The attached graphic popped up in one of my political pages today. It posits a suggestion I’ve seen repeatedly – that Trump’s campaign has been, all along, a grand conspiracy to ensure Clinton gets elected President. And, in some versions, to destroy the GOP.
It’s easy to fit the facts of this electoral season to a narrative that supports this notion, if one is of a mind to do so. That’s the beauty of conspiracy theories. Given a big enough data set and an outcome one doesn’t like, one can retrofit enough data points to a convenient theory to make it seem plausible.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll offer up rebuttal with a quote barrage:
The simplest answer is usually the correct one. — Occam’s Razor
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. — Hanlon’s Razor
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. — H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. — H. L. Mencken (again).
Trump is the fault of the voters, plain and simple. Trump, like most who aspire to public office, is a man of big ego and big self-importance. That sort of thing plays well to the masses, as the countless examples of demagogues in the world’s history demonstrates. Trump tapped into an angry and visceral populist/nativist undercurrent that was unnoticed or ignored by the Republican Party establishment in DC and stoked into extreme rage by the Democratic Party’s unilateral excesses as embodied by President Obama. Trump is not the product of some backroom deal between himself and the Clintons, he’s just the result of people thinking shallowly and selfishly (as are so many other politicians).
This wouldn’t be the first time that an undesired political outcome was attributed to a shadowy star chamber, nor will it be the last. Human nature assures us of this. People don’t like to admit their own errors, because doing so is tough on the ego. Worse, doing so publicly exposes people to one of the great fears: public humiliation. This fear is almost certainly hard-wired into our genes, since being shunned by the tribe makes it very unlikely that your DNA will be passed down to your progeny. So, people will come up with outlandish theories instead of simply saying “I was wrong or I was suckered by a snake oil salesman.” It’s how politicians, con artists (but I repeat myself) and other unsavory types have leveraged others to their benefit since the dawn of civilization.
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