The gullicism of the American public

Thanks to commenter Mark Jamison for forwarding me this essay from Adam Serwer about what Serwer calls “gullicism” — the striking combination of gullibility and cynicism that characterizes our time in general, and the MAGA movement in particular:

The misplaced trust that might lead one to overlook the agenda of businessmen pushing useless vaporware tokens is the same impulse that convinces someone that Venezuela hacked voting machines to rig the 2020 U.S. election, then hid all the evidence. There’s no way the man who ran a fraudulent university and had photos of his inauguration altered to make the crowd seem bigger would make something up! Gullicism is what allows Marco Rubio to gush about the “president of peace,” who has bombed more countries than any other president in history.

Americans on the left are not immune to conspiracism, of course. You can easily find people who think Elon Musk rigged the 2024 election for Trump, or that the latter faked the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024. But conspiracism does currently have a partisan skew: Trump’s false claims have embedded these habits of thought within the conservative movement. Democratic leadership did not validate online nonsense about fake assassination plots and a rigged 2024 election, while most Republican leaders have repeated or declined to challenge Trump’s lies.

Part of what’s going on here is that people want a simple explanation for their troubles in a complicated world. Autism? It’s vaccines. Disease? Some foods are “poison.” Trouble with your kid? Must be brainwashed by … novels? Video games? Rap music? (This one depends on the decade.) The One True Reason trains a mind not only to reject complexity but to accept bigotry—which is why it’s so ideal for reactionary politics. No housing? Immigrants. No job? Immigrants. Inflation? Immigrants. Immigrants? It’s the Jews.

Serwer points out that in this respect our current moment was yet again anticipated by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian psychology:

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements.” She argued that “the whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naïve fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” All are ruled by “the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.”

It’s important to note that, in the context of the contemporary Republican party, the Christ figure of Donald Trump was presaged by many a snake oil-selling John (and Joan) the Baptist. Rick Perlstein’s 2012essay on the symbiotic relationship between right wing politics and profitable grifting to those prone to paranoid styling remains the classic treatment of the subject.