How One Era of Big Lies Gave Way to the Next
May 13, 2021
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It’s now a done deal. The GOP is Trump’s. With theouster of Liz Cheneyfrom the GOP leadership — formally — the cycle is now complete. The GOP is a party, a movement, an ideology that belongs to Trump — and to Trumpism. There’s a good — or rather, bad, ominous, and frightening — reason for that. I’ll come to that. What I want to talk about is this. The GOP is now becoming America’s Taliban, ISIS, Nazi Party, in a very, very real way. I want to explain precisely how — the vicious cycle of collapse that marks out fascists parties throughout history. It happens through Four Big Lies, and we’re going to trace them together.
Don’t cry for Liz Cheney. You should see her as a figure that represents a vicious cycle: how one level of American folly, hubris, violence, and greed gave way to another, how one era’s Big Lie became the next. Liz Cheney is Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter. You remember — the warmonger who, in retaliation for 9/11, set in motion an endless waragainst the wrong country.
That’s not some kind of point scoring. I want you to understand the vicious cycle of American collapse — and Republicanism imploding into fascism — in intimate detail.This — Trumpism, fascism, becoming a Taliban, ISIS, Nazi Party — is thenatural, inevitable endpointof American conservatism. It is wherea movement founded on Big Liesends up — with the biggest, most violent liars telling the biggest lies taking it over wholesale.
Let me explain. Remember that fake war onthe wrong country? What started it? A Big Lie. One told by Cheney, over and over again. Saddam has WMDs. Saddam didn’t have WMDs. Saddam didn’t have anything to do with 9/11. Whether or not you think ousting him was a good or bad idea isn’t the point. It’s to recognise that even in the Dick Cheney era, the GOPwas a party of Big Lies.
Again, that’s not point scoring. I want you to understand a certain truth that American media seems incurious to explore and reluctant to explain. And it goes much much deeper than merely telling a Big Lie to start a fake war.Modern conservatism is founded on and grounded in a series of Big Lies.
What’s the most formative and elemental — the Big Lie thatanchors the rest? Well, the first Big Lie goes like this. The key to having a modern society is for peoplenotto invest in each other. Let the private sector take care of everything. People, after all, are just consumers, and everything in society — from healthcare to retirement to education — is just a commodity.
That Big Lie produced the following social contract. America has shockingly, astoundingly low levels of public investment.Just 15% of it’s economy. In Canada and Europe, by comparison, the level of public investment as a share of GDP is50%. Why do Canadians and Europeans enjoy all those basic human rights and grand social institutions they’re renowned across the world for — the ones that give them the world’shighest living standards, ever, way, way higher than Americans? Things like healthcare, retirement, childcare, education, income, for all, universally? Because half the economy is public investment — more thantriplewhat it is in America.
Now, I said this — the idea that we can have a prosperous, or even functional, modern society, with incredibly low levels of public investment, the bare minimum we can get away with — is a Big Lie. That might sound harsh to you, so let me explain why I say it.
We have what economists and social scientists call an “existence proof” right before our eyes.In plain English, that means we can see this theory of American economics — let the private sector provide everything, because public investment is a wasteful “leaky bucket” — iscompletely false. We only have to glance at the modern world for a moment to see it completely disproven. What disproves this central theory of American economics? Europe and Canada do.
If the idea that low levels of public investment created high living standards and a successful society wastrue, then Europe and Canada would be the failing states, while Americans would enjoy happy, healthy, prosperous lives.Completely the opposite is the case.
What’s our responsibility as mature adults? Educated, sane, thinking people? To learn.From the facts. Europe and Canada’s success — while America’s been turning into a failing state isn’t anewthing. It’s been going on since at least the 1980s. In other words, this great global trend has been true for decades now.
And yet the GOPdoesn’t learn. Ithasn’t learned. And that’s how this is a Big Lie — this idea that “small government” is going to set Americans free.If you ask a Canadian or European if living at the mercy of a job, having to pay your life savings for healthcare, never being able to retire, dying in unpayable debt isfreedom, they’ll look at you like you’re crazy. They’re right. Americans aren’t free in any meaningful sense anymore — they’re more like wage slaves or neoserfs, their choices basically reduced to what kind of degradation they have to suffer to earn enough money to pay the bills this month, for things, like insulin, which are kept artificially scarce.
If you’re an adult, you have a responsibility. When the facts prove a truth about the world, youchange your mind. If you can’t do that, you are lying.To yourself, to everyone around you, to the world. What do we call people like that?Ideologues.
The GOP became a party of ideological fanaticism long, long ago. It wasn’t with Trump’s election. It was — at least in the modern frame — when it began to tell this first Big Lie, that “small government” aka nonexistent public investment is the key to having a prosperous modern society. In 1980, when Reagan was elected, that might have just been a simple mistake. But by 1990, when it was obvious it wasfalse, it was alie.
Again, that might sound harsh, so let me re-emphasize the reason I put it this way. I want you to understand how the GOP’s inevitable culmination was to end up captured by a figure like Trump, become a movement or party that was the equivalent of America’s ISIS or Taliban. It wasn’t magic, it wasn’t a coincidence. It was fate, set in stone decades ago, by the transformation into ideological fanaticism. It was becoming wedded to Big Lies, which can only end in one place — the biggest, dumbest, greediest, most violent liar, at the top of such a movement and party. Americans seem to think that the GOP becoming this wretched thing is some kind of anomaly. It’s not. It’sdestiny.
What Big Lie was the Big Lie of small government founded on and grounded in? Why did, around 1980, Republicans start telling the Big Lie that “small government” was how to build a functioning, successful society?Because of what had happened in the 1970s.
The 1970s were America’s great era of civil rights and progress.Until 1971, maybe 1973 depending on how you look at it, America was the world’s largest apartheid state.Americans hate it when I say that, which is only a measure of how reluctant they are to really understand their own history.
And by 1980, a massive, massive backlash to all the civil rights gains of the 1970s was brewing in white America. White America didn’t want to live in an equal society. “Small government” was code for “I don’t have to pay for those dirty, filthy people’s healthcare, education, retirement. Why, their grandparents were my grandpappy’s slaves!”
White America chose not to invest publicly even if it meant not having basics like healthcareitself. That ishow deep the animosityto really living in a society of true equals ran.
It’s crucial to understand this point if you really want to understand America.You see, white America’s choice not to invest in things like healthcare or retirement — but to deny them to everyone, including itself, because it didn’t want minorities to have them has a telling and crucial timing. It happenedbeforethe white working and middle class began to fall apart.
White American made the choice to deny all of society basics in1980. That was when the white working and middle class was still doingwell. We can’t therefore turn around, like pundits do, and blame it on later decline — “Oh, they’re angry because they’re not doing well.” The causality is precisely the opposite. White America was doing well — until it believed the Big Lie of small government, built on the Big Lie of prejudice and bigotry — andthatis when it began to decline.
So what happened was that by believing the Big Lie of small government — which was founded on the Big Lie of prejudice and bigotry — white working and middle class Americadestroyed itself.
What do I mean by that? Just think about the average American’s life now.Because everything is privatized, he or she has to pay astronomical sums that the rest of the world actually can’t believe, just for basics. Hundreds of thousands for healthcare, maybe millions, as much as a home to educate a kid. Bang. White working and middle class America was doing much, much better before it decided to deny everything to everyone — including itself.
But when it made the decision — in 1980, with the Reaganite backlash to the civil rights gains of the 1970s — to deny everyone, including itself basics, that everything should beprivate, and nothing should bepublic, it set off a chain reaction of ruin. Fast forward a few decades, and by 2010 or so, the middle class was beginning to cease to exist. And that was because even White America was paying massive, massive sums it couldn’t afford, for all these privatised basics, whether healthcare (“health insurance”), retirement (“401ks”), childcare (nonexistent), and so on.
As a result, white America’s fortunes imploded. Along with everyone else’s.But white America was different. It had been taught to expect upward mobility. That it was entitled to money and power over everyone else and a better than life than its grandparents. None of this turned out to be true. And so it reacted in rage and violence, choosing Trump.
That is how you get to Trumpism.That’s why it was inevitable that the GOP was going to become America’s Taliban or ISIS. Do you see the links yet? Let me sum them up concisely. The GOP’s told people three Big Lies over the decades — and one has ledinevitably to the next. In a vicious cycle ofconservatism becoming fascism.
Around 1980, the GOP began to tell the Big Lie of Supremacy and Selfishness.The idea that you didn’t have to support anyone else as an equal if you didn’t “want” to, because, hey, you were the master race, after all, and you could go on nursing your grudges. That became the Big Lie of Small Government — I could deny you healthcare and retirement and so on, and call myself moral, just because I went to church every Sunday, never mind the fact that I’d basicallyleft you to die.
The first Big Lie — the Big Lie of Selfishness and Supremacy — was told by Reagan, who nursed White America’s grudges, and told them it was OK to go on being resentful and mean-spirited and cruel, and encode all that into a social contract of “self-reliance” and so forth. This was the 1980s.
That Big Lie became the next one — the Big Lie of Spite, or Small Government. By the 1990s, America was a place where even a Democratic President — Bill Clinton — couldn’t create a public healthcare system or retirement system or any kind of public institution, because the idea of small government had become a sacred cow. But it wasalreadyproven false — you only had to look at how well Canadians and Europeans were doing, relative to Americans, whose lives were beginning to — just look at Gen X then — stagnate and go nowhere.
This was the era — and Big Lie of folks like Cheney, and it’s why you shouldn’t cry for Liz Cheney. She played a decisive role in American collapse, too, telling her era’s own Big Lie that would become the next, even worse one. How so?
ThatBig Lie became the next one.When small government, built on selfishness didn’t create a functional prosperous society — but instead the bizarre paradox of the world’s first poor rich country, a nation that was supposed to be rich, but instead had exploding poverty, an imploding middle class, skyrocketing suicide and despair — what was the GOP left to do? It had only two choices? One, admit it was wrong to begin with, and that the first two beliefs had been lies, or at least huge, huge mistakes.Or double down again, with an even Bigger Lie.
All that led to the third Big Lie — the Big Lie of Hate. Who was responsible for White America’s declining fortunes? Not White America, which was stupid enough to believe the first two Big Lies, which had led to it’s own ruin. It waseveryone else. Immigrants, refugees, foreigners, aliens, women, gays, anyone different, even little babies, who were put intoconcentration camps.
This Even Bigger Lie is one which it’sstilltelling.All those hated minorities are what is really responsible for White America’s declining fortunes — not White America believing the Big Lies of Selfishness and Spite. It’s not White America’s own fault its lives fell apart — nope, its the fault of all those demonised scapegoats, whether black joggers, or little Mexican babies.
That’s the Big Lie of Hate — it’s those scapegoats fault, not your own, that your life fell apart. Nope, it’s not because you were dumb enough to believe in the first set of Big Lies — you’re perfect, pure in blood and faith. It’stheirfault. Hate them. They aren’t really human beings at all.
Hence, “the election was stolen from us.” Who’s “us”? White America. The pure and true. The “real” ones, the ones to whom the promised land belongs.And to the first few Big Lies, too. The election was stolen from us, the idea that spite and selfishness are going to lead us upwards, not into the abyss. If you believe in the Big Lies of Spite, Supremacy, Selfishness, and Hate — then of course you’re going to think “the election was stolen.” All this — the land, its purity, its bounty, all its harvests, all its prosperity, everything on it — has alwaysbelonged to you.
The GOP was always going to become American’s Taliban or ISIS. These four Big Lies — selfishness, supremacy, spite, hate — they’re exactly what every fascist movement in history has always told.The GOP has always had a choice, though — to admit its mistakes, act like adults, own up, and change course. It never has, not once. The Reagans didn’t do it, and neither did the Cheneys, and neither did the Romneys. Every era’s Republicans believed, bought into, and told their Big Lies. And each era’s Big Lies led to the next, compounding and igniting the cycle of American collapse.
It was always going to end here. If, one day, the Republicans want to grow up and act like adults — who change their minds when the facts prove them wrong — then let me know. Until then, the chilling truth is this:70% of Republicans still believeall these Big Lies, and 100% of them believe at least one of them. That is a social movement large, foolish, and dangerous enough to go on reacting in rage, violence, greed, and stupidity,until a society is collapsing, in perpetuity.
UmairMay 2021
