The Reality Gap

 In the midst of a deadly pandemic he has completely failed to control and an economic collapse connected to that failure, it seems insane that Donald Trump even has a chance in this election. By all rights he should be where Jimmy Carter was in 1980 or Herbert Hoover in 1932.

A lot of this can be chalked up to partisanship. Most Republicans would rather cut off their left arms than vote for a Democrat. Trump is the ultimate test of their partisan loyalty and they have been overzealous in trying to pass it.

However, it's not just simple partisanship. Beneath that divide lies a fundamental difference in how Americans apprehend reality. Conservatism is less of a set of ideas than it is a mental universe. Conservative media defines the parameters of that world, and if something does not cross that media world's threshold, it never registers. This gives Trump a huge advantage, since his followers never even hear about his failures and malicious behavior.

For example, a relative sent us a letter in the mail from the middle of the country. It did not get here until more than two weeks after it was sent. My relative was perplexed by this, completely unaware that the Trump administration has been sabotaging the postal service. When I brought this up, they refused to believe me. I sent them some news articles to explain what I was talking about. When the topic came up again after we finally got the letter, my relative again acted dumbfounded, as if the reason was not plain as day. 

It's not merely the fact that so many live in an alternate reality, it is that they CHOOSE to live in that reality. That is an absolutely crucial point that a lot of people don't seem to get. I know people with advanced degrees who are climate change deniers. It's not that they are "dumb" or "ignorant" it's that they have CHOSEN to live in this alternate reality. If their alternate reality is questioned their entire identity collapses and so they simply refuse to connect the president's policies against the post office to the reason why their mail arrives so late. 

Anyone who has been around fervent religious believers understands this dynamic well, and it's no coincidence that there's a lot of crossover between Trump voters and die hard white evangelicals. (Nor is it that the same group is well represented in QAnon circles, but that's a story for another time.) Thirty years ago the media landscape was such that news of the president sabotaging the post office would have registered with ordinary conservatives, but now they view any news coming from outside their media to be suspect.

The reality gap is keeping Trump viable in this election, but it might not be enough to put him over the top. Even so, the huge percentage of the country that has elected to live in an alternate reality are not going away. They will remain the majority in broad swathes of the country. The media landscape will be even more fractured and divided as years go on. A Democratic Congress and president who does not realize this, and who thinks they broke the spell by defeating Trump, will be setting themselves up for failure.