrant voting fraud theory but it’s such an obvious waste of his time.

The same is true for all the time I objectively wasted responding to stolen election delusions. This is part of why I cut my involvement with The Motte a few months ago. While I’ll forever remain grateful to the space for incubating my writing career and, for a time, fostering one of the most enlightening communities online, the place eventually suffered a slow decline into familiar right-wing crankery. A flagrant hostility to having one’s ideas challenged (Why do you believe what you believe? What is your evidence? Do you apply your principles consistently? Etc.) became too common to be worthwhile. As the adage goes, you can’t reason with people out of positions they didn’t reason into. Life is too short and I have way too many much better uses of my time.

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How did all this happen? Any attempt to answer why everyone who disagrees with you is crazy risks recycling just-so flatteries about oneself, and this should be met with a high degree of skepticism. To set the stage about my history, I’ve been a libertarian basically my entire adult life and throughout I’ve had a much stronger affinity towards Republicans than Democrats. I generally could reliably rely on Republicans’ appreciation of the material well-being that free markets provide, and for them to foster a healthy instinct against government oppression, either of which generally made them much more sympathetic to a “leave everyone alone” guiding principle. Their biggest flaw was a blind spot within their skepticism of government power for foreign military adventures. But that’s also why I actively disliked Obama through both of his terms, because he represented the same appetite for war, barely dressed differently.

If you need even more of my accolades, I actually was actively happy that Trump won in 2016. I declined multiple invitations to election-watching parties because I had no interest in attending (what I assumed would be) a Hilary Clinton circle jerk. When the results trickled in and the odds flipped, I walked around my neighborhood and I admit I watched everyone’s sad lamentations with amusement; I was convinced that many stated concerns about Trump were histrionic. I was well aware of the crazy shit he had said, but I also assumed that campaigning with a patina of bullshit was something all politicians had to do to get elected, and I figured he’d button up like everyone else once he’s through the door. Hell, I even applied to work in his administration!

I mean, why not?

No one needs remind me how wrong my expectations were, and that’s completely my responsibility. I do think that much of Scott Alexander’s You Are Still Crying Wolf warning a few days after Trump’s 2016 victory still holds up, and you can lay some of the blame on traditional institutions like the media and academia fucking up their credibility. Trump is a destructive individual because he has fostered a national ideology firmly grounded on delusional thinking, and because he’s willing to do almost anything (however incompetently) to stay in power. But the attacks against him at the time largely tried to peg him into the uninspiring and misapplied “he’s actually very very racist” hole. I made a similar argument about how much public health authorities fucked themselves over with arbitrary pandemic guidelines.

So yes, lots of institutions became ideologically captured with “credulous conformists” as Yglesias said, and they fucked up their responsibilities, but that’s a woefully incomplete answer for the current sad state of affairs. Twitter staff having an itchy trigger finger and temporarily suppressing Hunter Biden’s laptop story cannot excuse the crazy shit people still believe about the 2020 election today.

My very broad guess at an answer is that Trump lucked into an electoral victory because he was enough of an “unknown outsider” to be palatable to broad section of Americans. But more importantly, his obsession with Obama’s birthplace simultaneously galvanized those susceptible to conspiracy theories and who were, correspondingly, previously less engaged in traditional politics because no one catered to them. As I said before, the problem is you can’t selectively imbibe on just a tiny sip of crazy:

So the party is in a bind. A nontrivial portion of their base (and increasingly, their leadership) is just delusionally psychotic, and the leadership has had to thread the needle between not completely denouncing them but also not totally letting them take over. They're having a tough time.

Once the crazies become a demographic bloc that cannot be ignored, you’re fucked. Once someone falls down a delusion pit, I have no idea how to get them back, because humans are really good at maintaining their cognitive dissonance shield. If you have 30 minutes to waste, watch this “debate” at 2X speed between Destiny and some MAGA YouTuber and see how many escape hatches and Gish gallops you can spot. Politicians and podcasters who are otherwise sane but with no scruples have a strong incentive to cater to the delusions their audience is thirsty for. Votes are votes and money is money after all.

Another reason conservatives may have gotten more susceptible to conspiratorial thinking might be because it’s consistent with the perpetual victimhood mythos that has gotten so popular within the MAGA sphere. Trump is a winner, ergo it’s impossible for him to lose anything, ergo any purported “loss” must be reframed as a valiant struggle against a heavily exaggerated opposition. Hence the repeated mantras about how no one in history has ever been treated as unfairly before, and the proclivity towards inherently contradictory lore about how “they” are supremely incompetent and conniving. It’s the salving delusion that keeps the narrative from completely falling apart.

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Still, I’m cautiously optimistic. The counter ideology to any authoritarian movement is lower-case liberalism, and the secret sauce that makes it so wildly successful and resilient is precisely its ability to identify and correct mistakes:

Liberal democracies, liberal markets, and liberal science all make mistakes, because they are human; but they have built-in mechanisms for identifying and rectifying them. Liberal democracy provides for political competition and rotation in power; markets let firms and entrepreneurs fail and be replaced; liberal science connects millions of investigators in a collective search for error. By contrast, faith-based regimes claim godly infallibility; communism and imperialism claim historical inevitability; authoritarian populists don’t believe they ever really lose an election or make a mistake; social justice warriors live in what Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott call a “perfect rhetorical fortress,” impervious to evidence and hostile to dissent.

My caution rests on the fact that you still need a critical mass of non-crazies around to jumpstart the correction engines. MAGA’s fatal vulnerabilities are its humiliatingly shallow talent pool, and its aversion to admitting mistakes. The illustrative and foundational distinction between the two political parties is that the Dems eventually realized Joe Biden was way too senile to carry on, and so he was pressured out (or “violently overthrown” as Trump likes to say). This mechanism is nonexistent and incompatible with the other side’s ethos, but MAGA can still win through sheer numbers.

My hope is that Trump will lose this November. Obviously if that happens he’s going to endlessly gripe that the election was yet again stolen from him, but hopefully enough people will grow bored with this tiresome re-run. Combined with his very visible cognitive downward spiral, maybe the fever will break for some and enough will peel away at the margins. A movement that is based on cursory headlines and meme talking points cannot be countered by reason, but maybe a public degradation will be sufficient to bury this ideology into the ground.

I for one would be stoked if debates over tax rates and deregulation once again became the most contentious issues dividing our country.