From Trumpism to lockdown, people believe in the craziest things

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Lionel Shriver has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Following his disgruntled supporters’ rampage through the Capitol, Donald Trump’s fate hangs in the balance. But one artefact of this disreputable administration will survive Trump himself: doubt over the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, shared by some 39 per cent of the electorate, including two-thirds of Republicans.

However refuted in the courts, Republicans’ pervasive conviction that the election was ‘stolen’ must be partially rooted in their rollercoaster emotions while watching the returns. On election night, Trump seemed to be winning. Trump himself declared victory. Only across the following four days, as counts of mail-in ballots dribbled in, did the President’s lead slip agonisingly away. It’s far more upsetting to appear to win something only to be ‘robbed’ of that victory than to lose outright at the start. Most Trump voters feel the election was stolen because that was their subjective experience of that week. Trump’s own demented belief in his pilfered ‘landslide’ must have become quite so bitterly consuming because he’d enjoyed that brief period of elation on the Tuesday night, which was, however temporarily, based on fact.

Granted, Trump had primed his constituency to expect the Democrats to cheat for months in advance. Yet however consequential this ‘alternative fact’ for the American public’s shared faith in their political system, the astonishingly prevalent myth of the ‘steal’ exemplifies a far bigger problem than this one highly contagious lie.

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Julie Burchill

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At its inception, the internet promised instant universal access to more information than people had ever historically enjoyed by orders of magnitude. During the web’s early days in the 1990s, expectations were idealistically high. We would all become wiser and better educated.