The “Big Lie” Convention

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The Republicans’ virtual convention got off to a great start last night in galvanizing Trump’s base. But that, apparently, wasn’t its sole purpose. Speakers like Herschel Walker (the Trump-befriended Black football star), Governor and Ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott seemed bent on humanizing Trump and his party. They softened some hard edges—far more than Trump ever does or tries to do himself.

These effective speakers had to have had a bigger purpose in mind than just making Trump’s die-hards feel better about themselves. Doing that, after all, would produce no net new votes. So we can assume that someone among the night’s producers had in mind “broadening the base” for the run-up to the actual election. If so, the night posed a question that is existential not just for American democracy, but for any democracy in the Internet-electronic age: how much can Big Lies sway voters?

At the dawn of the electronic age, after radio but before television, Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels and Adolf Hitler invented the “Big Lie.” The question they posed was simple: could a bald lie, with little or no factual basis, be sold to a whole people with constant repetition by authority figures?

The answer they found was a resounding “yes.” The Nazis sold several Big Lies, but perhaps the most egregious involved German Jews.

Before Nazism, German Jews loved German culture, science, commerce and industry and were successful participants in them. But the Nazis’ lie portrayed them as spies, saboteurs and traitors, responsible for deliberately contributing to Germany’s economic carnage after losing World War I.

The result was the so-called “final solution,” in which Nazis systematically murdered six million German Jews and other “enemies of the people” in the Holocaust. One of many things that made this particular Big Lie so horrendous was that most of the people whose extermination the Nazis had used it to justify were not foreign enemies, but loyal German citizens. Many who had the means to do so declined to flee Germany in time because they just could not believe that their own government would treat them so.

All this may seem but history. Yet it’s hardly forgotten. Today, in a reformed and repentant Germany, golden paving stones recall the fates of all known victims of the Holocaust, engraved with their names and dates of deportation to the death camps. These stones lie in virtually every city, suburb, town and hamlet of modern Germany, testaments to the lethal power of Big Lies.

The Nazis drove their Big Lie to its horrible conclusion with the most primitive electronic media now in wide use: radio and film. TV hadn’t yet been invented. In addition, Goebbels made a big mistake: he aimed his propaganda too high, using the elite of pre-war Germany’s sophisticated film and theater, rather than aiming his lies at the working masses.

The Nazis could sell this catastrophic Big Lie to the German people with only radio and film, and by aiming above most of the German public’s heads. How much better could Trump and the GOP do with television, cable, the Internet and social media to play with, let alone with Fox’ moron pundits and the likes of Limbaugh and Carlson, who aim their lies directly at the intelligence and ire of ordinary, non-college-educated workers? That, my friends, is the existential question posed by the first night of the Republicans’ virtual convention, if not by the rest of it, too.

The Big Lies the Convention served up are pretty easy to identify. In rough order of importance to a hypothetical rational electorate, there are five.

First, it lied that Trump gave us the Obama Expansion, rather than slow it down by unneeded tax cuts for the rich, failing to rebuild our infrastructure, a counterproductive trade war in China, and (most recently) failing to fight the pandemic first. Second, it lied that Trump fought the virus promptly and effectively, rather than blaming it on China, saying it would “go away,” refusing for months to force production of PPE, tests and ventilators under the Defense Production Act, disclaiming all responsibility for a coordinated federal response, forcing premature opening of businesses (causing spikes in contagion), and recommending untried and even farcical cures like hydroxychloroquine and ingesting bleach.

The other three Big Lies are closer to Hitler’s fateful lie about German Jews. The third tars Black people and their sympathizers of all races as promoting violence and “carnage” in American cities, when all they want is to stop wanton police violence against innocent Black people, or violence grossly out of proportion to their offenses. The fourth paints Joe Biden, who was chosen as candidate precisely for his moderate, incremental, non-threatening approach, as “far-left” radical who will promote violence, revolution and “socialism” (the last after he beat Bernie Sanders precisely on that issue). The fifth Big Lie is simple and concrete: it’s that Biden, who has repeatedly and publicly repudiated and disavowed defunding the police, has really made doing so part of his platform.

What gives these Big Lies their existential menace is not just their substantive importance. Lies have always been a part of electoral politics. It’s the phalanx of private and invisible actors who stand behind some or all of them: Fox, Sinclair, Limbaugh, Carlson, and legions of domestic and foreign trolls, spooks, political operatives and Lenin’s well-named “useful idiots.” Other, far more powerful private individuals, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, spread the Big Lies for profit, or claim they can’t profitably stop them.

Today’s Big Lies are not only unprecedented in the number and power of their spreaders; they are unique in scope. When the Nazis told their Big Lies, they knew they were deluding the people. They justified doing so for the recovery and greater glory of a Germany then suffering the economic pain of the Weimar Inflation—the worst developed-nation inflation in human history.

In contrast, today’s Big Liars pretend to be creating “our own reality,” as Dubya and Cheney described their enterprise. They think that, if enough people come to credit their Big Lies, they can become as good as Truth. With Trump, it’s hard to tell what he really believes, but it often seems he believes at least many of his 20,000 lies and misleading statements.

This has never happened before, except in George Orwell’s dystopian novels. Yet it’s precisely Donald Trump’s modus operandi and the reason he sits in the White House. For him, as for Hitler and his crew, Big Lies have been a successful electoral strategy.

Our First Amendment is helpless against this tide of lies. Its theory is that Truth will emerge from a cacophony of competing voices. But human society never had to deal with a system in which every person with an Internet connection, including our President, can serve up his own Big Lies with practical impunity.

The relentless advance of technology will only make it easier to produce Big Lies—and “fake news” to back them up—with greater and greater verisimilitude. In a few years, it will become impossible even for the smartest experts to distinguish fake video from the real thing, at least by examining the video alone. You might have to be an all-seeing historian just to know what’s real and what’s not.

This is the existential threat to democracy, not to mention any rational society, that Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys present. It’s the same threat that Orwell foresaw in fiction most of a century ago. But today it’s real, and its technology and power are all on the side of the Big Liars.

If you want to know why authoritarian governments are growing worldwide like grass after a spring rain, it’s not some mystery of history. Their spread has coincided almost exactly with the spread and dominance of the Internet and social media.

It’s not that common citizens in countries as diverse as China, Egypt, Hungary, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, and Turkey have suddenly become sheep. It’s that strong men everywhere understand that Big Lies are the political analogues of nuclear weapons in the Internet Age. They want them for their own, and they want to control others’ Big Lies, not to mention truths, by hobbling the Internet.

Whether human democracy can survive this onslaught, or whether George Orwell was a real-life Cassandra, remains to be seen. It’s one of many things that, as Biden said, are on the ballot this fall. It may be the one that matters most.

P.S. Watching PBS Newshour’s coverage of the first night of the Republicans’ convention was sobering. You could see on the analysts’ faces their appreciation, if not awe, at how slickly effective many speakers’ Big Lies were.

All talk of an easy Biden victory had vanished by the evening’s end. But, surprisingly, no one mentioned the elephant in the room: the fact that much of the slickness arose from boldly stated Big Lies. Maybe no one saw the elephant; maybe we’ve all, including hardened journalists, become inured to “truthiness.” If so, that bodes ill for the election and our collective future.

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