There is a story to be told about a how a segment of America is descending into psychosis, at least since Nixon claimed he had “a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam”. He did if one includes a side order of treacherous back channels sabotaging peace talks during the Johnson Administration.
Follow this with late-70s television preachers hiding their weaponisation of religious belief, through Reagan’s continued confabulations, the “Iraqi Republican Guard” story of Desert Storm, let’s not forget a detour into Lee Atwater gaslighting a generation into voting for racism, then three Republican Representatives in a row resigning due to infidelity while trying to nail Clinton for a blowjob.
Meanwhile, during the Clinton Administration, Roger Ailes gets handed the controls to Fox “News”, immediately used to ramp up anti-Democratic propaganda disregarding the truth. Rush Limbaugh pollutes the airwaves with hate lightly disguised as “entertainment”, followed by Michael The Savage Weiner, Sean Hannity, and other future denizens of the Ninth Bolgia.
The tempo really picks up now. Following the Supreme Court’s rightwingers jamming their thumbs on the scale, Bush The Lesser accedes to the White House with PNAC enabler Dick Cheney driving spurious arguments for invading Iraq after 9-11, built on a web of lies about weapons of mass destruction, and of course UN inspectors were not allowed the time to amass evidence — because there was none. Limbaugh et al beat the drums for war, demonising anyone questioning the rush to conflict, with the results we now know too well.
The rush to war was cause one for PNAC, the Project for a New American Century, heavily populated by neoconservative followers of Joseph Strauss. A key tenet of Strauss’s philosophy was the concept of the “noble lie”, a just-so story propounded for the greater good by the ruling elite, which he claims to have derived from Plato’s discussion on governing the demos. Never mind proper scholarship shows Plato’s words point to no such thing, opportunists such as Paul Wolfowitz pushed whatever story Judith Miller at the New York Times would swallow in furthering the rush to war.
Meanwhile Shrub’s chief prevaricator, Karl Rove, came out with this beauty:
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.
A term exists for creating one’s reality with no regard to fact: delusion. Rove traded heavily in alternate realities, up to ginning up the 2004 crazy vote in eleven states with propaganda about gay marriage meaning the end of the American family and the death of religious belief.
As time goes on Fox increasingly makes up stuff from whole cloth, not even trying for plausibility, as witness the infamous voiceover when Barack Obama did a fist-bump with Michelle: “A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab?” No discussion of Obama’s presidency can avoid the chorus of birthers ginning up anything to spread doubt about his beliefs, plans, and even birthplace as a convenient way of calling him “n*****” without saying the actual word.
Through the entire time a continual stream of nonsense (literally, as in meaning “no sense”) oozes from various rightwing soi-disant libertarian “think tanks” such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Mercatus Institute, and my favourite, the Heartland Institute, which began as a tobacco industry mouthpiece for denying the link between their products and cancer, followed with a smooth turn into proselytizing for big coal and oil by excreting papers insisting climate change didn’t exist, if it did fossil fuels had nothing to do with it, anyway it was too late to do anything about it, and you were a fool and a Communist to say any different.
At this point many Americans have been fed a diet of lies from birth onward and are primed to believe any fool thing, which fool thing presented itself descending an escalator in a piss-elegant temple to kitsch. trump is not the beginning of the American Psychosis. He is rather the end result, the apotheosis of mendacities propagated by venal pols, religious fanatics, warmongers, cancer peddlers, and polluters. Rove was in a sense correct: his compatriots have indeed built an empire. An empire of madness.
