One of the main reasons that Democrats have been recently sidelined is that the electorate is experiencing crisis fatigue. The fearmongering from Democrats on COVID, Climate, and Russia has finally exhausted the voting public. The Democrats are finding out that cultivating a state of fear in the populace to attain and maintain power has its limitations.  Over time people get tired of hearing the same old drumbeat. The narrative wears thin and people start to see through it.

It is amazing that people fall for crisis narratives in the first place. The most likely explanation is that people regard themselves as intelligent if they go along with beliefs which experts hold with certainty. This leaves one vulnerable to false narratives. However, that’s not all. They may not perceive as acutely as others the economic pain that usually accompanies the policies put forth to solve the crisis.  Some may even consider themselves wealthy enough to withstand the troubles, or maybe even clever enough to benefit from the fallout.

Crisis experts rely on their audience having a short memory. When climate experts claim that the Antarctic ice sheet is melting at an alarming rate, and forty years later the ice sheet has done the opposite and grown, they are relying on people not remembering their previous predictions. My personal favorite was when health authorities insisted that the COVID vaccine would confer immunity on vaccinated individuals and then we would discover that these same experts would be home in bed with their third bout of COVID. How does one ignore these inconsistencies? Even if one tried to ignore them, the cognitive dissonance would build up over time and take a toll on one’s psyche.

What gives me hope for humanity is that individuals sometimes do become disenchanted with the experts ceaselessly droning on about a crisis. The Russia, Russia, Russia scare is a good example. Eight years ago, the Democrats and their media acolytes were screaming about Russian election interference. That episode ended in disgrace, with Mueller stumbling through his testimony before Congress. (However, it was too late to redeem Lorne Michael’s reputation as a funny man after he produced the worst skit ever on SNL.) Three years ago, it would have been unthinkable to say anything bad about that neoliberal mascot, Volodymyr Zelensky. Today, his lecturing to Western leaders on the existential threat from Russia is being compared to the lectures on climate catastrophism from that other boorish enfant terrible, Greta Thunberg.  In fact, it’s not just Zelensky’s shtick that Americans are weary of. Staving off the ambitions of one Hitler wannabe after another has been the justification for almost every war the U.S. has fought since WWII. The “stopping Hitler before he invades to Poland” narrative is wearing thin with the American public. They are starting to think that a disagreement with Russia may not require us to go to DEFCON 2.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.