Public Policy Polling has been peeking
under the low brow of the American public again, and found that a great many Trump supporters live in a different United States than do
their countrymen.
The survey found that 67% of Trump voters believe the
unemployment rate went up during Barack Obama presidency, when in fact it has dropped dramatically.
It found that 39% of Trump voters believe the stock market has gone down under
Obama when in fact the Dow Jones has nearly tripled since the start of the
Great Recession. PPP found that 40% of Trump voters believe he won the popular
vote, even though Clinton received roughly 2.7 million more votes than he did.
And 60% of Trump voters apparently believe “millions” of illegal ballots were
cast for Clinton in 2016, in the absence of any evidence to that effect.
PPP explains this in part by what it calls “a cult like aspect to Trump’s support, in which his
supporters believe anything he tells them because it is him telling it. The
phenomenon has been blamed on the right-wing media bubble, on tribalism (the
arrangement facts serves the same function as feathers or paint in identifying
other members), on mistrust of the mainstream media. I suspect a lot of people
find the assertion of comforting untruths to be therapeutic. Their imagined
America explains their own decline by framing themselves as victims of a larger
dysfunction.
Yes, people have always believed what they want to believe,
have always sought out facts – and if necessary created them – to buttress
their world view. (In high school, all those years ago, I read Richard
Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which I in my youth mistook
as history and not journalism.
I confess I have been among the many who used to
laugh this off, like gradeschoolers
deriding a classmate who still believes Santa Claus is real. But this is scary,
folks. These people have the vote, which makes them a thousand times more dangerous
than some lone loony with high-capacity magazine and a grudge.
This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2016.
