Republicans Can’t Handle the Truth
You
shouldn’t be surprised that they’re still backing Trump.
By Paul
Krugman
Opinion
Columnist
- Dec. 7, 2020
President Trump’s continuing attempts
to overturn an election he lost decisively more than a month ago is, like so
much of what he’s done in office, shocking but not surprising. Who imagined
that he would go quietly?
What some people may not have been fully
prepared for is the way Trump’s party as a whole has backed his dangerous
delusions. According to a survey by The Washington Post, only 27
Republican members of Congress are willing to say that Joe Biden
won. Despite the complete lack of evidence of significant fraud, two-thirds of
self-identified Republicans said in a Reuters/Ipsos poll that the election was rigged.
But you really shouldn’t be surprised
by this willingness to indulge malicious, democracy-endangering lies. After
all, when was the last time Republicans accepted a politically inconvenient
fact? It has been clear for years that the modern G.O.P. is a party that can’t
handle the truth.
Most obviously,
Republican refusal to accept the election results follows months of refusal to
acknowledge the dangers of the coronavirus, even as Covid-19 has become the
nation’s leading cause of death, and even as a startling number of people in Trump’s orbit have
been infected.
Sure enough, virus denial and vote
denial converged almost perfectly on Saturday, when Trump addressed a
large, mostly unmasked crowd in Georgia — creating a
potential superspreader event — and demanded that the governor overturn the
state’s election results. The next day Rudy Giuliani, who has been directing
Trump’s efforts to cling to office, was hospitalized with the virus.
The thing is, Republican rejection of
reality didn’t start in 2020, or even with the Trump era. Climate change denial
— including claims that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by an
international cabal of scientists — has been a badge of partisan identity for
many years. Crazy
conspiracy theories about
the Clintons were mainstream on the right through much of the 1990s.
And one half-forgotten episode in
particular seems to me to have foreshadowed much of what we’re seeing right
now: Republican reactions to the mostly successful introduction of Obamacare.
The Affordable Care Act went into full
effect in 2014, amid dire predictions by Republicans. The act, they
claimed, would drive insurance premiums sky-high, fail to reduce the number of
uninsured, and have a devastating effect on employment.
None of that
happened. Instead, millions of Americans gained health insurance coverage. Job creation continued, with three
million jobs added
in the year following the A.C.A.’s implementation. Obamacare may have fallen
somewhat short of its sponsors’ hopes (although nobody expected it to yield
universal coverage), but from the beginning it helped many Americans, and was
nothing like the disaster opponents predicted.
As far as I can tell, however, no
prominent Republican was willing to admit that the party’s apocalyptic warnings
had been proved false, let alone talk about why they were wrong. Nor, of
course, did Republicans make any effort to come up with a better health plan.
(It has been almost 11 years since Obamacare was signed into law, and we’re
still waiting.) Instead, party leaders simply pretended that the promised
catastrophe had, in fact, materialized.
For example, John Boehner, the speaker
of the House at the time, insisted that there had been a “net loss”
of people with health insurance. After that three million-job gain, Jeb Bush
(remember him?) insisted that Obamacare was “the greatest job suppressor in the so-called recovery.”
And in a move that prefigured the Trump
team’s desperate attempts to find evidence for election fraud, right-wing
groups went in search of health
care horror stories,
tales of ordinary Americans devastated by Obamacare.
To be fair, while there is no evidence
of significant electoral fraud, some people really were hurt by health reform —
mainly young, healthy individuals who previously had cheap policies and made
too much money to be eligible for subsidies. But these weren’t the victims
Republicans were looking for. Instead, they peddled tales of older,
working-class Americans who supposedly had lost access to affordable insurance.
None of these tales stood up to
scrutiny. But that didn’t matter to the G.O.P. As I wrote
at the time,
Republicans had already — pre-Trump — entered the era of post-truth politics.
Now, there’s
obviously a big difference in immediate impact between refusing to accept
evidence that contradicts your policy preconceptions and refusing to accept the
results of an election. But the mind-set is the same.
The point is that once a party gets
into the habit of rejecting facts it doesn’t want to hear, one fact it’s bound
to reject sooner or later is the fact that it lost an election. In that sense
there’s a straight line from, say, the Republican embrace of climate denial to
the party’s willingness to go along with Trump’s attempts to retain power.
And the G.O.P.’s previous history of
dealing with inconvenient reality gives us a pretty good idea about when the
party will accept Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election —
namely, never.
Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist
since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New
York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
