When conservative radio host Wendy Bell introduced state Sen. Doug Mastriano at his rally in Somerset County on Friday, Sept. 9, she opened with two simple questions. “How many of you know who I am?” Universal recognition. Raucous cheers. “How many of you believe what I say?” Another wave of applause and whoops of affirmation.
That second question gets to the heart of America’s political divide, and sheds light on a subculture that’s hiding in plain sight — and that propelled Mr. Mastriano to the Republican nomination for governor. The typical media frame of truth vs. lies and facts vs. misinformation isn’t the best way to understand polarization. It’s first and foremost a question of trust.
A few weeks ago, my rather right-wing barber told me, as if it were as obvious as the weather, that the Biden administration and oil companies are in cahoots to lower gas prices for the midterm elections. I hadn’t heard this one, but as my brain flipped through possible rebuttals, I realized there were no arguments or authorities I could cite that he would accept as legitimate.
If Joe Biden and the CEO of ExxonMobil had denied the collusion, he would of course assume they were lying. If a fact-check agency reported no evidence for such a conspiracy, he would say, “Yeah, that’s the whole point of a conspiracy.” If a mainstream media outlet did a thorough report claiming to fully disprove the collusion, he would assume the journalists were in on the job.
As far as my barber is concerned, every traditional American institution has proven itself untrustworthy. And he’s far from alone. As I’ve pointed out previously, Gallup’s annual survey of institutional confidence is at an all-time low, with public trust in media, political and corporate institutions all below 30%.
But trust is essential, because it’s impossible to independently investigate everything we rely on or believe to be true. We have to trust institutional leaders and intermediaries — that is, “the media” — to relay the truth to us. Because we rarely have the first-hand access to judge for ourselves, the question people face isn’t so much, “Which set of facts is true?” It’s, “Whom do I trust to tell me the truth?”
The answer can’t be “no one,” or else we’ll be completely adrift. So when people scrap all the usual authorities, they have to look elsewhere. And they’ll find an anchor in alternative authorities who seem to hold the traditional authorities in as much contempt as they do.
Enter Donald Trump. And Tucker Carlson. And Doug Mastriano. And Wendy Bell.
After attending a day of Mr. Mastriano’s events in Cambria and Somerset counties and speaking to some of his supporters, it’s clear that 2020 was an inflection point for many voters’ relationships not just with the media, but with every traditional node of influence and authority in America. And it mostly didn’t have to do with the election: It was COVID.
In 2016, Mr. Trump intuited and captured a growing sense of cultural, political and economic dislocation, especially in what writer Chris Arnade has called “back row America.” These are the people who have felt left behind not just by rapid cultural change but by economic “progress” that hollowed out their towns and neighborhoods. This was no longer the Reagan-era sense that government caused more problems than it solved: It had become an omnibus suspicion of an apparent government-corporate-cultural-academic monolith that cared nothing for the lifestyles and livelihoods of back-row Americans.
COVID seemed to bring this monolith crashing into their living rooms. Mask mandates for kindergarteners. Vaccine mandates for jobs. Neighborhood small businesses shuttered while “essential” big box stores remained open. Layoffs in already job-poor regions. Arbitrary rules, like having to wear a mask while walking to the bathroom at Eat-n-Park, but not while sitting in the booth.
Public health permission slips for George Floyd protests and shrill reprimands for other outdoor events, or for going to church. The insistence that Big Pharma corporations like Pfizer were to be considered pure symbols of Science itself when the respectable view had been, until the day before yesterday, that they were untrustworthy and cynical profit-seekers.
It was during the spring and summer of 2020 that Mr. Mastriano made a name for himself with his Facebook Live “fireside chats,” channeling the COVID frustrations of the people who have become his most faithful followers. And COVID still dominates his stump speeches, because COVID ties it all together.
They all failed you. They all betrayed you. They all lied to you. They all can’t be trusted.
But he can.
At least that’s the pitch. For his supporters any inconsistencies between his claims and those of, for instance, the legacy media will be resolved in his favor. Breathless pleas like “fake news!” and “misinformation!” and certainly “threat to democracy!” painlessly wash over them like morning fog in the Conemaugh Valley. Because they can’t be trusted and, by definition, he can.
There’s more than a whiff of demagoguery in this approach — especially in Ms. Bell’s explicit appeal to her own trustworthiness — but in a political culture so devoid of trust, it’s almost unavoidable. Certainly it was inevitable that this kind of populism would emerge. It’s what people want. More than that, it’s what people need.
Some have seen in the rise of men like Mr. Trump and Mr. Mastriano a kind of political nihilism, a breathtakingly cynical disregard for truth. But for those who feel that all the conventional authorities had already abandoned the truth, alternative politicians and alternative media — alternative truth-tellers — are their attempts to grasp for something to hold onto. The tent-revival atmosphere of a Mastriano rally is, among many other things, a desperate attempt to fulfill the need for trust and truth, and to avoid the nihilism of trusting no one and believing nothing.
The risk is ending up trusting anyone, and believing anything.
