It’s fitting that the Iowa Cult Caucus was staged on Martin Luther King’s birthday. As the reverend warned us more than 60 years ago, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
Ignorance and stupidity prevailed last night in Iowa, as expected, although there are ways to spin Donald Trump’s triumph as less than spectacular. Yes, he got 56,000 white people to pledge allegiance, but that was only 7 percent of Iowa’s registered Republicans. (Those 56k people wouldn’t even fill the Philly Eagles’ football stadium; there’d be 11,000 seats to spare.) Indeed, only 14 percent of statewide GOPers partook of the caucus ritual. And even though Trump got 51 percent of the caucusers, that means 49 percent of the folks who showed up rejected him.
But a win is a win, and he has clearly taken his first big goose-step toward his third nomination – thanks to a subset of voters who suck on disinformation like it’s mother’s milk. That’s by far the most disturbing feature of the MAGA pandemic. These people, especially the evangelical Christians, are so detached from factual reality that they’re willing to worship a rapist-insurrectionist with 91 felony raps. In the pitch-perfect words of Russian dissident Garry Kasparov, they are “sheep voting for a wolf.” Worse yet, they’re foot soldiers in the war on truth, the greatest domestic threat to democracy in our lifetimes.
Sane conservative economist Bruce Bartlett tweeted yesterday that we should shrug off the Iowa results: “Does anybody really care how many Iowa idiots belonging to the Party of Trump turn out to vote for the biggest asshole in American history?” But we do need to care. It’s the only way to combat the lies and ignorance that threaten to engulf us.
According to entrance polls last night, a landslide majority of the caucusing Iowans believed that Joe Biden stole the ’20 election, despite the 60 court rulings that said he won fairly. Plus, 67 percent of the white evangelicals said that Trump is fit for the presidency even if he’s convicted of a crime (say goodbye to the party of “law and order”).
And the stuff that Iowa MAGAts said to visiting reporters! As humorist Andy Borowitz quipped, “IOWA CAUCUS FORECAST: IQ’s expected to dip into single digits.”
Actually, I don’t want to denigrate them, lest I sound “elitist” for defending truth and facts. I’ll just share an actual sampling of how the gears in their brains grind:
“Donald Trump has released so much information and really opened the eyes of Americans and uncovered all the illegal activities that were going on. He really opened our eyes to the truth.”
“President Trump has never lied to us one time.”
“He’s got principles, that’s the key feature there.”
“Voting is fraud because of the machines. If we’re going to get a sham president like Biden again, we’re coming in the back door. We’re going to bypass the president’s power.”
“I know that he is picked by God for this hour. There are things that he has done in the past, but we all have pasts.”
Right, because in our pasts we’ve all fomented coups against the U.S. government and gotten people killed. And because in our pasts we’ve all sexually assaulted women and gotten dragged into court for it. How these people square their reverence for “family values” with love for an adjudicated rapist is a mystery to me, especially when that rapist is due back in court today for a defamation trial to determine the monetary damages he should pay E. Jean Carroll.
Wait, I promised not to denigrate these people. Suffice it to say that they’ve embraced an alternative non-reality because (take your pick) they’ve soured on democracy, they’re terrified of 21st century multi-racial pluralism, they think that militaristic authoritarianism will solve their woes, or whatever. Thwarting them at the ballot box in November – hoisting a banner for truth and the rule of law – will be the most important task we ever tackle.
Indeed, it was Dr. King who said that truth “will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”