There are long cons and short cons. When you have a conman at the helm they are going to run both if they are at all smart. The short cons are easy enough to figure out. The longer ones take a little more effort. For instance, maybe if you stand in front of a church and hold up a bible you will convince some people you are the candidate for Evangelicals.
We will ignore the fact that he has never actually been in that church. We will ignore the fact that he’s rarely ever cracked open that Bible. See, that’s a con. It’s a simple con and a straightforward con, but it’s still a con. Then, we get the cons that take a little more effort to unravel. The right has been doing one for years.
The conservative movement draws it’s power from three primary groups. There is the business community that is generally in favor of lower taxes and fewer government regulations. The second one is what has been dubbed the Evangelical movement, but could generally be characterized as the Religious Right. They are generally anti-abortion and against same sex marriage. Finally, you have some working class whites that are concerned about immigration and inner city violence. What you’ll notice is that groups two and three often get victimized by the first group. Their taxes never seem to go down. In fact, they pay more and more while the first group lives it up on their luxury boats and country clubs. When the simple church goers and blue collar folks seem on the verge of catching on you manufacture another crisis. Maybe it’s a caravan of immigrants coming to the border. Maybe it’s a new law to limit abortion or expansion of rights for the LGTBQ community we need to fight. Throw out enough red meat and they won’t notice you are robbing them blind again.
This brings us to today’s lesson. This is the excessive use of crisis in order to distract from the current crisis. It becomes a machine. First, you do something to invent the crisis. You create a hysteria over something that is not all that important. The next step is convincing as many people as possible that only you can solve the crisis. This is easier since you created the crisis in the first place. Finally, since the crisis isn’t real anyway, you can take credit for solving the crisis.
When you live in a perpetual state of crisis then it is easy to become exhausted to crises or exhausted period. It is easy to become hyperfocused on crises that don’t matter and overlook the ones that do. When you continually are in crisis you simply don’t have the energy to do it anymore.
The latest crisis resides on the Supreme Court. We need nine justices. We might have a contested election. You can’t have a contested election with a deadlocked court. Except, we had the last election with a deadlocked court. That one was actually deadlocked 4-4 on most issues. It didn’t seem to be important back then. That’s because we hadn’t manufactured enough crisis.
See, we hadn’t talked up enough the possibility that the Democrats were going to steal the election with their vote by mail. No one has ever done that before. Vote by mail is a new thing they want to do. They are sending everyone 14 ballots so they can stuff the ballot box. We might not know the results on election night. That is literally unprecedented. We’ve always known who won on election night. Walter Cronkite himself reported the results from 1832 on Channel 13 on election night by 8:30.
So, we hire 137,000 lawyers fresh out of law school to contest an election before it has even happened. That’s the crisis we are creating out of thin air. We convince enough people that vote by mail (also known as absentee voting) is dangerous and must be fought at all costs. I alone can solve it by appointing a new justice now, now, now. I then get credit for solving the crisis by limiting vote by mail and getting my conservative justice. See, this is how this works.
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