Things are terrible because I was told they would be

Another commenter observation to front page from Tzimiskes:

I have struggled to understand how people can actually believe Trump’s American carnage nonsense that goes along with Trump’s crazy and the economic stuff.

My current thinking is that for a lot of people it’s about the morality that we grew up with. They really believed that oppressing minority groups was essential to stability so now that gay people are getting married and trans people are allowed to exist this has to be translating into chaos and crime. They then seek out sources that will support this.

They believe that the economy is a zero sum game so China doing well or immigrants coming here must mean that regular Americans are doing worse and look for information that confirms this as well as racial prejudices which must mean being woke causes companies to underperform.

And so on. I have also come around to thinking that this, rather than actually supporting Republicans, is what drives Fox News. They are chasing a market that wants to believe all the small minded BS I grew up hearing is actually true and it creates an alternate reality where all that crap I heard actually did result in the consequences I was told it would. Fox News provides this reality and this false reality then informs the right wing, rather than the right wing driving reality. It’s a world where gay marriage led to an ongoing crime spree as people became less moral and where more diverse corporate boards and immigration meant that Zenith couldn’t compete with Korean and Chinese TVs. It’s insane but I can get why certain people want to avoid the cognitive dissonance of noticing that all the terrible consequences that were being predicted by people they trusted didn’t come to pass. They want to live in a reality where this stuff was right all along and will follow a crazy old man that tells them that this is all real and everyone who says different is lying.

I think there’s a whole lot to this.

Take crime: Violent crime rates did skyrocket in the US between 1960 and 1990 for a complicated and far from fully understood set of reasons, but superficially this trend fit nicely with conservative/reactionary prophecies that sex, drugs, and rock & roll, plus women and black people getting good jobs via “affirmative action” was going to lead to The Collapse of America. Then a funny thing happened, which is that violent crime rates started declining nearly as steeply as they had risen. At this point the violent crime rate is all the way back to where it was in the late 1960s, i.e., half as high as it was in the early 1990s. Similar statistical stories can be told about divorce, teen pregnancies, and other trends that went way up in the wake of the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, but then started declining steadily as well.

None of this can fit into the conservative/reactionary world view, in which interracial and gay couples on TV, and that trans woman that won an Ivy League swim meet, are necessarily signs that the Apocalypse is upon us. In this vein I always think of the scene in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle is cruising the filthy streets of New York City late at night, gawking at all the degeneracy, and imagining the cleansing rain that will wash it all away (That Bickle is a sociopath is the kind of detail right wing viewers of the film, along with your Tom Friedmans and other reactionary centrists, tend to miss).

So to deal with all this potential cognitive dissonance, the conservative mind does what it always does best, which is to ignore empirical reality and create a counter-narrative, in what should be happening is happening, because otherwise their whole world view would make no sense, and we can’t have that. And, as Tzimikes points out, Rupert Murdoch monetized the holy heck out of that elemental need.