Denialism
The Deepest Divide
I originally published this piece on October 26, 2020
Recently, a series of revelatory events have exposed the current occupant of the White House as a fraud, even in terms of his basic appeal to his supporters:
– A bizarre photo op of the president holding a Bible upside down in front of a mainline protestant church turned scripture itself into a cheap political prop, and was arrived at by the kind of violence Jesus Himself opposed in word and action, and many wondered if the man’s legion Evangelical Christian supporters would at last abandon him.
– Myriad eye-witnesses described the president as denigrating those who’ve served our country in uniform as victims of a pointless con, and as being perplexed by their ranks who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, because they don’t seem to have gained anything by it, and we wondered if his overtly patriotic base would finally declare they’d had enough.
– The New York Times laid bare the president’s utter failure as a businessperson, though the foundation of his appeal to his supporters was supposedly their perception of him as a wildly successful mogul.
This was a real poser for non-supporters, so much so that when historian John Meacham was asked, essentially, ‘now that the jig is up on his success-narrative, why would anyone continue to support this person?’ the great historian, so full of deep knowledge of the American character, could only answer honestly, ‘That is the question of our age.’
– On a debate stage, the sitting president couldn’t bring himself to denounce white supremacists, looking desperately for a specific group to be named so he could go to his standby dodge that he doesn’t know who those specific people are or what they’re about, but in the grasping confusion of the moment, when a name was finally produced by his opponent, blurted out a rallying cry rather than a condemnation, and we thought, ‘Surely, this is the final straw.’ But for millions of our fellow citizens, it was not.
– Finally, the most accomplished living American journalist released audio recordings that proved conclusively that the leader of the free world flat-out lied to his people about a plague that has ruined the planet’s economy and killed Americans at a rate much faster than World War II did, then contracted the disease himself and — amazingly — likely became an embodied spreader of it, only to quickly resume criss-crossing the nation to hold maskless rallies that turbo-charge the pathogen’s spread.
‘He promised to keep everyone safe. Said he was the only one who could. This, surely, will be too much,’ many said. But for millions of our neighbors, it is not.
So, why is that? Why, when all the things his supporters say they find appealing about the president are shown to be total falsehoods, do they stick with him so loyally?
Especially now? When the reality of covid is hitting us hard — why is there not an obvious mass awakening?
Whatever the results of next week’s election, it’s clear that about 40 percent of us will never give him up. The man himself has understood this from the beginning, bragging that he could murder someone in the open and not lose their support.
How could that be? And how did he know that from the start?
To understand it, we need to understand the real appeal this leader is offering his adherents. And it’s not patriotism. It’s not reliance on God. It’s not small government and lower taxes, or American exceptionalism.
Much has been written about the current president’s basic appeals to racism, which is so central to our nation’s history, and his open embrace of misogyny and displays of toxic masculinity. And these things are clearly a part of it. But in some ways, elements of those appeals serve another very powerful motivation: the profound denial of difficult realities.
We commit to denial so fiercely because underneath all of it — the societal problems down to the personal — there is some grieving that must be avoided that we know will be too painful
I have a specific understanding of the ferocious drive to defend a state of profound denial. I was raised in a family that may have had some things in common with how the president was brought up.
My father abused his own children in the worst ways. But to the world he was a successful executive, very smart and charming, and a committed family man.
His wife, my mother, was committed to keeping out the conscious knowledge of what her husband was doing and had done to her children. She’d been raised by a similarly abusive father, and when the abusive man she’d go on to marry met her, I’m sure he found her built-in capacity to live in a world of profound denial ideal in a partner.
My siblings and I adopted forms of the same coping skill — whether or not we were being harmed directly. The father who did the abuse, mostly at night, was a separate man from the attentive parent and successful businessperson we’d encounter during the day.
If you’d asked me about him when I was a teenager, I’d have told you my dad was the greatest guy in the world. And this kind of overcompensation and profound denial is a common strategy we human beings employ when things are otherwise not survivable.
Those who were witnesses to harm can adopt profound denial as a means of appeasing the offending person in order to literally keep them off of them. ‘See. I’m on your side. All of your victim’s struggles aren’t the result of being abused by you. They’re their fault!’
Unfortunately, traumatic developmental experiences are not nearly as rare as most of us would like to think, and we carry those survival mechanisms into our adult lives, where they continue their function of distancing us from a dangerous, often random-seeming world.
If a person becomes a perpetrator of some form of abuse of others, then the reason for such total commitment to profound denial is obvious — it protects them from getting busted.
But even those who don’t seek to restore their sense of lost power through harming others as they have been harmed, can become committed to denialism as a way of keeping their own unprocessed pain at bay.
As witnesses and victims alike, sometimes within the same person, sometimes not, we commit to denial so fiercely because underneath all of it — the societal problems down to the personal — there is some grieving that must be avoided that we know will be too painful. Some culpability, misplaced or earned. Some resentment of a victim whose very existence makes us feel vulnerable.
And we are all witnesses, whatever else we are, because of the abundance of suffering in the world. And to have compassion for another is to share a little piece of their pain for a time and we just don’t like to do that. It hurts to do that. Even the fractional amount compared to the actual sufferer’s pain is too much. So, we deny it away. All of us do to a degree. Some commit to it more than others, for their own reasons, of which, they’re likely not consciously aware.
It’s possible to accept that things are, and were, as bad as they were, and are — but it’s a painful process, that can be stuck-with to varying degrees.
But denialism is a boat perilously floating atop the sea of reality. And the denier understands at the level of existential threat that any leak in the boat threatens to sink it entirely — and they’ll soon be drowning in all the difficult truths they’ve been avoiding this whole time — because of that one leak.
Whatever makes us feel vulnerable in a world full of harms must be expunged at the level of thought.
And our current president understands this implicitly. And organizes multi-faceted appeals to his supporters around that understanding:
‘Stay with me,’ he effectively says. ‘Stay here in a world where covid can’t hurt you. Where it’s a hoax.’
And when reality pierces that denial, the boat gets patched with another one.
‘Okay, it exists. But it’s gonna go away. Like magic. With the weather. Like all things go away.’
And when it doesn’t. New patch:
‘It’s the flu. Nothing more. That not working for you? Then here’s a miracle cure! And another! And one after that! I took them myself. Never felt better! You come out the other side immune. Like a super-hero! You have the power! Not the virus! Not the random harms of the world. You!’
“Don’t let it dominate you,” he wrote in a direct appeal to denialism. But that’s been the basic message all along.
And it’s pull on us isn’t limited to the president’s die-hard adherents. We don’t have to deny the severity of covid in order to push out its impact. There’s been noticeably little communal mourning of the great numbers of fellow citizens of our country and of our world that we’ve lost. No national grieving as there’s been for single-event or single-war loses of life. Because we’re still in the middle of it and such acknowledgement is too much to bear. So we go on, largely without communal mourning. In denial of the losses and their grief.
The mechanism, of course, has been around much longer than the current president’s been on the scene. We’ve heard it as the gravitational center of an appeal for political power for years, in many forms.
Climate change is threatening the planet? No worries. It doesn’t exist. Anyone who tries to remind me that it does is threatening the buoyancy of my boat. They must be shouted down. “Drill baby drill!” is a denialistic rallying cry.
That same problem is literally burning down huge parts of our country? Well, the thought of something like that happening to innocent people scares me. I could be one of them!
‘No, you couldn’t,’ the current president knows to answer. ‘It’s their fault. They need to get out and rake all the forests and this would stop happening. See! Their fault. Couldn’t happen to you. You live in a place that does things right.’ What a relief.
‘The poor remind you of your own vulnerability? Don’t worry. I give you permission to scorn them. They’re poor because they’re lazy. They love getting a hand-out. And they’re not really poor at all. They have TV’s and AC’s.’ This denialistic appeal goes back to the repugnant ‘welfare queen’ trope of the 1980’s and way before that.
The current president takes the reassurance that you don’t need to feel compassion for your fellow person further.
‘These people live in cities run by people of color who’ve messed everything up. See! Isn’t it a relief to hear a leader who will say these things out loud? Who tells it like it is.’
A woman who was sexually assaulted by a Supreme Court justice speaks what’s obviously the truth at his confirmation hearing, and the perpetrator lies in equally obvious ways in a United States Senate chamber — ridiculously claiming that an act of sexual debauchery he’d referenced around the time of the assault was really a drinking game, and that an act of drunken debauchery he’d referenced around that time really referred to flatulence.
These are lies so absurd as to be embarrassing, but the perpetrator’s indignance, along with his senatorial allies’ indignance, is the vociferous voice of denial — equating the calling out of the truth with a new era where no young man is safe from accusation, no matter how credibly made. The president says as much relentlessly at the time.
Playing a large part in it all is the desire to keep the terrifying thought that our daughters and wives, sisters and children can be raped at any point, through no fault of their own, at bay.
Denialism is a con. And the target of the con is the self.
For many of us, a world where that can happen is an intolerable place to live. We’d rather move on with seating the second Supreme Court justice who’s clearly a sexual predator in the last 30 years — and let their victims continue to carry the weight alone. Even as they begin to fight back against such damaging denial from across the decades.
And this leads to one of the most insidious and disguised forms of denialism that’s taken root under the current president: the popular conspiracy theory about the sexual exploitation of children by a group of coordinated elites.
As a victim of childhood sexual abuse, this is deeply offensive and painful to me. I feel gut-punched every time it’s even mentioned. Because I recognize it for what it is: an attempt to distance the sexual abuse of children from everyday life and cordon it off as happening only in the context of comic-book style cabals. Not in your schools and your kids’ soccer teams, and certainly never in your family.
These kinds of conspiracy theories are a boon to child predators, because they take the burgeoning awareness of harms to children in everyday life, and deny it away by appearing to be an attempt at acknowledgment. It is insidious.
Denialism must be maintained against all leaks. It’s a constant patching of holes and bailing out of encroaching water. Science punctures the boat … deny it away.
New technologies that implicate our long history of glutenous use of resources and make us feel culpable for pollution must be denied away also — it’s all the same boat.
People who aren’t adherents of the current president laugh it off when he brings up low-flow dishwashers and toilets and energy-saving light bulbs at his rallies. But those of us with up-close experience to profound denial understand how effective that is. What a relief it represents to his adherents. What a reassurance, that’s connected to everything for them.
And it’s no wonder denialism is surging in our nation right now. It’s a direct response.
New movements calling for acknowledgement of crimes that’ve gone ignored for millenia have risen up. Me Too is shining a light on sexual assault and harassment in a powerful way.
The movement against intimate partner violence is pushing open doors on the power and control dynamics of abusive relationships in an organized, practical, and deeply insightful way.
LGBTQ+ people are vocally demanding equality and calling out mistreatment, marginalization, and homophobia.
Black Lives Matter is striding a step beyond the most basic rights won by the hard work and sacrifice of last century’s Civil Rights Movement, and crying in a loud voice for acknowledgement of systemic racism, violence, and suppression of black and brown Americans.
It’s no wonder that the forces of denial get so upset when Confederate monuments are set to come down, for example. The act of their removal is a verdict. A stating out loud of the racism they obviously represent. And such acknowledgement is intolerable. Threatens to sink the boat entirely.
And a leader emerges to stand against all of it. ‘Come back with me,’ he says. ‘To the great-again good ol’ days. Leave it to Beaver — remember when things were like that?’
And what was Leave it to Beaver except a blissful state of profound denial — if you weren’t one of the people being harmed?
But he’s not really a leader at all. Not even in terms of his own movement.
Denialism is a con. And the target of the con is the self.
We’re so used to understanding a con from the swindler’s perspective — a slick operator getting over on a dupe.
But what happens when our aim is to dupe ourselves?
If we can pull off that kind of a con, we can walk in a world where racism is a thing of the past. Where our queer siblings are worthy of ridicule and don’t need to be dealt with as equals. Where sexual assault and abusive partners are rare. And where children are even more rarely the targets of sexually predatory adults. And even then, only under the most bizarre, extraordinary circumstances.
No, the president isn’t the author of this con. He’s just the shill. The plant in the crowd feigning surprise to discover he’s found a dollar bill when he opens the soap wrapper.
And the more total his commitment to the role, the more many of us adore him for making the whole scam on ourselves possible. What a great relief his performance facilitates.
And the con goes on for lifetimes. People live and die with it. Find new shills. New grifts on their fragile psyches.
It’s so hard to stand up to it, because you’re not standing up to the president, or any individual. You’re standing up to a very loud, angry, and frightened mass of people.
We’ve seen over the last four years that people with courage enough to confront an enemy in war, which is a lot, can still have nowhere near the amount of courage required to stand up to an army of deniers.
This is why we celebrate people like John Lewis and like Maya Angelou. Because they are so rare. Because they face down the very real threat of the response to acknowledgement. They are willing to suffer it.
There is something very hopeful to me, though, in this time of focused denialism.
It’s pretty clear that the most devoted adherents to total denial number somewhere around 40 percent of us.
All my life I’ve believed it was more like 80 percent. I’m kind of shocked it’s such a low number. It’s the easier way to go in life. But the strong response to confrontations with truth are so loud, the number must have seemed double to me.
I’m heartened to know that acknowledgement is a majority force against denial. It can’t have always been this way. And I love and admire the truth-seekers who’ve gotten things this far.
But predicating all of this, is the acknowledgment that everyone who’s committed to denying difficult truths, is keeping out some real and actual harm — witnessed or experienced. And the hand-in-hand truth that we all participate in various ways.
And in the fullness of reality, it’s my hope that we will see those struggling with denial as our siblings who do not have the strength to accept certain painful things. And who need our help.
We should not go on being harmed by these denials. But we should not seek to reassure ourselves against that person as an “other” any more than we’d condone someone doing that to us.
And maybe, when we’re ready, we can extend a hand of help, stand up for reality, and follow the example of peace-loving truth-tellers that our country has produced in bunches at times.
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