The Facts Just Aren’t Getting Through
A few weeks ago, I went to a political rally in a farmyard. The Polish presidential candidate Rafał Trzaskowski was speaking; in the background, a golden wheat field shimmered in the late-afternoon sun. The audience was enthusiastic—the host, a local farmer, had spread news of the candidate’s visit only the day before—but the juxtaposition of Trzaskowski and the wheat field was odd. He is the mayor of Warsaw, speaks several languages, has degrees in economics, and belongs to the half of Poland that identifies as educated, urban, and European. What does he know from wheat?
But Trzaskowski was running for president in a country whose other half lives in an information bubble that teaches people to be suspicious of anyone from Warsaw who is educated, urban, and European. Polish state television, fully controlled by the ruling Law and Justice party, was sending aggressive messages into that bubble, warning its inhabitants that Trzaskowski was dubious, foreign, in hock to “LGBT ideology”—which the incumbent president, Andrzej Duda, called “worse than communism”—and beholden to Germans and Jews. The messages, constantly repeated on a wide array of radio stations and television channels, were designed to reinforce tribal loyalties and convince Law and Justice voters that they are “real” Poles, not impostors or traitors like their political opponents.
During his short campaign, Trzaskowski did his best to reach into that bubble too. He stood beside wheat fields, spent a lot of time in small towns, and ran ads that called for an end to division. “We are united by a dream,” he said in one speech: “a dream of a different Poland,” a Poland where there are no “better” and “worse” citizens. This was a deliberate choice: Instead of mobilizing the voters inside his own bubble by attacking the ruling party, he sought to bridge Poland’s deep polarization by appealing to national unity.
[Anne Applebaum: Poland’s rulers made up a ‘Rainbow Plague’]
He came close, winning 49 percent of the vote. But he failed. Trzaskowski’s half of Poland was insufficiently enthusiastic, while the other half was energized, angry, and very much afraid of Jews, foreigners, and “LGBT ideology.” Duda’s voters were also happy with the government subsidies and reduced retirement age that his party had approved, and not remotely inspired by Trzaskowski’s language of solidarity and unity—if they even heard it.
If that doesn’t sound familiar, it should. Because the same thing could happen in the United States this fall—or during the next election in France, or Italy, or Ukraine. American politics, Polish politics, French politics, Italian politics, Ukrainian politics, all derived from their own history, economics, and culture, now have this in
