THE MYTHS OF MAY

Oxford Languages, the umbrella organization of the Oxford University Press whose products include the Oxford English Dictionary, defines the word "myth" as "a widely held but false belief". It lists the words "fallacy", "fiction", "delusion" and "lie" as among the word's many synonyms.  

Oxford Languages also defines the word "myth" as "a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events".  For this definition, it lists "story", "legend", "tale" and "allegory" as synonyms.

The definitions are by no means consistent.  

Legends, as the second definition makes clear, are often designed to explain actual, observed phenomena.  An allegory, as Plato's Cave made clear, can disclose a truth. Those shadows on the wall are what you perceive, not what is real.  And as for God, or the gods, though any decent theologian will concede that religion can only begin where science ends, any decent scientist will concede that religious truth is possible where scientific truth is not.  

The Big Bang may have had a Big Banger.

So . . .

When does an allegory become a delusion, a legend a fallacy, a story a fiction, a belief a lie? 

When does a myth become a myth?

Some cases are easy, even in retrospect and even avoiding the tendency to assume the regress of the past must be judged by the progress of the present.  

Hitler's Holocaust, Stalin's Gulag and Mao's Cultural Revolution were based on lies from the beginning. So was slavery in this country. The notion that an entire race could and should be liquidated -- either actually in the case of Hitler, Stalin and large parts  of Maoism or structurally as with American slavery -- was sufficient in itself to constitute evil. And the absence of specific intent on the part of large numbers of the enablers,  the "banal" part of the evil made famous in Hannah Arendt's telling phrase, did not minimize the inherent depravity. 

Other cases, though more ambiguous, can cross the line for different reasons.  

The racism that pervaded America in the wake of the Civil War and still rears its ugly head even today has over time been both accepted and combatted.  Jim Crow and segregation ultimately gave way to Brown v. Board of Education, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the steady emergence of a black middle class (albeit with economic resources below its white counterpart) and Barack Obama. At the same time, while the Klan is gone, black Americans today are still three times more likely than whites to be killed by the police.  And while the Supreme Court pretends conditions today are so different that federal oversight of jurisdictions which historically disenfranchised minorities is no longer needed, the reaction of many of those jurisdictions has been to create new rules (e.g., limiting early voting, closing drop boxes, computerized gerrymandering) to either suppress the minority vote or render it meaningless.  

Though most of us believe racism is wrong, the myth of equal protection and the reality of discrimination are still fighting an ongoing battle.  

Finally, there is the case where lies or lunacy interact with a myth that in itself is not particularly nefarious but becomes so by virtue of the permitted alchemy.

That is the place MAGA Republicans find themselves in today.

The innocuous myths that form the foundation of the MAGA GOP are myths about the American Constitution and the American citizenry. The constitutional myth is that the founders created a limited federal government and that powers not expressly delegated to it were retained by the states and the people. The citizenry myth is that Christian settlers from Europe came here and created Ronald Reagan's shining city on a hill.  

Neither of these myths is inherently dangerous or incoherent, 

Both of them become so, however,  once they are married to Trumpism. 

A pathological liar and narcissist, Trump constantly changes his positions without explanation and oblivious to contradiction. As president he said we should never question the nation's debt or leverage the need to pay it by demanding budgetary concessions; Congress then increased the debt limit three times during his tenure without any conditions.  As an ex-president, however, Trump is now telling the GOP to let the government default unless the Senate passes the House's bill freezing spending at last year's levels for a decade (it won't) and Biden signs that freeze into law (he won't).  

If the House bill actually became law, Congress would have to find $4.8 trillion in spending cuts over that same period, $3.6 trillion of which are not specified in the bill.  The $1.2 trillion that is specified comes from imposing work requirements on food stamp and Medicaid recipients, recouping unspent Covid relief, repealing some of the just enacted energy and climate measures designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions, blocking student loan forgiveness and cutting IRS funding, and is pretty much a laundry list of the usual suspects from whom the GOP typically demands sacrifice -- the poor, the sick, the young and any government agency that goes after tax cheats.  The GOP cannot specify the rest because it refuses to cut defense or raise taxes and does not want to be blamed for cutting Social Security or Medicare, all or part of which would have to happen to get anywhere near $3.6 trillion. 

Default, of course, would be catastrophic.  Both the Congressional Budget Office and Council of Economic Advisers believe it would reverse the employment gains of the last two years and create a recession.  If prolonged, unemployment would rise to 5%, the gross domestic product would decline by 6% and interest rates would skyrocket.  The stock market would tumble, along with the nation's retirement accounts.

Trump does not really care about the full faith and credit of the United States. He does, however, care about staying out of jail and, with  one criminal trial pending and two other criminal investigations coming to a head, he views the presidency as a means to that end.  

For that reason, he is stoking the MAGA base.  

Per usual, part of that stoking involves pissing off his opponents.  

When asked why he had changed positions on the issue of default, he said he was president then but isn't now.  It's hard to understand precisely what that meant (or even if it had any meaning), but if we are looking for answers, Trump's narcissism is as a good a place as any to start.  Thus, when default carried with it the potential to hurt his presidency, he opposed it; now that it has the potential to hurt Biden's, he is for it.

The stoking also involves acts of serial outrage.  

One day he is found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll and ordered to pay her $5 million in damages; the next he is re-libeling her as a "wack job" at a CNN Town Hall, thus creating additional damage; the day after that he threatens to out Brett Kavanaugh if evangelicals refuse to endorse him in 2024; and the day after that he demands America default on its legally assumed bills if the Democrats refuse to sign on to unspecified spending cuts. 

Tearing down is all Trump is good at.

Whether he is tearing down a victim he sexually assaulted.

Or . . .

The country he incompetently ran.

Nor do Trump or his MAGA enablers stop at the water's edge.  

Trump himself is part of a crypto-fascist cabal of western politicians currently reminding the world of what it thought it killed in the 1940s.  With Putin in Russia and Orbán in Hungary, they are fact-free authoritarians who thumb their noses at the rule of law and readily endorse violence as a means to political power.  

Putin himself has tried to remove Ukraine from the map and is counting on western weariness and the support of anti-war Americans like Marjorie Taylor Green and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to ultimately forestall Ukraine's defenses and turn a war of attrition into a Russian victory, however pyrrhic. He has openly endorsed Trump, imposed financial and travel restrictions on Americans who have no connection to Ukraine policy but oppose the former president  (e.g., NY Attorney General Letitia James and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger), and now calls the Trump-led insurrectionists who sought to stop the electoral count on January 6 "dissidents" who the American government is "persecut[ing]" (and who Trump himself is promising to pardon if he returns to the White House).

In his CNN Town Hall, Trump claimed he would bring the war in Ukraine to an end in a day.  

He also refused to say how.  

Claims of omnipotent ability are part of Trump's typical pose but have never been remotely predictive.  As to this one, his former national security adviser, John Bolton, dismissed it out of hand. "No rational person believes you can get the Ukrainians and the Russians to agree on how to resolve it in 24 hours," said Bolton, "It shows [Trump is] utterly out of touch with what the war is all about and what the implications of Russia's aggression . . . are all around the world." Earlier in the interview, Bolton explained that the world leaders with whom he interacted when he led the NSC thought Trump a "laughing fool".

Nonetheless, Trump is a fool who admires dictators -- Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Kim Jung Un in North Korea, all of whom he has variously termed smart, savvy, top of the line. open or honorable.

And he is a fool who still stands a chance of again becoming president.

To date, there are only four Republicans opposing him -- former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), all of whom have announced their candidacies, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who will do so later today.  Of those four, Trump led DeSantis by 31 points in the May 1 CBS poll, by 23 points in the last ABC News/Washington Post poll, and by 27 points in this week's CNN poll. The other three barely register.  

If, however, Trumpist mythology is the GOP's ball and chain, DeSantis is hardly suited to remove it. 

Both of them activate the MAGA base by appealing to the base's sense of grievance.  For the base, the constitutional and citizenry myths are exclusive.  The myth of limited federal government allows the states to ban abortions and books and the myth of Christian and European settlement allows today's citizens to shut the southern border and eliminate gay bars (and gay rights). 

Neither of them, however, can appeal to those outside the base.

Trump is unable to appeal to moderates and independents because they do not want an unhinged psychopath's finger on the nuclear button.  DeSantis is unable to appeal to moderates and independents because they do not want to make abortion illegal at six weeks, ban books, limit fee speech on college campuses or declare war on Disney and Mickey Mouse.  Moderates and independents also do not want Russia annexing Ukraine and do not much care whether that occurs because the American president is in Putin's pocket (as is Trump) or ignorantly treats Russia's seizure as a mere "territorial dispute" (as does DeSantis).  They will vote for neither of them.

At a baseball game last summer, erstwhile Trump supporter Anthony Scaramucci told me that the Republican party had to eliminate Trump and MAGA root and branch to be successful going forward.  

It hasn't. 

Because the other truth about myths is that they . . .

Last long . . .

And die hard.