Shitty realism: the far-right’s most effective weapon

Or why we must wrestle with pigs

Dec 14, 2023

∙ Paid

Vance and Trump: the Lord Haw-Haws of our day

The relative Russian success in the Ukrainian war is revealing how we still fail to find the language to understand the West’s enemies. We accuse the pro-Putin faction in the US and Europe of spreading “fake news” or “lies”. Or, in the case of the admirably robust Senator Thom Tillis, of talking “total and unmitigated bullshit”.

Tillis was responding to J.D. Vance, a Trump-supporting senator (and a Putin-supporting senator, come to that). Vance claimed that “some people in this town are saying we need to cut social security and throw our grandparents into poverty. Why? So that one of Zelenskyy’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht?”

It was fake news, and a lie, and total and unmitigated bullshit, and every other insult you wish to cite. There is no prospect of benefits to elderly Americans being cut to fund aid to Ukraine. And only a malicious fraudster, which is to say a member of the majority faction in the modern US right, would dream of insulting our intelligence by saying so.

And yet if we have learned anything in the past decade it should be that it is not enough to expose news as fake. There is now a substantial body of academic research on the effectiveness of the fact-checking services reputable news and third sector organisations run. It tells us what we ought to know from our own experience: revealing a lie to be a lie has a limited impact on the ideologically committed. (Parisian researchers studied supporters of Marine le Pen. Although they accepted that she dealt in “alternative facts”, to put it gently, the knowledge that she embraced fake news did not weaken their support for her.)

It is the height of liberal naivety to imagine that, if we expose the lies of the far right (or left), all will be well. Life is not an exam. You do not succeed merely by knowing the right answers.

We ought to know by now that demagogic politicians and hucksters do not just lie, They lie with a strategy that tells a kind of truth their supporters want to hear.

I call it “shitty realism” – or if you do not like the coarse language, distorted truth. It’s shitty because unscrupulous operators pile up the lies and hysterical exaggerations. In the case of Vance, he is being a total shit when he pretends that the benefit payments of poor, elderly Americans will go to Ukraine. Quite deliberately and shittily, Vance plays on the fears of the vulnerable and confused that they will face an impoverished old age.

He then appeals to the fears of the paranoid that a clique of politicians is plotting to steal money from Americans to give to foreigners. Vance finally adds that those foreigners are corrupt, and will use US money to buy yachts rather than fight a war of national survival. His ability to invent the rabble-rousing idea that aid for a fellow democracy in its hour of maximum danger is being stolen from the poor and given to the corrupt shows that Vance is an accomplished and instinctive liar, and of course a piece of shit.

But exposing him will do little good. Trump supporters won’t necessarily care for two reasons. First because a few will hope for a Russian victory. I and many others have written about the admiration in a section of Western reactionary thought for Putin’s contempt for human rights, and in particular LGBT+ rights, and the admiration for a strongman leader.

But many more understand that Vance is, despite everything, telling a larger truth that American money given to Ukraine cannot be given to Americans.

Vance understands that shittiness needs to be dressed up to make it more acceptable. And so he pretends that there is a plot to steal money from poor Americans and give to Ukrainian criminals. But the fact remains that Western money and arms have gone to Ukraine and much more must go if we are not to live with an aggressive Russia for the rest of our lives. To win the political argument it is not enough to reveal the lies of Trump and his supporters, you need to take on the truth behind the lies and justify aiding Ukraine openly and proudly, by explaining that the defeat of Russia will be a blessing,

Being realistic about shits, and understanding that even the worst of them may tell a kind of truth on occasion, strikes me as the only sensible political posture. To take another example, it is no good trying to argue for net zero by saying, truthfully, that the UK’s Tory press was engaged in wholesale climate-change denial until as recently as a decade ago. It’s a true and tempting allegation. But the fact remains that when conservative say the transition to net zero is hugely costly and uncertain, they are telling the truth, regardless of their histoires, and unless you take them on, you run the risk of losing the most important argument of our time.

In their contrasting ways both US and UK politicians are hopeless at winning arguments.

Hyper-partisan America makes its politicians lazy. They are not good at winning over potentially biddable voters on the other side of the divide. If you assume your opponents are wicked or demented, the art of persuasion dies. If they could rediscover political skills, pro-Ukraine Democrat politicians could seduce a portion of the currently wavering supporters of Vance and Trump by appealing to their patriotism. (Notice I say a “portion”. Not all or a majority, but enough to hurt the far right.)

As Fiona Hill, a clear-eyed adviser to successive US governments said this week, “Ukraine has become a battlefield now for America and America’s own future — whether we see it or not — for our own defensive posture and preparedness, for our reputation and our leadership. For Putin, Ukraine is a proxy war against the United States, to remove the United States from the world stage.”

Allow Ukraine to lose, and no ally will trust the US again.

In the UK the situation is almost the precise opposite. The problem with our culture is that it is nowhere near partisan enough. With an election coming, neither main party wants to make expensive commitments and so neither dares argue in public that we will have raise substantial amounts of military and financial aid for the struggle against Putin,

You cannot win arguments you duck. The case for saving Ukraine can only be won by fighting the pro-Putin faction point by point, not merely by shouting “you liars”.

“Never wrestle with a pig,” goes the old saying. “You both get dirty and in any case the pig likes it.”

But in the case of Ukraine we must wrestle with the pigs of the far right. For unless we take them on and beat them, we will all be in deep shit.