Читать книгу Alt-America - David Neiwert - Страница 9

Ladies and Gentlemen: In American public life there is an alternative dimension, a mental space beyond fact or logic, where the rules of evidence are replaced by paranoia. Welcome to Alternative America—Alt-America, for short.

Alt-America is an alternative universe that has a powerful resemblance to our own, except that it’s a completely different America, the nation its residents have concocted and reconfigured in their imaginations. It is not the America where the rest of us live. In this other America, suppositions take the place of facts, and conspiracy theories become concrete realities. Its citizens live alongside us in our universe, but their perception of that universe places them in a different world altogether, one scarcely recognizable to those outside it.

In Alt-America:

•Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim born in Kenya who conspired with a global elite and terrorist radicals to impose sharia law on America.

•Obama, Hillary Clinton, and most mainstream politicians are simultaneously the corrupt pawns of a nefarious New World Order (NWO) that seeks to impose a global government that will turn the world’s population into their slaves.

•Global climate change is a hoax concocted by the NWO and environmentalist elites who want to impose massive regulatory regimes on businesses and force ordinary Americans out of public lands.

•These same global elites want to gut the Second Amendment so that Americans’ guns can be confiscated and the populace disarmed, all in the name of public safety, but really for the purpose of imposing its tyrannical dictatorship.

•The current American government is actually an illegal and unconstitutional entity that seized control of the United States in the 1930s and, through its corrupt Federal Reserve Bank, controls the nation’s fiat currency for its own nefarious ends.

•Prejudice and oppression against white people now is a greater problem for the world than whatever bigotry minorities might face. White people are the primary targets of oppression by an elite that shames them with “political correctness” whenever they object to the rising tide of brown faces—especially foreign-language-speaking Muslims and Latinos—in their midst.

•Minorities, especially blacks and illegal immigrants, are busily sucking up taxpayer dollars through welfare programs while homeless veterans go hungry. Organizations like Black Lives Matter are just another chapter in minorities’ claims to victimhood, while their adherents shoulder no responsibility themselves.

•Illegal immigrants, especially Latinos, are part of a conspiracy by liberals and Democrats to overwhelm the country with welfare-dependent parasites who eagerly vote for the liberal agenda in order to sustain their lifestyle.

The longer you dwell in this universe, the more likely you are to absorb some of its more exotic beliefs, such as the theory that chemtrails left by jet airliners are actually part of a New World Order plot to slowly poison the populace or spread mind-control drugs, or that federal emergency-management plans are in reality a cover for a plot to begin rounding up Americans and forcing them into concentration camps.

Once Alt-Americans start to believe some of these kooky ideas, it becomes a simple matter to persuade them of the reality of other kooky ideas, new threats, new conspiracies against them and the nation. When Donald Trump informs his followers that there’s a massive media and establishment conspiracy to “rig the election” and deny him the presidency, they not only eagerly embrace the claim but begin talking about a “revolution” to overthrow or even assassinate Hillary Clinton.

Established facts supported by concrete real-world evidence are inconsequential to people inside the Alt-America universe—indeed, those facts are instead interpreted as further evidence of the conspiracy and its efforts to hide “the truth.” Never mind that President Obama is a practicing, churchgoing Christian who was born in Hawaii and has produced both versions of his birth certificate to prove that. And if he really is sympathetic to Islamic radicalism and the installment of sharia law, he certainly has an odd way of showing it, having ordered the killing of the Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, as well as the ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) leaders Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Hafiz Sayed Khan.

Never mind that the New World Order conspiracy has long been recognized as the product of the fevered dreams of the extremist Patriot movement and John Birch Society elements of the American right that have been claiming since the 1950s that society is on the brink of mass roundups and enslavement that have never materialized—ideas that keep finding fresh life under new guises.

It doesn’t matter to Alt-Americans that a consensus of the world’s climate scientists agrees that global climate change is a reality that is already upon us, nor that the world’s ice caps and glaciers are measurably shrinking at an alarming rate, and that sea levels around the world have already begun rising, already begun inundating low-lying American states such as Louisiana.

You can try explaining to someone from this universe that, even though a number of liberals and Democrats have proposed minor regulatory measures in response to the epidemic of gun violence that costs 33,000 Americans their lives every year, no one has proposed any kind of mass gun-confiscation measures or any other law that might violate the Second Amendment. You might even point out that gun-rights advocates have been warning for eight years that President Obama planned such tyrannical measures in the imminent future—steps that never even came close to materializing. It won’t matter to them.

You can explain to them that the Federal Reserve is a heavily regulated entity that mostly watches over interest rates and the monetary supply. You might even try explaining that abandoning the gold standard in 1971 ensured the value of the dollar, but far-right conspiracists still claim that it resulted from a one-world-government plot. You can try, but they will dismiss you.

And so it goes for the rest of the universe inside of Alt-America. In more than a few respects its strange reversal of realities resembles that of Planet Bizarro, the square planet sometimes visited by Superman. Planet Bizarro almost always appeared purely for its humorous effect; likewise the notions promulgated by Alt-Americans are ripe fodder for people who want to make fun of them.

The beating heart of Alt-America, however, is the ancient drumbeat of white identity politics, a fear of nonwhite people who speak foreign languages and follow alien creeds. These people embody the Other: non- or sub-human beings whose presence is felt as a form of degradation. Good Alt-Americans loathe and fear this Other. That may be partly because race in this universe is essentially a zero-sum proposition: if one race gains in status or power, then another must lose concomitantly.

So when confronted with a discomfiting civil-rights movement like Black Lives Matter, they do not hear the message its name communicates clearly: “Black lives matter, and white people must stop acting as if they did not.” What racists hear instead is a zero-sum assertion: “Only black lives matter, and no one else’s.” Their reality is distorted by their inability to comprehend other people or have empathy for them.

The Alt-Americans view any attempts at parity in the value of a life as a direct threat to their own privileged position. And privileged they are: Even though whites are losing their long-standing ethnic dominance of American demographics, they have, through a combination of factors, maintained their powerfully privileged positions economically, politically, culturally, and especially within the law-enforcement and justice systems.

They are similarly impervious to the factual realities regarding immigration. You can demonstrate to them how immigrants actually pay large sums into the federal income-tax and Social Security systems through their paycheck deductions (while receiving few of the benefits of those taxes, since by law they are precluded from participating in most federal “welfare” programs), and in the end pay substantially more in taxes than they receive in benefits. You can explain to them that the primary reason there are so many undocumented immigrants outside the system is that the American economy generates hundreds of thousands of unskilled-labor jobs every year that businesses have difficulty filling because of their often difficult and unpleasant natures, and yet our immigration system, still awaiting comprehensive reform, only issues around 5,000 green cards annually to cover that labor. You can show them crime statistics proving that immigrants commit crime at a substantially lower rate than the general population, the white populace included.

Such information doesn’t make a dent. Alt-Americans will continue to believe that immigrants suck away their taxpaying dollars and bring crime and disease to the country and that we must erect a big wall to keep them out. They will continue to insist that Americans not only can fill those jobs, they need them. Latinos are displacing American workers, Alt-Americans believe, and the border is a national security risk—so immigration “reform” must wait until the border is secure. Immigration experts understand that this places the cart before the horse—that the border will never be secure until a sane policy that encourages legal immigration is in place.

Alt-America is largely the creation of an increasingly entrenched conspiracy industry that generates one theory after another about the truth that lies behind the public narrative generated in the mainstream media. These theories’ influence now reaches broadly into the mainstream itself. This conspiracism industry is composed mainly of a network of radio hosts and Internet entrepreneurs, who churn out a steady stream of New World Order plots and predictably Alt-American interpretations of daily news events. Alex Jones and his Infowars website are the best known of this group. Jones claims that a variety of global events, including the Boston Marathon bombing and the November 2014 Paris massacres, were in reality false flag operations carried out by agents of the New World Order.

It’s a self-contained universe. While this network often differs on the precise details of the conspiracies that populate Alt-America—sometimes resulting in vicious internecine bickering and “purity tests”—the overarching story and general nature of The Enemy is always the same: namely, some variation on the New World Order, or “globalists,” or any other term used to name the secretive cabal they believe is conspiring to rule mankind. This Alt-America universe has come to reflect most closely the far-right ideology of the Patriot-constitutionalist-militia movement.

The material this industry produces becomes grist for a hundred thousand conversations on Internet chat forums and on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. A horde of bloggers, homemade YouTube political preachers, and far-right ideologues echo and spread these theories. The volume and intensity of this material that’s been generated, especially since 2008, is genuinely astonishing. Equally astonishing is the extent to which you can find these ideas being increasingly voiced by ostensibly mainstream right-wing pundits on the radio and in media such as Fox News.

The material spreads readily. Any corner of the Alt-American universe can suffice to attract new believers who, sometimes in very short order, become wholesale subscribers to the many different facets of Alt-America. For example, a staple of the occupiers of the January 2016 Patriot takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was that the Constitution doesn’t permit the federal government to own public lands outside of the District of Columbia. Someone who believes that may well start spouting other “constitutionalist” theories, such as that a county sheriff is the supreme law of the land, superior to federal authorities, and expressing fears that there is a plot to drive white men off the land and into the cities, to take away their guns and Second Amendment rights as well, and so on from there.

For Americans outside the Alt-America universe, “cockamamie” doesn’t begin to describe how such ideas sound when Alt-Americans begin spouting unintelligible lingo at them. Some may question the Alt-Americans’ sanity and their intelligence. Yet various studies and polls of subscribers to conspiracy theories and Patriot movement beliefs have shown that the majority of Alt-Americans are better educated than the average American and have incomes well above the median. Their beliefs and worldviews are frequently based on close readings of arcane documents (legal and otherwise); they also often possess an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of various putative “facts” that, on close examination, turn out not to be facts at all. Alt-Americans are neither stupid nor unlettered; what they are instead is oddly gullible, eager to absorb any “fact” if it supports their worldview, and insistent that people who believe official explanations or mainstream media narratives are the real gullible fools, or “sheeple,” as their lexicon prefers.

Alt-Americans share a set of personality traits that distinguish them from people who are less prone to join them, yet they simultaneously operate in the same universe as everyone else. This is why they are able to function perfectly well alongside the rest of us, why they seem so normal, even likable at times—until those moments when their world bangs up against ours and they attempt to assert their ideas.

The political scientist Eric Oliver of the University of Chicago argues that conspiracy theories are “simply another form of magical thinking,” Oliver explained in an interview. And as with all types of magical thinking, people engage in conspiracy theories in order to cope with difficult emotions. Usually this emotion is the apprehension that is triggered by an inexplicable or unusual event. In struggling to restore our emotional equilibrium, we search for patterns. In looking for patterns, we use mental shortcuts called heuristics. These heuristics include our tendency to ascribe intentionality to inanimate objects or to assume that things that resemble each other share core traits … Because conspiracy theories articulate these heuristics, they may feel more intuitively compelling than other explanations, particularly to people in distress.”

The legal scholars Cass Sunstein and Adam Vermeule explored the spread and pervasiveness of conspiracism in a widely read study of the subject. They say the phenomenon is perhaps best understood if first we “examine how people acquire information.” They observe that there is an epistemic, real-world challenge for all of us in figuring out what is real information and what might be false or delusionary: “For most of what they believe that they know, human beings lack personal or direct information; they must rely on what other people think.” This is no minor issue: What we believe to be true shapes how we view the world, the behavior of others, and the meaning of events. We have to depend on other people—our parents, friends, teachers, the people who write the books and newspapers we read, the people who produce the television and movies we watch—to provide us with that array of information, facts, and opinion.

We all have built-in methods for sorting through the blizzard of information the world confronts us with. Most of these begin with trial and error—we pretty quickly discover that false, misleading, or distorted information can bring us to grief from life experience. Eventually we settle into patterns of gathering information that we become comfortable with as we learn to recognize reliable sources of facts. For most of us, this system of sorting through and figuring out the world usually revolves around established sources of reliable facts such as educators, experts, and journalists, as well as our personal acquaintances and family members.

In an era of high-speed communications and instant technology, this task of sorting through information has become more acutely personalized and haphazard than it was in the past. The arrival of the Internet as many people’s primary source of information has rendered much of the flow of our facts into 140-character tweets and video sound bites. As the Internet becomes cluttered with highly ideological propaganda mills and fake news sites, and as a flood of tweets and Facebook posts spread falsehoods alongside genuine information, it’s become exponentially more difficult to sort out just what information is accurate and what is not.

Most people alive in the twenty-first century have developed a healthy skepticism toward what they’re exposed to by a mainstream media landscape that is littered with biased “analysts” and representatives of corporate interests out to make a buck. But some people have elevated that skepticism to an unhealthy level, so that they view everything produced by the mainstream media or official government or academic sources with a typically self-reinforcing form of highly selective skepticism. They cannot believe any kind of official explanation for events, actions, or policies, but instead seek an alternative one. When this happens, their extreme skepticism flips into extreme gullibility, so that they become suckers for conspiracy theories that confirm the narrative they want to believe.

This shapes—or rather, distorts—their relationship to authority. Any kind of authority that exists outside of their universe, particularly sources with the taint of mainstream liberalism (embodied by Obama, Clinton, and the Democratic Party), is viewed as illegitimate and untrustworthy and is to be vehemently rejected and ardently opposed. In the meanwhile, any authority within the Alt-America universe, especially political figures, conspiracist pundits, and Patriot movement leaders, are revered as reliable authorities. Some of Donald Trump’s followers refer to him as Glorious Leader, or GL.

The personality trait common to most conspiracists and dwellers in Alt-America is authoritarianism. Most people think of authoritarianism as a political phenomenon in which whole nations are subjected to dictatorial rule, and it’s typically considered in light of the authoritarian leaders who lead such regimes. But it’s also a phenomenon studied in depth by psychologists, whose focus is on the masses whom they control, ordinary people who willingly sacrifice their personal freedoms in the name of an orderly society shaped to their personal beliefs and prejudices.

How could supposedly freedom-loving Americans subscribe to an authoritarian worldview? Psychologists have established that most people have some authoritarian tendencies, but these are balanced by such factors as personal empathy and critical thinking skills. In some personalities, however, a combination of factors such as strict upbringing, personal trauma, of a harsh rearing environment can produce people who are attracted to the idea of a world in which strong authorities produce order and stability, often through iron imposition of law and order.

The psychologist Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, one of the world’s leading experts in this personality research, has compiled a list of authoritarian personality traits that help explain the motivations of Donald Trump’s supporters. Not every authoritarian exhibits every trait, of course; conversely, everyone shares these traits, but not to the high degree of the authoritarian personality:

•Ethnocentric, strongly inclined to experience the world as a member of their in-group versus everyone else. Their strong commitment to their in-group makes them zealous in its cause.

•Fearful of a dangerous world. Their parents taught them, more than parents usually do, that the world is dangerous. They may also be genetically predisposed to experiencing stronger-than-average fear.

•Self-righteous. They believe they are the “good people”; this unlocks hostile impulses against those they consider bad.

•Aggressive. If an authority figures gives them the green light to attack someone, they lower the boom.

•Biased. Holding prejudices against racial and ethnic minorities, non-heterosexuals, and women.

•Contradictory beliefs. Opposite beliefs exist side by side in separate compartments in their minds. As a result, their thinking is full of double standards.

•Poor reasoning skills. If they like the conclusion of an argument, they don’t pay much attention to whether the evidence is valid or the argument is consistent.

•Dogmatic. Because they have gotten their beliefs mainly from the authorities in their lives, rather than thinking things out for themselves, they have no real defense when facts or events indicate they are wrong. So they just dig in their heels and refuse to change.

•Dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs. They think they are right because almost everyone they know, almost every news broadcast they see, almost every radio commentator they listen to, tells them they are. That is, they screen out the sources that will suggest that they are wrong.

•Limited in their exposure to contrary viewpoints. Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and ideas, they overestimate the level of agreement with their ideas. Conviction of being in the majority bolsters their attacks on the undesirable minorities they see in the country.

•Easily manipulated. People may pretend to espouse their causes and dupe them to gain their own advantage.

•Weak power of self-reflection. They have little insight into why they think and do what they do.

The authoritarian personality’s demand for leadership by powerful authority figures also helps explain their vehement rejection of the leadership of such liberal politicians as Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton. An authoritarian by nature wishes to follow the orders of the president, but cannot do so when someone viewed as an illegitimate usurper holds the position. Proving the fundamental illegitimacy of these figures—as a sexual pervert, a Muslim foreigner, and a lying crook, respectively—has been the driving preoccupation of their various campaigns to attack these politicians.

Authoritarianism as a worldview creates a certain kind of cognitive dissonance, a feeling of unreality, because it runs smack into the complex nature of the modern world and attempts to impose its simplified, black-and-white explanation of reality onto a reality that contradicts and undermines it at every turn. Thus, conspiracism is appealing to the people who tell pollsters they “don’t recognize their country anymore.” They are bewildered by the new brown faces and strange languages that people their cultural landscapes. They may long for a 1950s-style suburban America and are angry that the world no longer works that way.

Conspiracy theories offer explanations as to why the country is no longer what they wish it to be, why it has become unrecognizable. These narratives come to represent deeper truths about their world, while repeatedly reinforcing their long-held prejudices. They help them to ignore the uncomfortable nature of the changes the world, the nation, and its society are undergoing. Simply put, conspiracism provides a clear, self-reinforcing explanation for a sense of personal disempowerment.

Oddly enough, projection—interpreting others as results of tendencies that are actually one’s own tendencies—also is a factor in the spread of conspiracism. One study found that the people who were particularly inclined to suspect others of engaging in conspiracies were themselves inclined to conspire against others. Another study found that conspiracists—even as they accused activists on the political left (particularly black activists) of fomenting violence—were themselves more prone to engage in violence; hence their mounting threats to start a revolution and a civil war after the 2016 election if Hillary Clinton were to win, followed by the wave of ethnic violence they unleashed in the wake of their actual victory at the polls.

This propensity for projection is especially noticeable in the most important aspect of Alt-America: its real-world agenda, which is to impose its worldview on the rest of us. Alt-Americans fret and stew over imagined plots to round up Americans and place them in concentration camps or even execute them in a mass genocide, and fear the imposition of a dictatorial regime in which they have no say. Yet their own political agenda would result in the rounding up and incarceration of millions of people, while imposing a dictatorial regime shaped in their own political image that would silence any kind of leftist impulse.

In fact, in print and on YouTube, many Alt-Americans freely fantasize about their desire to execute liberals, terrorists, “race mixers,” and other traitors. I call this desire eliminationism—a politics, and its accompanying rhetoric, whose goal is to excise whole segments of the population in the name of making it “healthy.” This mindset is a common feature of authoritarianism; the Holocaust was a particularly horrifying case of eliminationist genocide perpetrated by an authoritarian regime. Eliminationist rhetoric lays the groundwork by being dehumanizing, the kind of talk that reduces human beings to vermin and diseases, such as when you hear immigrants described as “rats in a granary,” or Muslims as “a cancer”—beings fit primarily for elimination. The rhetoric gives tacit or explicit permission for the final essence, violent acts, beginning with hate crimes and escalating into mass roundups and genocide.

Eliminationist rhetoric is common to Alt-America, as the public frequently saw in the Trump campaign. It was, after all, a campaign initially predicated on a racially charged conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States (a requirement for any president). The campaign’s opening salvo, against Mexican immigrants, was openly eliminationist in calling for their mass deportation, and soon included similar demands for Muslims and the LGBT community. Trump’s constant campaign message was unmistakable as to just how he intended to “make America great again”: get rid of these people, deport them, prevent them from ever entering the country in the first place, and lock up or silence the rest of them.

This is the point at which Alt-America represents a real danger to American democratic institutions, threatening to displace them with a crude and frightening authoritarianism, enforced by state-sanctioned vigilantism. One of Alt-America’s most powerful and abiding effects is to displace people from a sense of concrete reality by putting them in an epistemological bubble that insulates them from facts, logic, and reason. From within this kind of bubble, objectifying other people, rendering those outside the bubble as the Other, and then demonizing them, is almost inevitable. Once other people are conceptualized this way, inflicting violence not only becomes simple but in fact may even appear to be necessary. Certainly, that is how they rationalize it.

As Alt-America has grown, so has the violence that inevitably accompanies it: acts of domestic terrorism, hate crimes, and threats of “revolution” and “civil war,” backed by a wave of citizen militias. All of them gained impetus during the Obama years and there was a significant wave of such incidents in 2015 and 2016, very likely fueled by the Trump campaign.

Indeed, the Trump campaign itself had an effect on the ground similar to that of eliminationist rhetoric generally: it seemingly gave permission, in its stubborn refusal to bow to “political correctness,” for people to act and speak in an openly bigoted and spiteful fashion. It was as though the campaign lifted the lid off the national id, and the violent, vicious tendencies that had been held in check for years came crawling right out.

It’s difficult to put a finger on exactly how large the Alt-American universe is; at any one time there’s no clear measure of how many people subscribe to its worldview. From ratings data we can see that Alex Jones’s Infowars audience at times exceeds 2 million weekly listeners and viewers, but that doesn’t indicate how many people actually believe what he says. Some listeners are critics and skeptics amused by his hyperemotional rants.

Polling data give us a clearer idea. A 2013 survey of American voters by Public Policy Polling about various conspiracy theories found the following:

•37 percent of voters believed global warming is a hoax; 51 percent did not. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans versus 11 percent of Democrats said they thought global warming was a hoax. Among independents 41 percent said global warming was a hoax and 51 percent said it wasn’t. Among Romney voters 61 percent believed global warming is a hoax.

•6 percent of voters believed Osama bin Laden is still alive.

•21 percent of voters said a UFO crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 and the US government covered it up. More Romney voters (27 percent) than Obama voters (16 percent) believed in a UFO cover-up.

•28 percent of voters believed that a secret power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring eventually to rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order. A plurality of Romney voters (38 percent) believed in the New World Order compared to 35 percent who didn’t.

•28 percent of voters believed Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. 36 percent of Romney voters believed Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11; 41 percent did not.

•20 percent of voters believed there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism; 51 percent did not.

•7 percent of voters thought the moon landing was faked.

•13 percent of voters (22 percent of Romney voters) thought Barack Obama was the Antichrist.

More recent polling related to the conspiracy theories that have swirled around the Trump campaign has revealed that these kinds of beliefs have become more established and widespread in the ensuing years, inflamed in many cases by Trump himself.

In 2014 political scientists J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Woods found that at least half of the general American public believes in one kind of conspiracy theory or another; 25 percent of the poll respondents believed that President Obama was not an American citizen. The most widely held conspiracy theory, believed by 40 percent of those polled, was that the Federal Drug Administration is secretly withholding cancer cures.

Survey figures strongly suggest that Trump’s campaign drove these numbers up. By August 2016, a poll conducted by NBC News found that 72 percent of registered Republican voters doubted that Obama’s citizenship was real. A May 2016 Public Policy Polling survey found that two-thirds of Trump’s supporters believed that Obama was secretly a Muslim. Political issues weren’t the only ones that surged: an October 2016 Fairleigh Dickinson poll found that 60 percent of Trump’s supporters now also believed that global warming was a myth concocted by scientists.

In the countdown to the election, the propensity for conspiracism among Trump voters intensified. Encouraged by Trump’s frequent campaign trail charges that the election was rigged and his refusal, in the third and final presidential debate on October 19, to say he would accept the results of the election were he to lose, his supporters quickly embraced the conspiracy theories ginned up by Alex Jones and other Trump supporters. An August 2016 Public Policy Polling survey found that 69 percent of Trump voters believed that if Hillary Clinton won the election, it would be because it was “rigged,” whereas only 16 percent thought it would be because she got more votes than Trump.

The PPP poll had a peculiar finding related to the long-standing right-wing loathing of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN, a group primarily committed to enrolling minority voters. It had been driven out of existence in 2010 by a right-wing scandal involving heavily edited videos. The poll asked: “Do you think ACORN will steal the election for Hillary Clinton, or not?” The pollsters found that “40 percent of Trump voters think that ACORN… will steal the election for Clinton. That shows the long staying power of GOP conspiracy theories.”

Indeed, this was not an overnight phenomenon. The dumpster Donald Trump’s campaign set on fire in the 2016 election had been slowly filling for many years.