President Donald Trump's continuing attempts to overturn an election he lost decisively more than a month ago is, like so much of what he's done in office, shocking but not surprising. Who imagined that he would go quietly?
What some people may not have been fully prepared for is the way Trump's party as a whole has backed his dangerous delusions. According to a survey by The Washington Post, only 27 Republican members of Congress are willing to say that Joe Biden won. Despite the complete lack of evidence of significant fraud, two-thirds of self-identified Republicans said in a Reuters/Ipsos poll that the election was rigged.
But you really shouldn't be surprised by this willingness to indulge malicious, democracy-endangering lies. It has been clear for years that the modern GOP is a party that can't handle the truth.
Most obviously, Republican refusal to accept the election results follows months of refusal to acknowledge the dangers of the coronavirus, even as COVID-19 has become the nation's leading cause of death, and even as a startling number of people in Trump's orbit have been infected.
Sure enough, virus denial and vote denial converged almost perfectly Saturday, when Trump addressed a large, mostly unmasked crowd in Georgia - creating a potential superspreader event - and demanded that the governor overturn the state's election results. The next day Rudy Giuliani, who has been directing Trump's efforts to cling to office, was hospitalized with the virus.
The thing is, Republican rejection of reality didn't start in 2020, or even with the Trump era. Climate change denial - including claims that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by an international cabal of scientists - has been a badge of partisan identity for many years. Crazy conspiracy theories about the Clintons were mainstream on the right through much of the 1990s.
And one half-forgotten episode in particular seems to me to have foreshadowed much of what we're seeing right now: Republican reactions to the mostly successful introduction of Obamacare.
The Affordable Care Act went into full effect in 2014, amid dire predictions by Republicans. The act, they claimed, would drive insurance premiums sky-high, fail to reduce the number of uninsured, and have a devastating effect on employment.
None of that happened. Instead, millions of Americans gained health insurance coverage. Job creation continued, with 3 million jobs added in the year following the ACA's implementation.
As far as I can tell, however, no prominent Republican was willing to admit that the party's apocalyptic warnings had been proved false. Nor, of course, did Republicans make any effort to come up with a better health plan. Instead, party leaders simply pretended that the promised catastrophe had, in fact, materialized.
To be fair, while there is no evidence of significant electoral fraud, some people really were hurt by health reform - mainly young, healthy individuals who previously had cheap policies and made too much money to be eligible for subsidies. But these weren't the victims Republicans were looking for. Instead, they peddled tales of older, working-class Americans who supposedly had lost access to affordable insurance.
None of these tales stood up to scrutiny. But that didn't matter to the GOP. As I wrote at the time, Republicans had already - pre-Trump - entered the era of post-truth politics.
Now, there's obviously a big difference in immediate impact between refusing to accept evidence that contradicts your policy preconceptions and refusing to accept the results of an election. But the mindset is the same.
The Republican Party's previous history of dealing with inconvenient reality gives us a pretty good idea about when it will accept Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election - namely, never.
The New York Times