A Christian friend writes to say that she is being inundated by propaganda from within her religious online circles. They’re making hysterical claims about voter fraud, a Democratic coup, and so forth. I’m getting some of that too, though far less of it because I’m not on Facebook. As I wrote on my Substack newsletter last night (you should subscribe; it’s free for now), I had dinner with a Christian friend who is a Democrat, and who is reeling from the things he’s reading from other Christians he knows and loves. He’s not politically engaged, and joined Facebook to be a part of their lives, but seeing the red-hot election takes, he’s wondering if he ever really knew those people at all. I assured him that liberals are doing the very same thing. Seems like everybody is venting their passions now.

Hate me if you wanna, but I am holding back. I cannot tell what’s true and what’s not. I remember being in a situation like this, in the march up to the Iraq War. I surrendered to the emotional tide within, and within my tribe, to believe what President Bush was saying. It felt so right, and so righteous. But it was not true. I’m not saying that the president was a liar, but that he was propagating a false narrative, perhaps unawares. It led to disaster for our country. I am not going to surrender to what this president is saying, not without solid evidence.

Do I believe vote fraud might have occurred in this election? Of course it might have. Where we have solid reason to suspect it, we should dispatch a phalanx of Republican lawyers to challenge it in court. But Donald Trump is exactly the kind of man who would make reckless, inflammatory allegations — and has done so. I have walked this walk before, and it leads nowhere good. Let’s be patient, and let the lawyers do their work. If you aren’t careful, you are going to talk yourself into believing that it is a metaphysical impossibility that Trump lost. You could not have convinced me in the summer of 2002 that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You could not have convinced me that the facts and the logic were anything but clear: the US needed to go to war against Iraq. The only reason anybody could doubt that was that they were cowards or fools.

It’s happening again. I’m not saying that there has not been Democratic voter fraud. I’m saying that we don’t know that for sure, and that the President of the United States does not know that either at this point. His rhetoric is destructive and reckless. Mobs are always bad. A right-wing mob is no better than a left-wing mob. Bank your fire, and let the lawyers work. And if Trump loses, so be it. The more important fight is going to be the one to save the Senate, and it’s going to take place in Georgia.

Peggy Noonan writes today:

It looks to be a long slog. Will some mess and incompetence be uncovered on state levels? Probably. Will we see some mischief appear to have been done in this city or that county? Probably. … But there’s a point at which we have to remember there are limits to all inquiries. Richard Nixon in 1960 didn’t challenge what had been done to him when the cemeteries went strong for JFK. He thought it wouldn’t be good for the country.

Do those involved understand that turning this election into a political street fight could result in literal fighting in the streets? Oh, for a president who could say something like, “Let’s let the system do its work in a hard election shaped by changed rules during a pandemic. Let’s trust in honest outcomes and see where we are at the end. For now from me a simple vow, to stick to tradition and respect the decision of the people.” Instead the president, as this is written is screaming on Twitter about “Voter Fraud,” “STOP THE COUNT,” “secretly dumped ballots.” He vows, based on nothing, to go to the Supreme Court. He ends as he began, playing with fire.

We will have to keep our cool and see to it that the law prevails.

Here’s what I’m afraid of: if Trump does not prevail, and Biden is sworn in as the next president, all the passion on the Right that should be going towards the building and expanding of a conservative majority, and a coherent new populist policy agenda for the Right, is going to go into nurturing a Trumpist Dolchstoßlegende — a backstabbing myth that maintains the reason Trump lost is that he was somehow betrayed. I also fear that this will be the response of many conservative Christians. The passion that they ought to have been pouring into preparing their communities for resistance and resilience under the coming soft totalitarianism will be wasted on Dolchstoßlegende.

The political scientist Eric Kaufmann has a very good piece at Unherd this morning saying that the pollsters really blew it when it came to predicting how educated conservatives would vote. Educated conservatives lied to pollsters, or withheld their views. Why? Because they work in environments in which they believe they would be likely to suffer if their political views were known. Kaufmann:

Across all racial groups, 80% of Americans say “political correctness is a problem in our country”. Only the small “Progressive Activist” 8% of the US population largely thinks it’s not. In practice, the burden of political correctness arguably falls most heavily on university-educated Republican supporters. Data from a recent Cato Institute survey shows that 88% of Trump-voting graduates compared to just 44% of Clinton-supporting graduates agreed that “The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive.”

Republican supporters with degrees tend to work in graduate-dominated environments, where organisations and peers are more likely to enforce norms of political correctness. As a result, it is highly-educated Republican supporters who are most shy about revealing their beliefs at work.

Kaufmann shows the charts documenting this. And more:

How does this affect polling? Republican pollster Frank Luntz told Emily Maitlis that Trump voters were over twice as likely as Biden voters — by a 19 to 9 margin — to conceal their intended vote from others. I would expect this ratio to be considerably higher among university graduates, which would, accordingly, skew predictions the most among graduates.

Pollsters claim to have overcome this problem by comparing telephone and online surveys and finding no difference. Since online surveys are anonymous, they reason, a ‘shy Trump’ effect should reveal itself by comparing these two methods, and they find none.

However, we also know that people who internalise social norms often conceal their views in online surveys. The psychologist George Herbert Mead referred to people’s ‘generalized other’, a kind of mental peer group we carry around in our heads that sits in judgement upon us is even if no one is actually watching. For instance, in a recent survey of North American academics, I found that just 23% of academics were willing to state they would discriminate against a Trump voter for a job, but the actual share when using a concealed technique called a ‘list experiment’ was 42%. Likewise, a 2010 study found that the share of white Americans willing to endorse zero immigration jumped from 39% to 60% when the question was concealed in a list, rather than asked openly.

Many educated conservatives know well that they have no reason to trust online surveys to guard their privacy. In my informal discussions with my circles of educated conservative friends, almost everyone is savvy enough about the Internet and surveillance capitalism to know that there is no reason to trust privacy. If you missed political scientist Jon Askonas’s New Atlantis piece on tech tyranny, now is the time to read it.

It is absolutely vital for conservatives to understand that the outcome of this presidential election will likely not make a meaningful difference in the spread of tech tyranny and soft totalitarianism. 

I use “meaningful” because it’s obvious that a Republican in charge of the executive branch will be better at fighting this stuff than a Democrat. But as the shy Trumpers of Eric Kaufmann’s essay know, conservatives are fighting a rich and powerful culture within the leading institutions of this society. There is no reason at all to believe that the woke tyrants within these elites cultures will rethink their views in light of Tuesday’s result. If anything, they will double down on them, on the theory that clearly they haven’t worked hard enough to de-Trumpify America. For the Woke, there is no problem that applying more Wokeness can’t solve.

So, even if Trump somehow manages to eke out a win in the courts, it will solve nothing, especially within elite circles. Remember this from Live Not By Lies:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Again: a Trump win will do nothing to deter the elites in their well-developed networks and powerful institutions. If you, reader, are one of these closeted conservatives inside a corporate, academic, or media environment, I would love to hear from you about what your colleagues are saying this week, and what kind of workplace you expect to have post-election.

My belief is that the elites, especially in Silicon Valley, will regard this election, and its failure to fully repudiate Trump, as a sign that they need to work harder to control thought and discourse. This will be especially true if there are mass protests from the Right, or even violence. I look for them to accelerate the development and implementation of a social credit system. Jon Askonas wrote last year:

By pulling so much of social life into cyberspace, the information revolution has made dissent more visible, manageable, and manipulable than ever before. Hidden public anger, the ultimate bête noire of many a dictator, becomes more legible to the regime. Activating one’s own supporters, and manipulating the national conversation, become easier as well. Indeed, the information revolution has been a boon to the police state. It used to be incredibly manpower-intensive to monitor videos, accurately take and categorize images, analyze opposition magazines, track the locations of dissidents, and appropriately penalize enemies of the regime. But now, tools that were perfected for tagging your friends in beach photos, categorizing new stories, and ranking products by user reviews are the technological building blocks of efficient surveillance systems. Moreover, with big data and AI, regimes can now engage in especially “smart” forms of what is sometimes called “smart repression” — exerting just the right amount of force and nudging, at the lowest possible cost, to pull subjects into line. The computational counterculture’s promise of “access to tools” and “people power” has, paradoxically, contributed to mass surveillance and oppression.

But here’s the thing: all that information is available to Google, Facebook, Amazon, and all the other tech companies — non-state actors that have the capacity to engage in smart repression of their own by identifying who the Deplorables are, and deciding whether or not to do business with them. We are seeing now, in real time, conservatives being thrown off of Facebook and Twitter for posting innocent things critical of leftist priorities. Moreover, there’s this (again, from Live Not By Lies):

Nor is it hard to foresee these powerful corporate interests using that data to manipulate individuals into thinking and acting in certain ways. Zuboff quotes an unnamed Silicon Valley bigwig saying, “Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively engineered human behavior.” He believes that by close analysis of the behavior of app users, his company will eventually be able to “change how lots of people are making their day-to-day decisions.”

Maybe they will just try to steer users into buying certain products and not others. But what happens when the products are politicians or ideologies? And how will people know when they are being manipulated?

If a corporation with access to private data decides that progress requires suppressing dissenting opinions, it will be easy to identify the dissidents, even if they have said not one word publicly.

In fact, they may have their public voices muted. British writer Douglas Murray documented how Google quietly weights its search results to return more “diverse” findings. Though Google presents its search results as disinterested, Murray shows that “what is revealed is not a ‘fair’ view of things, but a view which severely skews history and presents it with a bias from the present.”

Result: for the search engine preferred by 90 percent of the global internet users, “progress”—as defined by left-wing Westerners living in Silicon Valley—is presented as normative.

This is going to get much worse now. It will be even more difficult to tell what truth is. What we are seeing emerge now on the Right is the same indifference to the truth that has been so powerfully manifest on the Left. And this is why we are accelerating towards some kind of totalitarianism. From Live Not By Lies:

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.” For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

In my book, I talk about the 1619 Project as an example of this. But we should not be under the illusion that the Right is not susceptible to the same passions. If you hate the libs more than you love the truth, then you will believe whatever Donald Trump tells you — even if it leads to disaster. Don’t do it. Don’t. Back in 2002, I hated radical Islam more than I loved the truth, and my weakness led me to support a bad war. There were tens of millions of us who made that mistake.

We are watching America tear itself apart. More than ever I believe that we Christians are living in a Kolakovic Moment. As I explain in the book, Father Tomislav Kolakovic, arriving in Slovakia in 1943 hiding out from the Gestapo, foresaw the advent of Communism in Eastern Europe after the eventual German defeat. He knew that Christians had only a limited time to prepare themselves and their communities for oppression and persecution. He got busy. The bishops criticized him as alarmist, but he knew how blind they were. The Iron Curtain came down in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Father Kolakovic’s network became the backbone of the underground church.

I don’t know what precisely is coming to this country, but I know it will be no good for social and religious conservatives, who will suddenly be in the position of being dissidents. We have no time to waste with pointless stab-in-the-back fights. Keep a cool head, let the lawyers do their work, and prepare for the long term resistance — while we have the freedom to do so. And please don’t forget: the things you do and say in the days to come could cause permanent rupture with close friends and family. Think hard about this. Is it worth it?

If you’re a reader of my book, these questions in the Study Guide will help you and your group think through what the preparation might look like for you.

And by the way, readers, I continue to write Daily Dreher, a Substack newsletter in which I reflect on quieter things, in a non-polemical way. You can read it all here for free, and have it delivered by email nightly. At some point I’ll probably charge for it, but for now, I’m enjoying the challenge of writing in a different mode, and people seem to like it, because I’m getting lots of sign-ups.

UPDATE: This:

This was all so obviously the next phase.

Figure out your off ramp because the purge is coming. https://t.co/7ZHDyeGgtB

— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) November 6, 2020

The fight ahead is about so much more than the presidency. If Trump somehow pulls this out in the courts, it will change very little about the broad struggle. You have to keep that front to mind.