Over Winter Break, I spent a few hours researching possible careers in journalism. Columnist for The New York Times, reporter for The Wall Street Journal, fact-checker for The Washington Post — I skipped past examining the third. A career analyzing politicians and trying to decipher the truths from the lies sounds like torture. It’s not just speechwriters fudging the numbers or candidates exaggerating anecdotes anymore: the lies are bigger, and so are the consequences.
How can one reconcile election denial with the facts? What additional context can one give to the claim that women aren’t the only ones giving birth? The truth is a noble, difficult pursuit. The truth is a responsibility. One that few will bear, least of all those in power. Both parties have embraced their own unique fictions, more encompassing than any single false statement or extreme issue. Our partisan divide has grown, and two separate realities have emerged, each lived in by their respective sides of the political aisle.
Former President Donald Trump (just President Trump, to 40 percent of the country) has announced yet another bid for the Oval Office. His declaration of victory in 2020 was more than just deception: it was a cancer, with tumors manifesting themselves as rioters storming the Capitol Building and armed thugs posted up next to ballot drop boxes in Arizona.
And yet, most Americans did not embrace Trump’s lie, or the other crazy policies adopted by his ideological successors.
Roe v. Wade was overturned, and the country read tragic stories of teen pregnancies caused by rape and reckoned with the proposed laws that would see them forcibly brought to term. Meanwhile, many Republicans, such as Tudor Dixon, rallied behind no-exceptions abortion — based on the lie that it is morally right and necessary for a victim of a brutal sex crime to have her assailant’s baby.
Any reasonable doubt about climate change has been put to rest by concrete scientific consensus, but congressional Republicans refuse to act, and some even refute the evidence entirely. Lingering questions about the role of guns in mass violence have been answered by a series of never-ending shootings, and yet Republicans still blame mental illness. Mental illness can’t open fire on a crowd of bystanders.
Then the midterms came. The political center said “no” to falsehood. Democrats performed shockingly well, holding the Senate and nearly holding the House. But this left turn merely substituted one false narrative with another, and Americans know it. Biden’s low approval rating and the success of more mainstream Republican candidates in typically blue districts, such as Mike Lawler’s victory over U.S. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in New York’s Hudson Valley race, are indicative of a nation disgusted with both parties.
LSA freshman Julian Hernandez explained his thoughts to The Daily: “I feel like in some cases such as economic policies and foreign affairs, there is a ‘black and white’ between the right thing and the wrong thing to do. However, with other issues such as abortion and (its) morality, I find the increasingly radical stances of each party deeply troubling.” On many of the most important issues, especially democratic and cultural issues, the two parties have embraced opposing extremes, and they pay the price with moderate voters.
In key swing states, Trump’s handpicked screwballs lost seats for Republicans because most Americans wanted to put 2020 behind them. Despite liberals’ unpopular positions on crime and radical positions on gender theory, the anticipated Red Wave evaporated because Trump showed independents an even scarier reality.
“Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated. And that’s where MAGA Republicans are today.” President Joe Biden said in a speech.
Democrats ordained themselves the party of democracy. They were playing make-believe.
MAGA Republicans are not the only ones to lose without grace. Jan. 6, 2017, while less climactic and damaging than Jan. 6, 2021, saw objections to the certification of more states’ presidential votes by House Democrats than by House Republicans on the day of the insurrection four years later.
Trump’s defeat made election denial a larger menace, but it did not invent the dangerous mentality from scratch.
In 2022, Democrats made the threat to democracy a top issue. Publicly railing against the Big Lie, they privately fueled its growth by supporting Trump-endorsed election deniers in the primaries, hoping to face weaker candidates in the general. Trump’s crony John Gibbs won the Republican primary in Michigan’s 3rd congressional district after liberals spent $400,000 advertising his highly conservative beliefs.
In places where Democrats already had power or recently took it by propping up far-right maniacs, they govern from their own reality.
Crime rises, and they fight to defund the police. The city of Portland gutted their police budget by $15 million and suffered a 65% increase in homicides. Even Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat, conceded that as a result of the killing, “many Portlanders no longer feel safe.” But the more typical liberal response has been to downplay the problem.
In the recent Maternal Health Guidance, the Biden administration has removed the word “mother,” using the term “birthing people” instead. The unsettled gender debate distracts from the pressing matter of guaranteeing women better pre- and post-natal care. The debate around reproductive rights is already volatile, and radical new components limit the potential for positive motion. Most Americans rightfully support protections for transgender people. Many are weary about the speed of change. Sudden cultural shifts threaten to alienate all but the most progressive voters and require more substantive thought. Altering our language and historical understanding of pregnancy are dramatic steps that must be taken seriously.
Republicans and Democrats alike take nothing seriously. On democracy, abortion, climate, crime, etc., if fiction is convenient, then fiction becomes policy. Discussion is an exhausting, upsetting endeavor, but the alternative is silence.
Fiction and silence are bad for democracy. Finding the truth is hardest when passions are high, but at no other time is it so important. Americans want reality, and the results of the midterm elections reveal a nation that is not yet ready to abandon it.
Jack Brady is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at jackbra@umich.edu.