The House of the Dead

LGM engages in a lot of justified mockery of the elite media’s sanewashing and both sides frames, but imagine if you had a read a story in the NYT fifteen years ago, aka the Before Time, that read like this:

By baselessly framing Ms. Smith’s rise as a Democratic scam, the President extended his long-running project to erode public faith in elections — and gave an unusually clear preview of how he could greet any disappointing results for his party in November, when control of Congress is at stake.

He has been anything but subtle about his desire to limit the ability of Democrats to vote by mail, implying, with no evidence, that simply choosing that widely used means of casting a ballot is inherently suspect. Addressing a gathering of Republican lawmakers in March, he said the way to hold their majority was to pass a strict voter identification law cracking down on mail ballots.

“It’ll guarantee the midterms,” he told them, warning that failure would bring “big trouble.”

Privately, according to one senior adviser, he has pressed aides to find ways to “stop them stealing it from us.”

An executive order he signed in March directing the Department of Homeland Security to assemble a federal list of eligible voters and barring the Postal Service from delivering mail ballots to anyone left off it was condemned by election experts as illegal and drew multiple lawsuits.

Still, even if the President fails to change election laws or processes, he can sow substantial chaos simply by trying to convince voters that the results were fraudulent.

More than five years after his supporters, fueled by lies about a stolen election, stormed the Capitol to stop the transfer of power, the President has tried to recast that event as a day of “peace,” claiming his supporters were led astray by F.B.I. officers in a false-flag operation. He has produced no credible evidence, yet he has pardoned rioters who breached the Capitol and has entertained paying restitution to some of them, over the objections of even some in his own party.

I mean how much more straightforward could that be? The story asserts as incontestable facts that the president of the United States is trying to delegitimate any election his party loses, by making false claims about voter fraud. Five years earlier, this president’s lies about a stolen presidential election inspired a mob to storm the Capitol to stop that president from being removed from office. Another word for this is “sedition.” This president has continued to lie about these events, spinning fantastical conspiracy theories about government false flag operations (carried out by his own administration against himself, but nobody said any of this had to be even minimally coherent in the age of “a lot people are saying”), and abusing the pardon power to shield his seditionists from legal consequences, while at the same time trying to pay them off with taxpayer money for their sedition.

All of this is, again, is being stated quite straightforwardly, in a straight news story on the front page of the paper of record. And again, if you had read that story fifteen years ago without any preparatory slow heating of the water in the pan, you would have concluded that the nation’s political and legal systems had suffered multiple catastrophic failures, and were in the process of collapsing completely.

Instead, it’s Tuesday.

What I’m trying to capture here is that of course we never simply experience the thing of the moment as if it came out of nowhere. We experience it after a long process of normalization and desensitization. So the thought experiment is just that, because we’ve all gotten used to this madness over a long time, not overnight. I include myself in this of course. If I had magically woken up to this one day, being the person I was fifteen years ago, I think I would have emigrated the next day. Now I blog about it.

Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.

Dostoevsky. The House of the Dead

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

Tolstoy, Anna Karenina