Of All the surprising things that I have learned about Donald Trump this week, the most surprising is that he seems to have very low expectations of the people he employs. I refer, of course, to the investigators that he famously sent to Hawaii—the ones who “can’t believe what they are finding.” They apparently have a low threshold for amazement (rare in professional investigators), as all they seem to have found are 1) two “facts” that were well known to the birther movement in 2008 and have been entirely refuted with clear evidence; and 2) a simply inaccurate assertion about what the State of Hawaii means by a birth certificate. In today’s Slate, David Weigel (HT: Russell Fox for the link) deals nicely with the two supposed facts—that “Obama’s grandmother stated on tape that he was born in Kenya” (she did not; it was a translator’s error during a spontaneous phone interview, which was corrected moments later in the same interview) and that “his family is still arguing about what hospital he was born in” (they are not; the ONLY source to ever give a different hospital than the public record is an unsourced quote in a high-school newspaper puff piece written during Obama’s Senate campaign). Weigel does not ask us to believe him on these points. He links to original sources. And even if one chooses to dismiss his evidence, it is still impossible to maintain, as Trump seems to imply, that his intrepid investigators are just now uncovering these shocking “facts,” which Weigel also refuted in a 2008 article for the same publication.
It is not difficult to understand why Trump pursues this issue. This is classic primary politics, as we can see by polls indicating that Trump has moved into a tie for second place in the 2012 Republican presidential primary—despite the fact that he does not even appear to be running. Trump has made an enormous fortune through his casinos—selling the dream of easy wealth to people who are bad at math. Why not sell the dream of an unconstitutional presidency to people who are bad at history.
But why does this contingent of society exist in the first place. How has an easily refutable conspiracy theory—the sort usually limited to the fringes—managed to persist in the minds of around 25% of American voters--all of whom have, in the current information age, easy access to the primary texts (i.e. the actual recording of the taped conversation with Obama's grandmother that you can listen to here) that refute the theory?
I think that the answer lies in the functioning of a very basic psychological principle known as “cognitive dissonance,” or the anxiety produced by trying to hold two contrary pieces of information in the mind at the same time.
I recently wrote a book* in which I argued that cognitive dissonance was a major source for new ideas and new literature because of the way that our minds are wired. Human beings are unique among the world’s species, not in the way we experience anxiety (which is fairly standard), but in the way that we resolve anxiety. Unlike dogs and cats and little field mice--who handle anxiety by either running away or by trying to act tough--we can resolve our anxieties through narrative. When something makes us anxious, we can tell ourselves a story that makes us feel better—even if the story is not true. When the anxiety is caused by fear of a strange sound, our story might be about what is making the sound. If the anxiety is caused by incompatible information, the story must somehow reconcile, or at least synthesize, the other thing that we “know.”
How does this relate to the birther narrative? Simple. Most of the people who promulgate this story see themselves as patriots—Constitution-loving, troop-supporting, red-blooded Americans who would lay down their lives for their country. They see Barack Obama as a threat to all that they hold dear, and they regularly say things about him that are not compatible with the ideals of a patriot. If President Obama was elected according to the process described in the Constitution, then his presidency is entitled to some minimal degree of respect from anybody who professes a love of that Constitution. And yet, a substantial portion of Americans, for whatever reason, have decided that they cannot give him even that level of respect.
And this is why the Birther myth will never die. It does not grow out of facts that need to be explained; it is made necessary by an ideological contradiction that needs to be resolved. As long as Barack Obama is the president of the United States, he will command from patriots a respect that many who believe themselves to be patriots will never accord him; thus requiring a reconciling narrative. Myths have always been a powerful tool for overcoming contradictory beliefs by building a narrative to remove a contradiction. And one thing that human beings have learned over and over again in their short-but-distinguished history is that, as Saul Bellow famously said, "a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for delusion is deep."
