In 2018, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist, reportedly described his tactic of “flood[ing] the zone with shit” — pumping so much misinformation and nonsense into the media landscape that citizens trust serious news reports less and important stories get buried in the deluge. Conflicting stories and propaganda create a fog of confusion concerning what is true, siloing people into their own worlds, inhibiting a coherent response, thus helping a vile strongman get away with doing vile things.
Trump operates in a similar fashion individually. He is a real threat to democracy and the rule of law, but says and does so many absurd, awful things that one eventually grows numb to it all and begins to tune out. A dangerous effect. Another fog settles over the populace, with serious statements difficult to parse from the ocean of lunacy. When Trump speaks of serving for three terms or terminating the Constitution or being dictator for a day, is he trolling the libs and getting high off the attention, or expressing actual goals? (Not all will view his actions as fully clarifying.) When such statements exist alongside suggestions that bleach injections cure COVID, claims that windmill (energy turbine) noise causes cancer, and face-saving alterations of hurricane projection maps with a sharpie, is it harder for people to take them seriously? (Republicans certainly bend over backward to frame verbal threats to democracy as just more Trump silliness.) Does Trump, wittingly or not, flood the zone with so many distractions that his dangerous actions and true intentions make less of an impact, a boon to an authoritarian?
Such phenomena overwhelm the masses and ensure legitimate dangers are less noticeable in all the noise, and a recent, insidious third strain follows the same pattern. The mimetic variant has become increasingly obvious over the past four years. If Trump is accused of staging a coup, scheming to unlawfully remain in power after losing a free and fair election, the Right must respond with the laughable claim that Biden withdrawing from the 2024 election was a “coup.” If Trump interferes in an election, he must explicitly call the criminal charges against him (many for that very act) “election interference.” If Trump is a legitimate danger to democracy, no, the Democrats are the actual danger. Whatever crime you’re involved in, accuse the other side of the same, which serves to obscure the seriousness of your own actions by making all this look like standard, childish back-and-forth political name-calling. Flood the zone with shit; make accusations meaningless.
This furthers the construction of parallel worlds. As I wrote in War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ending Democracy is Saving It, which took the clear and present dangers to the democratic functioning of our society and compared them to the ideas in Orwell’s 1984:
Authoritarianism appears to rely on parts of the populace living in parallel worlds…built on conspiracy theories and lies… One part of the population believes destroying democracy is saving it. That stealing an election prevents a stolen election. The armed mob that broke into the Capitol [and] the conservatives decrying mass voter fraud…believe democracy is in danger as sincerely as liberals (and moderates and sane conservatives). It must be protected from those cheating Democrats, fraudulent votes, bad voting machines. Their own reality.
Pumping nonsense into the news, spewing nonsense individually, parroting nonsensically to distract from and delegitimize real problems… These practices and lies build the fantasyland. Elsewhere, they spread a cloud of exhaustion, confusion, and meaninglessness. Both of these creations aid and enable strongmen. Democracy, it turns out, dies not in darkness, but in a well-fertilized zone.
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