A Shortage of Serviceable Ducks

Is the Right Running Out of Decent Canards?

Not a duck.

The word canard means duck in French. It also means a false or misleading story.

In 2013, Alberto Brandolini propounded his Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, which states that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. In this story, I'm going to replace the world bullshit with canard, and also suggest that it may be time for a reconsideration of the overall principle.

I still think refuting a canard is much more work than making one up. I just think the level of asymmetry is declining. I see a number of reasons for this change in America's political discourse. They fall into two categories. First, the democrats are getting better at their game. Second, the fascists seem to be running on empty. 

There is now a cottage industry devoted to shooting down canards, and the reactions are quicker and more forceful. Good heavens, even the New York Times is now willing to use the word lie. 

Aggrieved parties are moving aggressively against the perpetrators of lies. This places the liars on the defensive, a situation they were apparently not expecting, and the outcome can be quite amusing. Sydney Powell, a great propagator of various theories of election fraud, got to watch her lawyers defend her allegations with the argument that "no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact." (For a story in the Guardian, click here.)

And the media, under pressure, have been tightening their rules and making it much harder for an enterprising canard to truly take flight - or go viral, as they say.

Again, the canardists seem to have been taken by surprise when their access to the microphone started to dwindle. Attempts to shift to new platforms haven't entirely fizzled, but the ability to reach beyond the base and get to a truly large audience seems to be limited at this point.

Finally, canards wear out, and when they do you have to replace them. And guess what? The replacement assembly line doesn't seem to be functioning very well. Many of the canards seem smaller, less credible, and less motivating, and many of them have remarkably short lives. How long did the ridiculous Dr. Seuss canard last? (And no, Minority Leader McCarthy, Democrats did not outlaw Dr. Seuss.)

There definitely seems to be a good bit of fumbling. Take the critical race theory kerfuffle. Many of the canardists don't seem to know much about critical race theory. But then they don't seem to know much about socialism either. I think there's a pattern here. I'm put in mind of the water strider, a bug that can walk across water without breaking the surface tension.

This tomfoolery still works with the base, of course, and many laws are being passed at the state level seeking essentially to prevent the study of history. All this needs to be opposed forcefully, but the perpetrators are acting in a sphere of illusions, and I suspect, if it comes to it, the bubble will be burst by children announcing that the emperor is wearing no clothes. That's essentially what happened in the 1960s.

Species of Canard

I see two main species of canard: distraction and contradiction. 

Distraction is a small, shiny object, preferably moving at great speed while it screams "Look at me, look at me!" Dr. Seuss is a good example. It can own a news cycle or two, distracting from the actual business in front of us.

Contradiction is the equivalent of a frontal assault. I used to have a boss who, when the conversation was going in a direction he didn't like, would simply say no. He didn't have anything to back up the no, but he didn't need anything. He was the boss, and it was a business, not a democracy.

Republicans, on the other hand, tend to respond with bald-faced lies. (Remember, they hate masks.) A classical example is the claim that January 6 was just like "a normal tourist visit" to the Capitol.

I personally think that lying is lazy. A more powerful, and more honorable, way to win an argument is to shift the terms of debate by bringing in new ideas or data. This is what a group of American colonists did when they declared that all men are created equal; monarchy has never recovered from this rhetorical blow.

But instead the right serves up the Big Lie, a contradictional canard if ever there was one. It's not getting much traction beyond the base, possibly because it's so ridiculous even Sydney Powell thinks the people who believe it are demented. (Fact check: Joseph Biden won the election.)

And who are the true believers? Self-identified Republicans are currently about 25% of the population in surveys. Evangelical Christians, a pillar of the right for many years, were 23 percent of the population in 2006; currently they are about 14.5 percent of the population. (For a story, click here.)

These are your dead-enders. We will always have them. There are still monarchists in France. 

One way to control them is to stop exaggerating their power. A recent poll indicates that 56 percent of Republicans believe the Big Lie. Okay, report the survey. Then do the arithmetic: 56% x 25% = 14%. 

Are We at War?

I'm not trying to underestimate the damage that the right has already done, or the damage that it is capable of in the future. Indeed, if things go badly, we could still wind up in a fascist dictatorship.

And facing up to the triumphalist certainty of people like Steve Bannon can get to be demoralizing. Early on he articulated the canardist strategy with the memorable phrase "flood the zone with shit." (For a January 2020 story, when the situation was much more fluid than it is now, see this story in Vox.)

Bannon's idea of flooding the zone is basically a military concept. The idea is to place your opponent in a chaotic and terrifying environment. As Shakespeare put it in Julius Caesar, "Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war" (JC3.1.273).

I suppose we could ask why we would apply such an approach to our political  process, but then Bannon  and his comrades think we are in a war. And I agree. A civil war that has been going on since January 2017. Not a lot of shooting, but plenty of casualties. Just look at the Covid-19 pandemic, where more than 600,000 Americans have lost their lives, basically to satisfy one man's vanity.  

The flood the zone approach may not be pretty, but it does work. However, you need a lot of bullets, and a very large delivery mechanism. My argument is that they briefly had both, and are now losing both.

I say this with some humility, because I've been wrong before. Back in 2013, I wrote a story called Maybe Lying Is Starting to Stop Working. I was, to say the least, premature.

How It Will Unfold

Having said that, I think the tide is running against the right. I think they peaked on June 3, 2020, when Senator Tom Cotton managed to place a piece of fascist propaganda on the op-ed page of the New York Times. In the story, he called for invocation of the Insurrection Act in response to the demonstrations and riots that occurred after the murder of George Floyd. 

I think the right saw that the hinge-point for a successful coup was bringing the professional military in on their side. It didn't happen. 

Since then, power has been slowly slipping out of their hands. In the November election, they lost the White House and the Senate, and on January 6 they failed to achieve their goal of reversing Joe Biden's election.

Now have a look at the voters, and what they want. The Republicans simply don't have much to offer to the great middle, also called independents. These are often people who just want things to calm down. They want to lead a normal life - go to work in the morning, come home in the evening, have dinner with the spouse and possibly kids, vote for representatives who are decent people and try to do the right thing. And of course they're opposed to dictatorship. The right's problem here is that they're in favor of dictatorship, and permanent chaos is their modus operandi. 

And we know our right wing very well. Although January 6 was definitely something new, most of the spaghetti they're throwing at the wall is old and tired and unlikely to stick.

I'm struck by how familiar so much of this stuff is. Look at Senator Susan Collins standing up and saying that states needed to control voter eligibility. States rights. Fourteenth Amendment. She reminds me of George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. 

I don't think there are any magic bullets, and I think we're looking at a long timeline, but I do think we have the tools to win this war. And wouldn't it be wonderful if we got all the way to the end without a lot of shooting? 

The right has certainly given us a lot of material to work with. January 6 has proven to be a veritable cornucopia. If you haven't looked at the New York Times video and the earlier New Yorker video, set aside a little time. They substantially deepened my understanding of what happened that day.

You could also watch the hearings of the House select committee investigating the events of January 6.

Fight a war with words and pictures. Fight a war without guns. Use the tools of democracy to defend democracy.

I think the war will be won by altering the shape of the battlefield.

A duck.

Recently a number of prominent anti-vaxxers have done a u-turn and started urging people to get vaccinated. Such an abrupt move to a diametrically opposed position - sometimes called a 180 - is dangerous to the leader who does it. For more see One-Eighties.

See also The Problem with Dystopia, Quagmire, A Home Invasion, After the Riot, Fascism.