By now, you no doubt have seen the Schwarzenegger speech in which he compares many in his own party to Nazis. In the speech, he mentions that people from other countries called him in tears because they were upset about what was going on. To those in other countries asking how this could happen in America, I can only say one thing.
It's the lies, stupid.
The American system is built on a pretty simple premise: if we dilute political power in as many hands as possible, then we don't have to worry about the corrupt motives of any one person as no individual has enough power to do all that much damage. Whatever corrupt thing an individual person wants to do is going to get drowned out by the competing interests of many other individuals.
Or at least, that's how it is supposed to work.
The Republican Safe Space Media
America has always had groups of wealthy people trying to translate their economic wealth into a concentration of political power into their own hands. Plenty of historians have documented that even before the revolution, wealthy Americans used racism to get poor and middle-class white people to vote against their own interests.
In order to further their interests of concentrating wealth and political power into the hands of the few (their own), a group of wealthy people worked very hard and spent a lot of money constructing an entire false news distribution ecosystem that not only spread lies but accused actual journalist sources of "bias" any time their lies were contradicted.
Feeling that their reputations were being attacked, many news sources started to avoid contradicting the lies coming from the right-wing media. Thus, conservatives would watch right-wing media and see them calling the mainstream media liars, but then would watch the mainstream media and not see anyone calling them liars. This led to millions of conservatives coming to the conclusion that the mainstream media was full of liars and that the right-wing media were the only ones telling them the truth.
It is true that propaganda always tells its audience that everyone else is lying, but in America's case, the mainstream media wittingly or unwittingly facilitated these claims because they were terrified of being accused of bias by propagandists.
No Facts, No Democracy
This has resulted in at least two Americas consuming completely different journalistic sources offering contradictory sets of facts. As people started to say during the Bush II administration, we now live in a "post-fact society."
As should have become apparent to all during the Bush II administration, democracy cannot function if the population cannot agree on basic facts about their own country and the world. You cannot have a functional policy about whether your military is going to use mass torture while operating in other countries if the voting population cannot agree on what torture is, nor whether or not torture is or has occurred. This brings us to last week's coup attempt by Republican terrorists.
Many of the people who tried to overthrow the government were surprised to find that they are now on the no-fly list. They are surprised that people are calling them traitors. They are confused as to why people are accusing them of trying to overthrow the government. This is because, from their point of view, everyone else is the traitor. As far as they were concerned, they were smearing their own poop on the walls of the Capitol in order to defend the Republic from sinister forces who were trying to deny Trump his rightful second term. In their minds, they were the heroes defending America, not the traitors trying to overthrow the government. This is all because we cannot agree on basic facts.
The right-wing safe space media is full of allegations of election fraud by Democrats. The right-wing safe space media makes no mention of the fact that every single one of these allegations was taken to court in a series of over 60 lawsuits, and also makes no mention of the fact that not a single one of those lawsuits managed to change a single electoral vote because all of those allegations are based on lies and bad logic. Those who consume conservative safe space media have heard the allegations repeated so many times that they take the allegations as absolute fact. Further, they have absolutely no idea that all of those claims were taken to court and failed because the conservative safe space media carefully protected them from that information. They of course have no idea why those allegations failed in court for the same reason.
If you try to explain any of this to them, you will trigger a defensive posture called the backfire effect, which will result in them becoming even more convinced that they are right. Because they firmly believe that the election was stolen by nefarious agents, in their minds, the rightful government has been overthrown by the conspiracy to steal the election. In their minds, the march on the Capitol was part of an effort to take the government back from the nefarious alien lizard people who stole the government from them. In their minds, they weren't a bunch of traitors trying to overthrow the government, they were Noble Heroes trying to save America from the alien lizard people and their treasonous Democratic minions.
The Outsider Test For Faith
This all sounds completely absurd, but to those wearing "blue lives matter" sweatshirts who murdered police and fully intended to murder the vice president and any Democratic legislators they could get their hands on, everything you believe is completely absurd and at odds with reality. From their point of view, what they did was the only rational response to the election last November and everything to happen since.
America has been taking this road for a long time. It took a lot of time and effort to so perfectly isolate Republican voters from reality that they could be motivated to overthrow the government while believing themselves to be patriots. It didn't start with "alien lizard people stole the election," it started with "making wealthy people wealthier will benefit you." The world was shocked when Trump called Nazis "very fine people" in the wake of the Charlottesville Nazi riot, but you have to remember that people in the conservative safe space media bubble did not see Nazis recreating a famous Nazi night march while chanting "The Jews will not replace us!" Instead, they were told that what happened in Charlottesville was vicious Antifa protesters violently attacking innocent patriots for no good reason. Most of them don't know anything about the Nazi who drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, or if they did hear about it, they thought it was a good thing because they were told the counterprotesters were the "real fascists."Conservatives saw a very different image of what happened in Charlottesville, and so they will never agree with others on a reasonable response to what happened in Charlottesville. I remember talking to conservatives years after Abu Ghraib, and many were shocked when I told them that they had defended mass torture as a public policy. As far as they were concerned, they felt the need to yell at liberals during the Abu Ghraib crisis because the liberals were trying to give back rubs to the terrorists. If they do acknowledge that mass torture happened, they assert that all tortured were guilty and that the torture prevented nuclear weapons from being deployed against America because torture works.
I can't help but think of John Loftus' "outsider test for faith" in which he points out to theists that things may sound reasonable when you are surrounded by people who believe the same thing, but insane to outsiders. What sounds reasonable and unreasonable can be wildly different because of group dynamics. Loftus invites theists to examine their beliefs as someone from a different religion would examine them. I don't know if that is possible in American political discourse. I don't know that any fact can penetrate the fog of disinformation and constant reinforcement of bad ideas in the Republican safe space media. I only know that democracy cannot survive if things remain the way we are. We can and should argue about the best solution to achieve a given desired goal, but if we cannot agree on basic facts about reality, then democracy as America has practiced it for over two centuries simply cannot function and will ultimately collapse. We will ultimately become a dictatorship as Rome did, and I fear nothing can prevent that because nothing can possibly make a Republican admit that they are wrong about anything.