The Marketplace of Ideas and Normalization, aka, Make Crazy Sane Again

Americans have all been raised on this notion of the “marketplace of ideas,” which is one of the cornerstones of free speech in this country, and probably elsewhere, but we don’t care about them.  Dirty Brexiters.  Basically, the marketplace concept says that the only way society can determine whether an idea is good or not is to give it an opportunity to exist in an open market, and see if anyone buys it.  Basically, you can say anything you want, but if it’s stupid, you’re going to get a smackdown for realz.  And I think, in a society where everyone is concerned about the same thing, and can debate with reason and open-mindedness, it probably works.  Sadly, we’ve never had that, I think, ever, which is why so many people sold the lie that slavery was a totally good idea for so long.

The alternative, on the other hand, censorship, seems hardly better.  So we let people yap and if we disagree, we either contribute our thoughts, we try to understand their thoughts, or we ignore them, either immediately or eventually, and hope that others do, too. 

Lately, though, I think that the marketplace of ideas is running smack into normalization: the idea that if somebody says or does something frequently enough without being challenged, it becomes part of the common wisdom – we hardly notice it, and we accept it as either The Truth, or at least A Truth.  People say it’s beginning to happen with mass shootings.  We’re getting used to them.  It’s pretty normal.

Donald Trump is the master of normalization.  He says something thoroughly outlandish, like that Ted Cruz’s father was part of the JFK assassination.  The first time he says it, people are like, “You are fucking crazy, man.”  But then the media picks it up, he supports it with three tweets, and he repeats it again, and suddenly we’re like, “Yeah, I’ve heard that before.  There must be some truth to that.” 

Twitter and Facebook and Instagram (which I called Pictionary to my son the other day, and he laughed and laughed) go even further to not only normalize, but magnify craziness.  Some douchebag decides he’s going to direct all of his rage and impotence against the cast of Ghostbusters, and somehow gets what seems like an army of supporters to do the same.  And this can lead us to conclude that lots of people believe this shit, when in reality, it’s just a sliver of a sliver of people, but they’re loud, and they’re persistent, and it seems like they’re everywhere, when meanwhile, people who disagree are probably ignoring it, because it’s stupid, and they’re adults, and, in the marketplace of ideas, rage against Ghostbusters really is not a big deal. 

But I think eventually, at least for me, it starts to be exhausting.  It’s exhausting to see Donald Trump repeat his crazypants word vomit over and over again.  It’s exhausting to see people support it, even if you know they don’t even believe it, they’re just angry that a vagina and ovaries could possibly have the nuclear code.  It’s exhausting to see the grammatically-challenged tweets and the ceaseless chants of BUILD THAT WALL or TRUMP THAT BITCH.  What the hell does TRUMP THAT BITCH even mean?  Is this a Euchre reference?  And in our exhaustion, we start to believe that maybe, just maybe, these thoughts have been exposed to the marketplace of ideas, and that they have been accepted as truth.  After all, it happened with Hitler.  (As an aside, my brother thinks that mentioning Hitler is a cheap out.  I believe that Donald Trump plays the same populist, isolationist, xenophobic shit, and, like Hitler, he is a master at normalizing hate and fear.  So write your own damn blog, JIM.)

And I don’t have an antidote.  But I think it’s worth saying.  Just because we live in a time when a bad idea repeated seems like it’s been accepted, it’s still a bad idea.  You have not lost your fucking mind.