Trumpism is a Symptoms of America's Disorder, Not the Cause

Once upon a time - in what feels like a galaxy far, far away - the Republican Party saw itself and to some extent was a party of ideas that valued intellect and education and had some tendencies to care about the common good.  To use another movie line, those days are gone with the wind and parallel the decine in public education - half the country reads at a sixth grade level - and a serous mainstream news media not fixated on sensation and Internet clicks and page views is hard to find and/or hidden behind pay sites (I don't even know how much I pay in aggregate to access the outlets I quote). Local newspapers have either died or become platforms for advertising and lengthy, serious pieces are long gone.  All of this has contributed to the "bread and circuses" approach to politics especially on the political right where sound bites replace serious policy discussions and pandering to grievance  - real and/or perceived - and prejudices offers the easiest means to rally votes. What is best for the country or one's community is of no concern and instead, winning elections at any cost (or attempting to overturn them) is all that matters.  Donald Trump and Trump wanabes like Ron DeSantis have used this sick state of American society to cynically fuel their own agendas, not doubt laughing to themselve over the idiocy of their supporters who want spectacle over substance and see the world as a zero sum game where someone elses improvent means it was stolen from them. A piece in Salon looks at this disturbing reality.  Whether enough voters will wake up to push for change remains and open question despite the bullet dodged in the 2022 mid-term elections.  Here are article higlights:

The American people — or a great many of them, at least — believe they can finally see the end of the fascist fever dream they have been lost in for these last seven years. It's a cruel illusion; escape from the waking dream-nightmare is much farther away than it appears.

It is true that large numbers of Americans tried to reorient and steady themselves by voting in favor of "democracy" in the midterm elections. But most people in this country remain punch-drunk, confused by the trauma and abuse they've been bombarded with during the Age of Trump.

As for Trump himself and the neofascist movement and larger white right, they are largely undeterred by that electoral setback. Their existential threat to American democracy and society has by no means ended, and if anything they are amplifying their attacks. We cannot return to "normal" through a state of denial or by ignoring reality. The peril will not magically go away. History has repeatedly shown that ignoring fascism and other forms of authoritarianism is essentially to surrender to them.

This collective denial and amnesia is amplified by a deeper problem: American society and culture are profoundly immature, unserious and superficial. In many ways, 21st-century America is typified by the spectacular and the ridiculous. . . . . In an unhealthy democracy, politics is largely a function of supply and demand. The Republicans' embrace of fascism and other forms of right-wing extremism simply reflects what their public wants — and what it has been trained to expect.

An immature culture is especially vulnerable to exploitation by right-wing fake populists and demagogues who care only about power and have no conception of the common good or responsible governance.

In a recent essay for the Atlantic, Tom Nichols explores this deviant political feedback loop, as exemplified by Republican candidate Herschel Walker's failed U.S. Senate campaign in Georgia:

Win or lose, all the criticisms of Herschel Walker obscure a larger point: The Republicans have acclimated the American public to ghastly behavior from elected officials and candidates for high office. The result is lasting damage to our political system….  Walker's candidacy is a reminder of just how much we've acclimated ourselves to the presence of awful people in our public life. Although we can be heartened by the defeat of Christian nationalists and election deniers and other assorted weirdos, we should remember how, in a better time in our politics, these candidates would not have survived even a moment of public scrutiny or weathered their first scandal or stumble…. The Republicans were once an uptight and censorious party — something I rather liked about them, to be honest — and they are now a party where literally nothing is a disqualification for office.

"As usual, however, the real problem lies with the voters," who have fallen prey to "an unhinged faux-egalitarianism that demands that candidates for office be no better than the rest of us, and perhaps even demonstrably worse. How dare anyone run on virtue or character; who do they think they are?"

Nichols correctly observes that the fact that Walker became a viable candidate for high office, "and garnered millions of votes from perfectly normal American citizens," is symptomatic of a profoundly damaged political system. It's also true that Walker's embrace by the Republican Party cannot be understood as something independent of racism and white supremacy as he fulfilled the stereotypical role of a Black buffoon.

Caroline Williams addresses this in another Atlantic essay:

Walker is a big, ball-carrying Black man, and these Republicans do not have an ounce of care for him. They are using him to advance their own Constitution-compromising agenda, the way conservative white people in this country have always used Black bodies when given half a chance.

Walker stands up at podiums, and I feel shame and sorrow and resentment. . . . . Walker's candidacy is a fundamental assault by the Republican Party on the dignity of Black Americans. How dare they so cynically use this buffoon as a shield for their obvious failings to meet the needs and expectations of Black voters? They hold him up and say, "See, our voters don't mind his race. We're not a racist party. We have Black people on our side too." Parading Walker at rallies like some kind of blue-ribbon livestock does not mean you have Black people on your side. What it means is that you are promoting a charlatan. . . . the election looks like a kind of grotesque minstrelsy. The Republican Party is saying that it wants power more than decency. It's saying that race is a joke. We must all take note—it is willing to destroy a man to advance its cause. The party thinks he won't break. And if he does, well, he wasn't really one of them, anyway, was he?

The immature and deeply pathological subculture that elevated Donald Trump and the panoply of other Republican fascists and extremists — Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Ron DeSantis and many others — is multilayered and complex.

American society elevates anti-intellectualism and anti-rationality. As historian and political scientist Richard Hofstadter famously observed some six decades ago, this is especially true of the Republican Party and larger "conservative" movement. Since the rise of right-wing hate media in the 1990s, this embrace of overt ignorance and conspiratorial thinking, and the accompanying rejection of expert knowledge, has become a defining feature of the American right.

More than half of all Americans cannot read at a sixth-grade level. High quality primary and secondary public education, as well as the college and university system — which should create citizens who are capable of critical thinking and acting as responsible members of a democratic community — have been systematically targeted for destruction by the Republican Party and "conservative" movement.

As part of the larger project of authoritarian capitalism, today's "conservative" movement seeks to create human drones who possess "job skills," rather than well-rounded human beings capable of thinking for themselves and asking questions about power, justice and the future of our society.

America's news media and the nation's larger public discourse are increasingly dictated by speed and superficiality and an endless supply of "content" in service to clicks, likes, downloads, retweets and of course advertising revenue.  Contemplation, rigorous thinking, serious public conversations about politics and society, and the kinds of reflective writing and other thinking that speaks truth to power and empowers citizens is shoved underground or rendered invisible by such a system.

Ultimately, America's democracy crisis and the rise of neofascism are a symptom, not a cause, of deeper cultural and social problems in what the Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges has called an "empire of illusion." Donald Trump and the Republican Party could disappear tomorrow, and the Age of Trump will likely soon be deleted from the public's collective memory. But the deeper roots of America's democracy crisis will not go away. Our society is sick and is using maladaptive behavior to compensate for that condition. American society will not get better until its leaders and the public at large face and admit the horrible reality of the situation and then do the hard work to remedy it.

I continue to blame much of the decline of the GOP on the rise of Christofascists in the party, a demographic that despises science and knowledge that threatens its flimsy beliefs and that wants power so that their beliefs can be inflicted on the majority.