A symptom, not the cause

I came across this piece in The Baffler by Rick Perlstein, written in 2012 and occasioned by the Romney campaign for president. How soon we forget, but Romney lied continually and atrociously. His lying was actually pretty much on a par with the current Liar in Chief. People tried to count them all and found the task overwhelming. But Perlstein's point is that constant, remorseless, outrageous lying was a necessary condition for Romney to be accepted by the conservative movement, because lying is central to conservative culture. It's a long piece but please do read it all. 

Perlstein subscribed to some conservative journals for research purposes and discovered that they all sell their mailing lists to con artists. And their pitches mix up conservative ideological and rhetorical shibboleths with ridiculous snake oil drumming. He also discovered that overtly political fundraising by conservative organizations is mostly a scam. Hardly any of the money goes to causes or candidates, it just lines the pockets of the fundraisers. And the mailings try to frighten people with imaginary scenarios even more ridiculous than the snake oil, e.g. "in the case of a 1976 pitch signed by Senator Jesse Helms, taxpayer-supported 'grade school courses that teach our children that cannibalism, wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior.'”  He goes on to say "These are bedtime stories, meant for childlike minds. Or, more to the point, they are in the business of producing childlike minds. Conjuring up the most garishly insatiable monsters precisely in order to banish them from underneath the bed, they aim to put the target to sleep." 

This might remind you that if Joe Biden is elected president, there won't be any windows in your houses and cows will be outlawed. Perlstein concludes:

If the 2012 GOP nominee lied louder than most—and even more astoundingly than he has during his prior campaigns—it’s just because he felt like he had more to prove to his core following. Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In this respect, as in so many others, it’s like multilayer marketing: the ones at the top reap the reward—and then they preen, pleased with themselves for mastering the game. Closing the sale, after all, is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher. Sneering at, or ignoring, your earnest high-minded mandarin gatekeepers—“we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” as one Romney aide put it—is another part of closing the deal. For years now, the story in the mainstream political press has been Romney’s difficulty in convincing conservatives, finally, that he is truly one of them. For these elites, his lying—so dismaying to the opinion-makers at the New York Times, who act like this is something new—is how he has pulled it off once and for all. And at the grassroots, his fluidity with their preferred fables helps them forget why they never trusted the guy in the first place.

So now it's come to the present moment.