People—especially those who are disenfranchised—will glom onto any minutiae no matter how trivial or incredulous if they detect an advantage and can imagine how it might leverage their team, but what’s even more surpassingly unbelievable, as Geoff Manaugh ponders and invites us to come along, is the magical thinking with which we make totems and talismans out of blandishing characterisations that cling to the margins of justice and framing policy.
What do you think? Truth and justice are to be upheld and suffer a thousand cuts, and as Napoleon put it “Repetition is the strongest of the rhetorical tools” and the only one worth having in one’s quiver. It’s not just the lie but its dissection and rehashing that drain people’s ability to attend and make informed choices, but we like—need this narrative of the last straw even though for institutional change or preservation, cherished symbols are rarely imbued with the power to affect real, enduring change for politics despite the effect that they have for the polity.
