The thrilling idea was that Trump, in his unprecedented awfulness, had at last opened a window of opportunity for revolution. Never had the Left been able to sell itself to many voters as an improvement on what they had. Even in the time of George W. Bush, who was pretty bad, there was no market to speak of for anything beyond center-left. The True Left had by then put down roots in the wilderness, where it ran a sort of alternative Christmas shop offering jeremiads year-round. Now, suddenly, jeremiads were in. This was either the end of democracy or the prelude to an election cycle in which anyone should be able to defeat the incumbent and his collaborators. To the Left, that prospect was a mesmerizing light in the sky, a sign that might appear once in many lifetimes. When conditions were right for anyone to win control of the US Government, the Left had a chance. The day had come to spring out of the wilderness and take the tide at the flood.
Each new low in Trump's behavior heightened the illusion of opportunity, not to say destiny. For illusion is what it was. America was in a fine political ferment, but it didn't follow that the status of the Left had changed. As we continue to see, widespread loathing of a figure like Donald Trump does not entail a newfound affinity with Marx-adjacent intellectuals. Discontent with a deepening Gilded Age does not entail a proletarian spirit of revolution. The popularity of policy ideas found on the leftist agenda does not entail openness to the agenda as packaged and sold by people better known for niche preoccupations, tone-deaf slogans, social vigilantism, and a dim view of America.
Meanwhile, more than four in ten Americans were being drawn into the vortex of a competing illusion: that hallucinatory world to which Trump's mountebank show was the entrance. It resembled nothing so much as a carnival midway, where coarse spiels and insistent tunes can excite you against your better judgement even in daylight. When night falls and garish lights come on, better judgement recedes as into a past life.
In the beginning was the Lie. There was Donald Trump's master-businessman persona, crafted with his father's connivance to disguise a career of blundering and irresponsibility; an imposture that Trump rehearsed in New York City before dinning it into the nationwide audience of a television show. Next came his brazen falsity as a political actor. He promoted the canard that Barack Obama was not a US citizen by birth. In his own run for president, he kept up a deceitful patter that dovetailed with lies purveyed by internet trolls (including agents of a Russian disinformation campaign). From the moment of his inauguration, he turned the presidency into a theater of make-believe. The common politician's laxity with truth paled beside Trump's assault on the fabric of reality. He apparently knew, in spite of himself, that reality at such an altitude of public life was a medium in which a man like him could save face only by constant disruption. Surrounded by people far more intelligent, competent, and disciplined than he, Trump had to show that intelligence, competence, and discipline counted for nothing against a charmed life.
And then there was QAnon. It was by no means the genesis of crackpot conspiracy theories, but it became their apotheosis for millions. No pot was ever so intriguingly cracked as the cranium of Q. No witch's brew was ever so turbid and thus so satisfactory to the imagination. You could go on for the rest of your life grappling with its riddles, teasing out its possibilities, burrowing through its dead ends, and savoring the freemasonry with its other believers. Where does the movement stand now? On May 27, 2021, The New York Times reported that a poll released on that day showed QAnon to be as popular among Americans as some major religions. Less than two weeks later, the Forbes article "'Q' Hasn't Posted In Six Months – But Some QAnon Followers Still Keep the Faith" stated,
Many QAnon believers lost faith after January 20, when President Joe Biden was inaugurated and their big day, predictably, never came. Since then, some have proposed new dates for when Trump will be reinstated, a conspiracy the former president reportedly has embraced.
The person known only as Q and claiming to be a "government insider" is, or was, what amounts to the high priest of a cult. Q fell silent soon after the US election of 2020. The reports cited here leave it unclear whether the cult is fading away or settling in, especially in view of the Forbes writer's observation that
Most Q activity has moved underground after social media companies cracked down on the conspiracy in January following the Capitol riot. A report published by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Lab last month concluded that QAnon content is "evaporating" from the mainstream Web.
The author of a book on QAnon interviewed for the Forbes article, Mike Rothschild, said he thought the latest "drop" (message) from Q, posted on December 8, 2020, would be the last, "since the Q movement has outgrown the need for new drops." That sounds more like settling in than fading away.
"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds," declared Edmund Burke. He didn't live to see QAnon, a farrago of sick imaginings that makes superstition look like the caprice of hale and hearty minds. Nor could he have foreseen the crowd of madnesses that now vie for pride of place in our forum. The selection is wide in itself. Compared with the belief that there's a Satanist cabal of elite liberal pedophiliac cannibals running the world, the mere belief that Donald Trump can fix things or that America is due for a socialist awakening is nothing to be ashamed of. But that's faint praise. Americans need healthier alternatives; at least the examples of sane liberals with the self-assurance to brush off bad company and sane conservatives who can harry their captors effectively.
Our forum is also crowded with great problems. Some, such as climate change or infectious disease, exist in a separate dimension from belief. We must meet them there. Social problems test our ability to reason together conscientiously. When problem-solving entails moral choices, we're obliged to consult a moral compass. All of this presupposes that we operate on principles more common and constant — and humbling — than our passions or our visions. It presupposes that we're not only in touch with reality but working with it, trying to make things thrive in it.
In our time, bodies of illusion have become like cloud banks that stretch across the American sky until they meet, overcasting the reality on the ground and charging the air with static. Reality remains, and wise people continue to work with it, but the clouds impose a sickening atmosphere and a distorting light on everything. The aggregations of people that embody the illusions form an arbitrary political elite.
The label rightist hardly suits an aggregation so crudely partisan that political content becomes secondary. However, it will do. The main opposing aggregation is leftist enough but similarly tribalistic beneath its veneer of intellectuality. Rightists immerse themselves in fluid certitude. Leftists jump jerkily between modes of self-justification: they know the will of the people; if you fault their unpopular ways, you're a defender of the status quo; progressive advocacy is a higher calling than electoral politics; mind you, the electorate is progressive at heart and only awaits more stirring advocacy. As a last resort, or even a first, there’s always the what-about dodge. ("You object to anti-Semitism at Southern Cal? What about settler colonialism in Palestine?")
White-nationalist rightists don't care whether they have a majority of Americans with them or not (having been led to believe that a majority juggernaut of Others is coming to run them down). The nascent effort to understand non-white conservatives and moderates, which could help us view the political scene realistically, runs up against the pat leftist response that such people don't know what's good for them. Theorists and activists for far-left movements long ago acquired a mental mechanism that accounts for any diversity of opinion among their intended constituents as the product of an enemy's divide-and-conquer strategy. Today that mechanism meshes with other cogs of a similar stamp to keep a new history always in the making in leftist minds. Rightists have their mental maelstrom. Leftists have their mental clockwork.
Seldom has America needed the best efforts of clear, free minds as it does now. Never have clear, free minds been overshadowed by bodies of illusion as they are now. Up among the cloud banks, the defense of Valhalla contends with the epoch of social revolution. Down in reality, tillers of the fields work in wintry darkness but also record-breaking heat. And no relief in sight.
