Lesssen learned: Democracy highly vulnerable if widely recognized authority figures spout total lies
At first glance it seems self evident, but evidently some aspect of our culture previously tamped down the degree to which leading authority figures brazenly and repeatedly asserted wild lies that are easily debunked by actual facts. It is not new that people in positions in authority sometimes lie, and do so boldly and knowingly. What is relatively new is that they now do so repeately, doubling and tripling down on those lies even when the truth that exposes their deceit is readily available.
No President of the United States, dating back well over a hundred years, practiced what became standard practice for Hitler's Nazi regime under Goebbels, that being the constant repetition of a totally fabricated reality until is was indistinguishable from the truth to vasts swaths of the population. Not until Trump. Previously leading authority figures tried like hell to bury stories that contradicted the message they sought to convey, but when that failed they shifted to damage control "clean up" mode, often looking for a scapegoat on whom the blame could be pinned who would then summarily lose their job. That playbook was abandoned by Trump, and the new "triple down" repeated (and sometimes further amplified) lie playbook has now been embraced by virtually the entire Republican Party.
The effects of this shift in political tactics is greatly heightened by the rise of major media partisan prime time "news commentators" who supplanted traditional "news anchors" in public influence. When such commentators retain a shred of integrity, the effect of their influence may not be toxic. But with media conglomerates chasing viewers for ratings driven profits, integrity is often the first thing to go. Suffice it to say that there is no one left now with a tenth of the capacity of a Walter Cronkite of former years, who can effectively counter Big Lie propaganda when it raises its ugly head.
America has always had racists, xenophobes and wild conspiracy consumers. They rarely though were given the oxygen of so called "legitimacy" needed for their views to literally go viral. That of course is where the explosion of social media comes into the picture, with platforms that are self contained and willfully detached from reality. But in my mind, it is the shameless brazen lies, all truth be damned, repeated by socially and politically established leaders at the highest levels, that is making the current pandemic of disinformation so difficult to contain, let alone eradicate.
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