The band formerly known as The Dixie Chicks (now known as “The Chicks,” and I’m not going to weigh in on that right now) released a new album called Gaslighter this week. It’s not one of the best albums I’ve heard this year, but it’s an enjoyable enough listen. The trio is trying a lot of new and interesting things on this album—a good variety of tempos and compositions and approaches to musical ideas. The results are mixed ("Sleep at Night" is a great song, but the album gets pretty slow and slips into repetitive clichés by the end), but I appreciate the experimentation and range they’re showing. As I listened to it, I mostly kept remembering how much I love Natalie Maines’ voice and how much I've missed hearing it.
The other thing that stuck with me after I finished the album was its title: Gaslighter. It’s a word that’s been thrown around a lot the last few years, and it’s not always accurately applied. I understand how Maines is using it, though, and it fits. Gaslighting is a form of manipulation wherein a person convinces someone else that they’re not seeing or experiencing the things they’re actually experiencing. This kind of psychological clouding usually happens over an extended period of time, and it eventually causes the victim to question his or her own sanity.
This weekend I’ve been thinking a lot about psychological abuse and manipulation in general. It’s something most of us have experienced and navigated in our personal lives, but it’s something that’s been especially prominent in our public life lately. And while I try to recognize a lot of it and try to call it out, I’m seeing more and more people just accept blatant lies and manipulation as truth. And as we head into election season, it’s starting to get worrying.
One thing I’ve learned for certain in the last four years is that the people in the current presidential administration are masters at deflection, manipulation, and gaslighting. And it seems to be getting increasingly worse.
Take the unrest in Portland that’s blown up this weekend. Whether or not you agree with the goals and methods of the demonstrations, the fact is that the protests in Portland have been mostly lawful and peaceful since June. But this weekend, some sort of anonymous paramilitary unit has descended on the city, beating people down with batons, tear-gassing people, and grabbing people on the streets and stuffing them into unmarked vans. Trump keeps shout-tweeting “LAW & ORDER!!” every few days, but it’s become clear that his version of law and order is actually unconstitutional lawlessness and disorder.
We see similar projection in the way the administration is currently trying to discredit voting by mail. There is no proof that voting by mail is a corrupt or flawed option. The President, Vice President, and several members of their Cabinet have all voted by mail repeatedly in the last four years. It’s safe enough for them. And we’re currently in the middle of a pandemic, so it’s important to have vote-by-mail as a safe alternative to waiting in long lines to vote. This had never really been a problem until this year, but all of a sudden it’s apparently a dangerous threat to our democracy or something.
If voting by mail was indeed a danger to democracy, then the President and his administration would be doing everything in their power to make sure it was safe and secure. Congress would be ensuring its security and devoting adequate economic resources toward it. Voting is a fundamental right in a democracy, and securing it should be a top priority for the Executive and Legislative branches. But Trump has done the opposite. He’s been villainizing and undercutting the United States Postal Service all year. A couple months ago, he appointed a political donor with zero experience to oversee the USPS. And sure enough, things are already being dismantled. So when the administration says that voting by mail is insecure, it’s because they’ve made it that way (and they intend to make it worse).
There are so many more examples. “At some point [the coronavirus] is going to sort of just disappear” as new cases and deaths are exploding. A legitimate investigation into foreign collaboration and election interference is a “witch hunt,” while his constant refrain of “OBAMAGATE!!” is neither defined nor supported with evidence. Democrats want “SOCIALISM!!” when the only people who are benefitting from socialism are the donors and giant corporations who have received enormous bailouts and contracts from the Treasury Department while small businesses are folding and unemployed people are barely scraping by. The media is all “FAKE NEWS!!” when they’re reporting actual quotes, actions, and statistics (except for Fox News and OANN and Newsmax and Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and Brietbart and Drudge and all the other “news entertainment" that’s poisoned the minds of our parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends for the last 30 years).
One thing has become crystal clear since 2016: If anyone in this administration (Trump, Pence, Bill Barr, Don Jr., Mike Pompeo, etc.) is sounding the alarm about something their political rivals are supposedly doing, you can be damned sure it’s something they’re currently doing or planning to do themselves. If they’re saying people are lawless, it’s to cover their own lawlessness. If they’re warning that voting by mail is rife with corruption, it’s because they intend to make it corrupt. They're telegraphing their own intentions all the time when they accuse their opponents of doing something. It's a clear pattern now.
People who cheat to win can’t imagine people not cheating to win. Liars can’t imagine people not lying. Manipulators can’t imagine people not manipulating. Grifters can’t imagine people not grifting. So they do it first. They do it so loudly, shamelessly, and repeatedly that people are completely worn down and overwhelmed. And before long, all that lying and cheating and manipulation just becomes an accepted reality to a large swath of the population. We’re constantly being gaslit, and the actual lived and experienced reality we’re seeing with our own eyes is repeatedly being denied and deflected.
I’ve been thinking a lot about George Orwell’s 1984 lately, too, and there are a number of passages that seem to apply well to our current encounter with administration-sponsored double-speak:
“Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
All of these quotes have rung resoundingly and alarmingly true over the last few years, and they’re especially true right now in the middle of a pandemic and an economic recession. Before we make any decisions about where we’re heading after November, we really need to stop right now and take account of what’s true and what’s not.
When you’re faced with gaslighting, projection, and deflection, you really have two options: 1) You can recognize it, call it out, and walk away if it doesn’t change or 2) You eventually get worn down by it, accept it as normal, and give in to a reality that’s not reality.
Too many people are choosing the latter right now. Even if it’s 40% of our country, that’s 40% too many. It means that people are choosing mindless loyalty, ingrained biases, and a wholesale acceptance of untruth over the facts and reality that are staring us in the face. This is not what democracies do. It’s what republics slipping into authoritarianism do. It’s what happens when people have accepted that a Ministry of Propaganda doesn’t need to exist because it already exists and it’ll tell us what to think…that 2+2=5. And I’m not going to accept that.
Wrong is wrong. Corruption is corruption. Manipulation is manipulation, and gaslighting is gaslighting. Natalie Maines, Martie Erwin Maguire, and Emily Strayer dropped an album this week about seeing it, stopping it, and walking away. For Winston Smith in 1984, it was too late to walk away. But it’s not for us. Not yet. All you have to do is open your eyes. When you hear a rambling, bombastic political rally from the Rose Garden, recognize it for what it is. When you hear people say something is real when it’s not or fake when it’s real, reject it—even if they say it repeatedly. Do this in your personal life and do it in your public life. It’s up to us to take back our senses and take back the truth. Because these things still matter. And they're still worth fighting for.
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