A Year After January 6, Remember That Millions Of People Have Always Believed In Big Lies
The fact is, Americans, and human beings in general, have never been a particularly well-informed bunch.
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
A year ago this week, most of us watched in horror as an unruly mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The deeper reasons why these people did such a thing could probably fill several psychology textbooks.
The most superficial reason is pretty simple though: the Capitol rioters stormed the Capitol because Donald Trump told them to. He primed them for violence on January 6 with months of unfounded lies claiming that Joe Biden had somehow stolen the presidential election. Then he appeared before the rioters on January 6 and urged them to “fight like hell.”
Not All Legal AI Is Created Equal
Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud have been debunked again and again, including in dozens of lawsuits and by partisan Republican audits that explicitly set out trying to find fraud. Biden did not steal the presidential election. It didn’t happen, and anyone who can be swayed by good evidence accepts that it didn’t happen.
But there are a whole lot of people who are either not swayed by evidence, or can’t tell the difference because solid evidence and self-serving lies. As of last summer, a series of polls found that nearly a third of Americans still were willing to say that Biden won the presidential election against Trump “due to voter fraud.”
It is not great that almost one in three of us apparently believes (incorrectly) that the current occupant of the White House doesn’t belong there. Yet, I’m not convinced our “Cliffhanger“-style grip on democracy is really ready to slip at any moment, with one wrong move set to send our republic tumbling into the abyss.
The fact is, Americans, and human beings in general, have never been a particularly well-informed bunch. For instance, at the pinnacle of ancient Greek society, just about everyone in that part of the world took it for a fact that the gods lived up on Mount Olympus and that they came down fairly frequently to interfere directly in important human affairs. Spoiler alert if you aren’t caught up on the classics: they didn’t.
Sponsored
How Savvy Lawyers Build Their Law Firm Rate Sheet
Trust The Process: How To Build And Manage Workflows In Law Firms
A Law Firm Checklist For Successful Transaction Management
How Savvy Lawyers Build Their Law Firm Rate Sheet
It’s easy to scoff at the false beliefs of ancient people with the benefit of thousands of years of hindsight, but we’re really no better. We’re arguably far worse given that we have exponentially better tools at our disposal to ascertain the truth. There are lots of examples.,
Remember a couple decades ago when we were told that Iraq had a trove of WMDs which Saddam Hussein was just itching to use? Yeah, it didn’t and he wasn’t. That whopper cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives. Nonetheless, a poll found that as of 2015, 41 percent of Americans still believed in the big WMD lie.
Even after Barack Obama released his birth certificate, about 22 percent of self-identified independent voters still believed that he “probably or definitely” was not a U.S. citizen. Fifty years after JFK’s death, 59 percent of Americans believed multiple people conspired to kill him, despite all the evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Some 42 percent of modern Americans say slavery was not the “main reason” for the Civil War (it absolutely was, and please, before any of you waste your valuable time writing me an email about states’ rights, just pause for a moment and consider whether a state’s right to make its own laws about slavery might have been the biggest right at issue for Southern states at that time). If you went out on the street and asked a hundred random people whether astronauts ever set foot on the moon, you’d probably get double digits who’d say no.
Substantial minorities of people, and in some instances majorities of people, have always believed unsubstantiated lies about big important issues like who is leading our country and with whom to go to war. Depending on the situation, the effects of people believing in such lies have ranged from incalculable suffering to kooky hijinks. But never since America’s founding has our habit of having some big chunk of our population believe some ridiculous nonsense led to the total destruction of our system of government.
We should obviously be vigilant against things like rampant nationalism and the storming of our nation’s Capitol. Even so, at the first anniversary of January 6, maybe it’s time to tamp down some of the hysteria about democracy hanging by a thread. Trump’s bogus election lawsuits flopped hard. No important government officials were willing to enable his coup. Had the Capitol insurrectionists actually caught any lawmakers on that awful day a year ago, there probably would have been even more tragedy, but that wouldn’t have been the end of the republic. It’s not like if the rioters succeeded in hanging Mike Pence the QAnon Shaman would have been automatically installed as vice president.
Sponsored
How To Build And Manage Your Law Firm Rate Sheet
Not All Legal AI Is Created Equal
January 6 was an ugly disgrace, as was the big election fraud lie that birthed it. With a year of perspective, though, it wouldn’t hurt to remember that America has survived a great number of arguably worse, arguably bigger lies.
