MANY THINGS CONSIDERED: The Politics of Denial

There is a famous – or infamous – photo from the Stalin Era where Soviet propaganda masters doctored a photo to eliminate from history a person the Ultimate Leader wanted to erase.

It’s a metaphor for the current propaganda masters in charge of what was once the American government.

Stalin and another guy and then (poof) just Stalin

The Trump Administration is into erasure.

They have stripped the Justice Department website of information about the convicted insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capital on January 6, 2021. They are trying to make sure any record of this administration’s crimes and corruption doesn’t survive beyond January 2029. Grants to study history have been suspended. The East Wing is rubble with the explanation for why an absolute fable. The Fox News weekend host heading the U.S. military has essentially banned journalists from covering the Pentagon.

You may have wondered why there is so little first hand reporting on the American military “excursion” in the Persian Gulf. Unlike other American wars, say World War II, the Iraq War or Vietnam, when journalists were able to report from at, or near the frontlines, the Trump War is not be televised except when the propaganda masters make a grainy video available to Fox News or the president and his minions bloviate from the West Wing.

Trump’s wars will produce no Ernie Pyle or David Halberstam or Peter Arnett. There will be no independent reporting because authoritarian regimes don’t tolerate independence. The reportedly widespread damage to American military bases and equipment in the Middle East as a result of his undeclared war with Iran goes largely unreported because no American journalist is allowed to see what all Americans should see.

Except at the gas pump, or if you’re a farmer at the fertilizer supplier, the cost of the “excursion” is in no way documented. We have only the vaguest idea of what it is costing. A safe assumption is that it is costing several billion more than we’ve been told.

All this is just the way authoritarians like it.

But propaganda depends on more than just deleting someone from a photo or restricting access to information. To realize its full power the control of information requires a willful suspension of belief.

To believe propaganda in the midst of our current circumstances is to deny what can easily be seen with your own eyes. Just the way authoritarians like it.

And that brings me to the late senator from Texas, John Cornyn.

The predictable Texas massacre

Nearly everything important that can be said has been said about Cornyn’s miserable defeat in the Texas Republican primary this week, but I do want to underline – in the spirit of the title of this piece – how a decade (or more) of denial in the conservative movement found a four-term U.S. senator carry just two (2) of Texas’s 254 counties against an opponent credibly characterized as the most corrupt politican in the entire country. 1

Here’s the best thing I read about John Cornyn, from Texan Michael Wood:

I hope John Cornyn is remembered for what he is: an incompetent and cowardly senator who put himself before his country.

I texted a politico friend about Cornyn’s coming defeat, and the friend replied that, yes, Cornyn is a victim of the disease that has infected one of our country’s two major parties.

Victim? Oh no. John Cornyn is not and never was a victim. Actually, he has had more agency in our country’s existential fight against Trumpism than roughly 99.999% of Americans. In 2021 there were exactly 100 people who could have put this sad and sorry chapter of American history behind us for good, and in that moment John Cornyn hid behind Mitch McConnell’s skirt, who was himself hiding behind a completely contrived constitutional justification for letting Trump get away with an attempted coup—as if McConnell himself wasn’t the reason the Senate trial was delayed until after January 20.

Fifty-seven United States senators were able to do the right and obvious thing and voted to convict and bar that evil man from ever holding public office again, including seven Republican senators. John Cornyn, however, could not do what his oath of office required. I’m sure the senator was very lawyerly and eloquent in his explanation of why the man sitting in the seat of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln shouldn’t have been held responsible for the feces his mob spread all over the walls of our seat of government—but you know, and I know, and John Cornyn knows, that this little man didn’t want a primary challenge six freaking years later.

And yet again the world is shown the fruits of every Faustian bargain ever made: you sell your soul, and in the end you lose your soul without even getting the object of your desire.

Denial is more than a river in Egypt

To do what John Cornyn did – ignore Donald Trump’s deceit, his vileness around January 6, recognize him as profoundly unfit for the office, and then pander for his endorsement six years later – requires a level of denial of reality (not to mention a character deficit wider than the Rio Grande) that most of us would reject from a friend or family member.

America’s conservative party has become the Party of Denial. Cornyn is just the latest to find that by even willingly denying reality you can end up embarrassed, disgraced, and soon well forgotten.

Cornyn’s party is in denial about Trump’s war of choice of Iran and how it has stunningly rewrote the geopolitical script in the Middle East and beyond. They keep repeating the fiction about the economy and inflation.

They ignore or deny virtually every one of Trump’s authoritarian moves from the silly and costly ones – a “ceremonial” arch, for example – to the profoundly damaging ones – gutting the USAID, a move that almost certainly has killed thousands in developing countries and worsened an Ebola outbreak. I could go on and on.

Nothing to see here is the motto

And, in fairness, it’s not just MAGA world or those, like John Cornyn, trying to out fox Mar a Lago Man who willingly play the denial card.

Former first lady Jill Biden said she was “frightened” by her husband Joe Biden’s 2024 debate performance and thought he was having a stroke.

“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Jill Biden told CBS News Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver in an interview airing Sunday on CBS.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”

Please.

It took about a New York second for Jill Biden’s comment to end up on the ash heap of political history:

A former senior Biden campaign advisor told Politico that Jill Biden’s recent comments on her husband’s 2024 debate performance are “revisionist history.”

Said the person: “She and a handful of other close advisors around President Biden kept gaslighting us, telling those of us on the campaign we were the ones who were wrong, and that he just had a ‘bad night.’ I think she saw the reputational harm this caused her and is therefore taking a new position.”

The less-than-celebrated Democratic autopsy prepared following the 2024 election is largely more denial. Here’s some of what PBS said of the report:

The report is far from comprehensive, and it avoids some of the most critical factors in the 2024 race.

For example, it doesn’t address President Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term at 81, despite widespread concerns about his age. Biden dropped out after a faltering debate performance, and Harris was quickly anointed to replace him at the top of the ticket.

The content of the autopsy was “incomplete” because some too smart by half folks had to excuse their own denial. Meanwhile the handling of the report by the national party amounts to political malpractice.

Let me try to get beyond the Democratic denial, and the reality involved in a basic question: why can’t the Biden’s, and the Clinton’s for that matter, just go away?

All denial aside, Democrats lost the White House in 2024 because:

• Many Democrats willingly suspended belief about Joe Biden’s advanced age and how has decline was playing with most Americans. (Republicans are embracing the same denial with 80-year old Donald Trump.)
• They ignored the southern border issues and inflation, handing those images to Trump to distort and amplify.
• When Biden, who said, we should remember, that he would only serve one term, finally withdrew after his awful debate performance, the party tried to rally behind Vice President Kamala Harris instead of finding some way to capture the nation’s attention with a real debate about who should lead the party.
• Harris, already saddled with Biden baggage, proved to be a minimally effective candidate who made numerous mistakes, including when asked if she would do anything different than Biden said, nope.

There is surely more to be said about the Democratic party denial, and like the conservative party, reality for Democrats begins with shedding denial of the reality looking you in the face.

Denial is not a political or any other kind of strategy. One can hope that through the murky haze of their own believing denial Democrats find their way out of the wilderness in November because Republicans aren’t going to even try.

Here’s Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic:

After losing in a blowout, Cornyn immediately pledged to support the ticket, including the opponent he had described as a fraud and a moral leper. Nobody expected anything else of him. The senator from Texas died, politically speaking, with his boots off.

Call me old fashioned, but I think the country – at least most of it – is tired of the unrelenting stream of bullshit from its president. People increasingly dismiss the Congress as a feckless institution populated by old men just waiting for their post-congressional lobby gig, while they trade stocks and avoid real issue. And the Supreme Court, oh, the Court, is viewed as an extension of the ruling party, not fair and impartial judges, but a political body dominated by a couple of angry old men hankering for a return to the 1930’s.

Khrushchev: a model?

But seventy years ago Khrushchev delivered a remarkable speech – four hours long – to his Communist Party comrades in Moscow. In that speech he denounced the brutal excesses of the Stalin Era and arguably changed history.

The speech was never to be published, but was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and reported by John Rettie in The Observer in 1956:

That was only three years after the death of Stalin, mourned by the great majority of Soviet citizens, who saw him as a divine father. So soon afterwards, here was their new leader telling them they had made a cataclysmic error: far from divine, Stalin was satanic. The leaders who inherited the party from the old dictator agreed that Khrushchev should make the speech only after months of furious argument – and subject to the compromise that it should never be published.

Its consequences, by no means fully foreseen by Khrushchev, shook the Soviet Union to the core, but even more so its communist allies, notably in central Europe. Forces were unleashed that eventually changed the course of history. But at the time, the impact on the delegates was more immediate. Soviet sources now say some were so convulsed as they listened that they suffered heart attacks; others committed suicide afterwards.

Such a reckoning will come to the United States.

The only questions are how long will it take and how much damage will be done as we wait? And how many heart attacks will there be?