You can't reason with a fanatic

 

It seems incredible that it's taken me this long to accept the obvious.

I've always known that you can't reason with Trump supporters because if they were susceptible to reason, they wouldn't be Trump supporters in the first place. But it wasn't until the aftermath of the recent election that I realized how very seriously even the apparently sanest of them take their citizenship in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Can you steal a presidential election? Sure, under certain circumstances, if the vote is close enough and you have conspirators in exactly the right positions in exactly the right states. But despite the half-hearted accusations that are occasionally made in the wake of close elections, it's a pretty tall order, and accusations generally come down to single states. Claims of multi-state conspiracies are inherently hard to take seriously because they would be so unwieldy, difficult to coordinate, and, most importantly, difficult to protect from discovery.

People talked about Illinois having been stolen after the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon contest, even though flipping Illinois to Nixon wouldn't have changed the outcome.  Florida was the focus after the Bush-Gore tilt in 2000; obviously, Florida's outcome was destined to decide the election. Even though the Bush-Kerry dustup wasn't really that close- Bush won by four points- there was grumbling among Democrats that there had been funny business in Ohio, some of it involving voting machines (Republicans laughed at the suggestion that Diebold machines were systematically rigged in Ohio- and, as it turned out, rightly so). Flipping Ohio in 2004 would have thrown the election to John Kerry. But as it turned out, there wasn't any real evidence of fraud. With some grumbling, Kerry and the Democrats accepted the outcome like grownups.

Interestingly, I don't recall any talk of the very close Nixon-Humphrey election of 1968- until 2016 and 2020, probably the most fraught political year in modern history- having been stolen. And the 1880 election, which featured what to this day was the closest popular vote outcome in American history (James Garfield defeated Winfield Scott Hancock by only 10,000 votes nationwide), didn't produce anything like the whining we see this year. That's all the more remarkable because four years before, a presidential election actually had been stolen, at least in a sense.

Historians agree that Democrat Samuel Tilden of New York actually defeated Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. But it was Hayes who became president due to a post-election bargain between Republicans and Southern Democrats to trade the White House to remove occupation troops from the South. 1876 was an exception to the rule that it's only practical to steal an election when the vote is close in a single state that will decide the election. There was no need for the corrupt bargain that decided the election of 1876 to be concealed because the Republicans and the Democrats were both parties to it. It's all the more remarkable that Gov. Tilden took it as well as he did, having been stabbed in the back by his own party. But instead of complaining, he remarked that he really had the best of both worlds: the honor of having been elected President by his fellow Americans, without the burdens and worries of actually having to do the job! America itself may well have been the loser when the deal was stuck that kept Sam Tilden out of the White House.

But coordinating a multi-state conspiracy to steal an election on Election Day itself would be a trick it would be all but impossible to pull off without detection. That's the first reason why any rational observer would be suspicious of MAGAland's whining about 2020.

The second is that there is literally no evidence of fraud and no reason to think any occurred other than a sheeplike willingness to take anything a psychologically disturbed outgoing president might say at face value. State election officials of both parties and even foreign observers came to the same conclusion: the only problems seem to have been the kind of minor, isolated incidents about which there are anecdotal reports in every election- except this time, there appear to have been fewer of them than usual. The Trump campaign's specific claims (to the extent that it felt it necessary to actually make specific charges) have been completely discredited. 

The inherent absurdity of Sidney Powell's claim about magical Venezualan voting machines switching  Trump votes to Biden is the third reason to disbelieve Trump's claim. That claim is so bizarre that even the Trump campaign disassociated itself from her. Yet the thoroughly discredited, utterly nonsensical claims about a "stolen election," often still using the very discredited assertions pushed by Powell and ultra-right-wing source OAN, persists anyway, in the absence of any sane reason to question the election's outcome.

When confronted with the complete lack of evidence that there was anything fishy about the election result, the conspiracy-mongers replied that the Trump team was saving the evidence for the courts. The courts have now heard the Trump campaign's lawyers- and it turned out that they didn't have any evidence after all. So the courts simply dismissed the Trump lawsuits, in many cases rebuking his legal team for wasting their time.
A final embarrassment, I suspect, awaits the president when the Supreme Court, whose transformation from marginally progressive to solidly conservative is his one arguable achievement, nevertheless treats his whining the same way.

It's unseemly. It's embarrassing. Mr. Trump's psychological problems render him incapable of embarrassment, and so sheeplike are many of his followers that they continue to argue discredited point after discredited point even now. The stolen election myth will become like all the other ludicrous conspiracy theories Mr. Trump has supported over the years, from "trutherism" to "birtherism" to everything in between. No, 9/11 was not an "inside job." No, Barack Obama was not born in Kenya.  And no, the 2020 election was not stolen. The American people simply turned up at the polls in unprecedented numbers to correct the accident whereby an immature, mentally unstable, stubbornly ignorant pathological liar won the presidency by a geographical fluke despite being rejected by a majority of the American people.

Since then, he has become the first president since the invention of polling, never once to have had an approval rating of over 50%, a mark he managed to reach only twice before falling back to his normal pattern of being about nine percentage points underwater. It should surprise nobody that he lost; the real surprise is that his defeat margin was by several points less than that!

 He will never admit that he was beaten fair and square; Donald Trump is incapable of being a "loser," the thing in all the world he detests the most. And no matter how great the evidence, most of his supporters won't believe it either. After all, they're his supporters because many of them are also conspiracy theorists, and conspiracy theorists are by definition oblivious to facts and logic.

This is why they insist, in the absence of any reason to think so, that it was stolen from Trump by some sort of conspiracy.

The truth is that all of us, finally, believe what we want to believe. Normally intelligent, rational, mentally healthy, and honest people stop believing things, however reluctantly, when they become convinced that they are simply not true. But one cannot convince a fanatic or a narcissist, and that brings me to the point I've reached in the past few days, as so people I was sure were intelligent and sane and fundamentally honest nevertheless doubled down on the lunatic right's crazy, baseless conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

You can't reason with crazy, so I've decided to stop trying.

Charlie Sykes and Tom Nichols had an hour-long discussion recently on The Bulwark podcast about dealing with the family's conspiracy theorists at Thanksgiving dinner if one's family had one. And Charlie is right: there is only one way to deal with the craziness: "Uncle Joe, you're wrong, and somewhere inside you know that you're wrong, and I'm not going to play the game. I'm not going to take this craziness seriously enough to try to argue you out of it. Pass the mashed potatoes."

The craziness of fanatics is validated by being argued with. Whatever psychological need is met by espousing a conspiracy theory is gratified in no small measure by the simple fact that its assertion encounters resistance. As someone once said, a person cannot be reasoned out of what he or she was never reasoned into in the first place. And while it's a hard lesson for many of us to learn, we can't "fix" fanatics.  The only person we can change is ourselves.

Hence, my new policy for dealing with the denizens of TrumpWorld- or, for that matter, the equally fanatical authoritarians on the "woke" left I might happen to encounter. I will refuse to respond to them or interact with them as I would with a reasonable person or treat their delusions as I would treat a rational proposition.

I will not play the game.

I will refuse to take them seriously, clarify that I cannot take them seriously, and decline to have the conversation. It might not shame them out of their folly, but they can't be argued out of it, either, and this way is probably better for my blood pressure. On the other hand, who knows? Maybe if enough of us treat them that way, it will begin to dawn on them that they are making asses of themselves. And if not, their craziness is no longer my problem.