By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, InDepthNH.org

The primaries are coming up: a good time for our Republican friends to repudiate the big lie once and for all. Democrats have their own favorite lies, of course, but right now the sins of the donkey seem small in comparison. Put simply, Democrats aren’t burning down government buildings these days, nor are they striving to overturn valid election results.

Nicely, however, and for the sake of historical symmetry, it didn’t always used to be that way. The classic version of the big lie belongs to the nineteenth century, after all, when the defeated South rehearsed this story: the Civil War was not about slavery but rather concerned states’ rights, and the rebels weren’t traitors to their flag but were rather noble adherents to their country’s highest principles.

Think how successful that big lie proved to be. Its supporters (and they were mainly Democrats) used it to engender the Jim Crow era; they used it forbid black people from voting, from working, from getting educations; they used it, via the Klan, against Jews and Catholics too. They killed in its name. Lynching used to be common in this country.

We rightfully criticize gutless weaklings like Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik for shamelessly kowtowing to MAGA orthodoxy, but for a century or more, many politicians in our country could only get elected if they adhered to that ugly Confederate myth. Liberal Supreme Court justice Hugo Black belonged to the Klan as a young man, because he had considered membership necessary for public life. After losing an early bid for office, future Alabama governor and progressive presidential candidate George Wallace famously swore that he would “never let himself get out-n——ed again.”  In signing his civil rights bill, Lyndon Johnson lamented that he had lost the South for an entire generation (Johnson proved optimistic).

In short, this early version of what Joe Biden hopes will collapse in one election cycle took a hundred years, the Great Depression, and World War Two to start breaking down.  And that was merely to start the process – not to finish the job. After the Democrats finally accepted that most Black Americans belonged to the same working class as urban immigrants and poor white farmers, that original big lie even managed to switch party affiliations.  Not for nothing did criminals carry the Confederate flag with them when they stormed the Capitol on January 6. That wasn’t symbolism. That was truth.

But if it goes that far back, I suppose it has deeper roots still. Many Americans hated immigrants before the Civil War, for instance. They were nativists who found foreign religions (usually Catholicism) and the ugly jibber-jabber of strange languages to be threatening and harmful to their way of life. That strand of domestic hatred grew over time too, both parallel to the Confederate myth and occasionally mixing into it. The big lie is part of this country’s culture, and no one version of it ever disappears without another version starting up.

The big lie lasts and lasts because it serves a human need. And that need is both a simple and a profound one: to stop time itself. More precisely, to make change go away. Or even more precisely, in 2022: to stop taking things away from people who either have a lot, and want to keep it, or people who have very little, and want to keep it –  their guns and their religion, as Barack Obama smugly commented.

And who is taking those things away? The most obvious answer is the liberals, the cities, the coasts, the educated. But the more subtle answer is the more interesting one as well: time itself. We feel it rushing past, all of us. There are changes in this world that can’t be stopped. Ice is melting. China has turned powerful. Africa and India will follow. Gay people now live next door. Could be your child. Could be you.

The big lie exists because it serves a need, and if you don’t meet the need, you won’t get rid of what fills it. And if the need is to deal with fear (the ultimate thing that nobody ever wants to change, after all, is our state of being alive), then the only real answer to fear, is love. Not the weak and platitudinous love of greeting cards and flower children, but the real and often difficult love that binds both families and nations together; the love that actually touches your heart, often by first touching your hand, and in so doing makes itself known as a force in the world at large.

Vote against the big lie. Because the opposite of love is not hate. It’s fear.

He is the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project,  The Book of Order, and his most recent one, The Hunter of Talyashevka . They are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.