DRAFT: A Very Peculiar Kind of Triumph of the Will Indeed

A draft for Project Syndicate: Did Trump win because key tranches of the electorate had a will to be misinformed, or because of Trump & his enablers' will to misinform them?...

A draft for Project Syndicate: Did Trump win because key tranches of the electorate had a will to be misinformed, or because of Trump & his enablers' will to misinform them?...

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Let me start by quoting a rude tweet from my friend Dean Baker:

Dean Baker: ‘I hate to put a lot of highly paid pundits out of business, but look at this f**king graph… <x.com/DeanBaker13/statu…>

Fact: those with justified true beliefs about the state of issues like crime, inflation, immigration, and the state of the stock market overwhelmingly supported Harris.

So did Trump voters believe lies because Trump told them to, or were they Trump voters because they believed lies? And how do Republicans—for we Democrats cannot do it, as a key part of the structure of misinformation is that nothing we say can be believed—who want a better politics and a better future educate their masters on how to understand the world, and how to decide who to believe?