The Insanity and Danger of Trump's Base

I have been lucky enough to be able to work through the ongoing pandemic and keep at least one of our incomes flowing.  In doing so I have taken precautions: wearing a mask when meeting clients, washing my hands constantly, constantly sanitizing the conference room, door handles and the shared copier.  What has surprised me is the number of people - including some clients - who are not taking precautions and in the process endangering not only themselves but others as well.  Yet these people are nothing compared to Donald Trump's vicious base some of who have assaulted and even killed those who have asked them to wear masks or social distance - this morning CNN is reporting a Target worker received a broken arm from one such belligerent individual. It goes without saying that Trump is urging these "good people" and "freedom fighters" to protest restrictions and view those who seek to follow them as enemies of "real Americans."  Meanwhile, far right groups are fanning the myth that the pandemic is a hoax.   One cannot help but wonder how these people became so horrible, easily manipulated, and so utterly contemptuous of the safety of others.  A column in the New York Times looks at this frightening element in America.  Here are excerpts:

I’ve heard of Muslim women in America being taunted for wearing hijabs, I’ve heard of Jewish men being mocked for wearing yarmulkes and now I’ve heard it all: A friend of mine was cursed by a passing stranger the other day for wearing a protective mask.

There is, of course, a rather nasty virus going around, and one way to lessen the chance of its spread, especially from you to someone else, is to cover your nose and mouth. Call it civic responsibility. Call it science.

But science is no match for tribalism in this dysfunctional country. Truth is whatever validates your prejudices, feeds your sense of grievance and fuels your antipathy toward the people you’ve decided are on some other side.

And protective masks, God help us, are tribal totems. With soul-crushing inevitably, these common-sense precautions morphed into controversial declarations of identity.

“Wearing a mask is for smug liberals. Refusing to is for reckless Republicans.” That was the headline on a recent article in Politico by Ryan Lizza and Daniel Lippman that noted that “in a deeply polarized America, almost anything can be politicized.”

On Monday the White House belatedly introduced a policy of mask-wearing in the West Wing — but it exempted President Trump. See what I mean about mask as metaphor? Trump demands protection from everybody around him, but nobody is protected from Trump. Story of America.

My friend was standing on a street corner in the center of a small town in New York. The state has decreed that people wear face coverings if they’re in public settings where they can’t be sure to stay six feet or more away from others. So my friend was following the rules, as were her two companions. All three of them were masked.

And a man driving by shouted a profanity at them.

Just two words. Just two syllables. You can probably guess which.

How did she know their masks were the trigger? She said that nothing else about the three of them could possibly have drawn any particular notice and judgment and that she’d encountered other evidence of objection to lockdowns, social distancing and masks in this relatively rural and relatively conservative area.

One man, she said, has been standing outside the local post office, yelling about government oppression and handing out fliers.

It’s not just her town. “Mask haters causing problems at retail establishments,” read a recent headline in the Illinois political newsletter Capitol Fax, which presented a compendium of reports from merchants around the state, including one in Dekalb who said that a customer wearing what looked like a hunting knife refused to follow Illinois directives and wear a mask. Priorities.

When [Trump] the president visited Phoenix a week ago, some residents who’d turned out to see him harangued journalists in masks, “saying how we’re only wearing masks to instill fear,” . . .

Outside the State Capitol in Sacramento two days later, a woman held a sign that said: “Do you know who Dr. Judy Mikovits is? Then don’t tell me I need a silly mask.”

Mikovits is a discredited scientist whose wild assertions and scaremongering regarding vaccines have made her a hero to conspiracy theorists and a social media and YouTube star. Naturally, masks factor into her repertoire.

And masks are emblems, maybe the best ones, of the Trump administration’s disregard for, and degradation of, experts and expertise. Last month, when Trump announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was recommending the use of masks, he went out of his way to make clear that he wouldn’t be wearing one and that no one else was obliged.

Those of us with masks on our faces or masks in our pockets, at the ready, are definitely doing what’s right, but we’re also making our own statements. . . . . I take my own tiny role in vanquishing this pandemic seriously. Rugged individualism ends where dying on this breathtaking scale begins. There’s liberty and then there’s death.

I’ve often heard that this once-in-a-generation crisis will bring us together, making us realize how much we need one another.

But it may well be driving us farther apart. Income inequality hasn’t been writ this large and gruesomely in decades. Red state vs. blue state and rural vs. urban tensions steer politicians’ and the public’s actions and words.

And a potentially lifesaving accommodation is a badge of so much — of too much — more. Masks have unmasked immeasurable distrust in America. Who’s working on the vaccine for that?

Trump Speaks Volumes About the Danger Posed by the GOP Base

Perhaps I cannot totally escape my Roman Catholic upbringing despite the moral bankruptcy of the Church hierarchy as evidenced by the world wide sex abuse of children and youths and it's embrace of 12th Century knowledge.  Or perhaps it was the views of my parents who saw things as clearly as right and others as clearly wrong.  The follow through was that one did not associate with or support someone or groups who consistently engaged in wrongful behavior such as taking from the poor to give to the rich, failing to help the poor sick or needy, expressing open hatred for others and refusing to see their humanity.  These values are what I deem true "Christian" values.  Yet, for the vast majority of evangelical Christians and others who claim to be decent and moral, these values have been openly rejected by their support for Donald Trump and today's hideous incarnation of the Republican Party.   They put their loyalty to a political party that makes misogyny the norm ahead of the values they pretend to support.  Equally disturbing is their growing contempt for others who are different due to skin color, the country of their birth, their sexual orientation or their religious faith.  Only white, heterosexual, right wing Christians are deemed to be fully human.  This new orthodoxy of Republicans is frightening and dangerous.  The common good no longer matters to them, nor do the less fortunate, including children.  A column in the New York Times looks at the allegiance of the GOP base to Trump and its growing embrace of hate.  Here are excerpts:

Last year, as it became clear that Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination, analysts on both the right and the left speculated that millions of regular Republicans would be repulsed by his ethnonationalism and misogyny. 

Come Election Day, however, Republican voters did not abandon their party. . . . . This pattern has continued into the present and shows no signs of letting up. In recent days, prominent Republicans, including George W. Bush, Bob Corker, John McCain and Jeff Flake, have warned in various ways that Trump is leading their party and the country in a very dangerous direction. For the moment, however, it is the president’s critics who are butting their heads against a brick wall. The reality is that neither Flake nor Corker is seeking re-election, and both would have struggled to win renomination if they presented themselves as adversaries of President Trump.

In short, the Trump-Steve Bannon-Laura Ingraham wing of the Republican party is ascendant. As Mike Allen headlined his post on Axios Wednesday: “Virtually every Republican now a Trump Republican.”

Alex Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of California-Merced, put the state of play in a larger perspective: “The real story of Election 2016 is that the vast majority of Republicans voted for Trump” despite the fact that he was an outlier candidate who “lacked the normal credentials in terms of experience, ideology and character.” “Republicans identify, at a deep psychological level, more strongly with their party than do Democrats,” according to Theodoridis: The evidence is rather clear that the modern hyper-polarization is far more characterized by tribal division than by ideological distance. The real story seems to be the growing us-versus-them, in-group/out-group dynamic.

Theodoridis summed up the conclusions he and his colleagues reached in a blog post in Scientific American in November 2016: Partisanship for many Americans today takes the form of a visceral, even subconscious, attachment to a party group. Our party becomes a part of our self-concept in deep and meaningful ways.

In other words, the assumption that many Republican voters would be repelled by Donald Trump turned out to be wrong; instead party loyalty — “a visceral, even subconscious, attachment” — takes precedence.

These expressive partisans also feel increased schadenfreude, a complex positive emotion, when they read about bad things happening to or reflecting poorly on a political candidate of the other party. They even feel this positive emotion in reaction to events that are clearly negative. . . . . voters “not only increasingly dislike the opposing party,” but are also willing to “impute negative traits to the rank-and-file of the out-party.”

The growing strength of the kind of partisanship that is widespread today — whether you call it visceral, expressive, affective or tribal — undermines the workings of democratic governance.
 A number of questions present themselves to us as a nation, most notably: Where are we going? Off a cliff appears to be the answer for now, but who is going to help us climb back up? What can mitigate these developments except disaster? Over time, will we just swing back and forth between parties with no bipartisan achievements at all? What phoenix will rise from the ashes of our tribal partisanship?

Of course, this phenomenon is not limited to the United States. It is a worldwide problem, which is another way of extending the question. Germany, France and the Netherlands have one answer, still refusing to yield government control to right-wing populists despite the success of ethonationalist insurgencies in all three countries; Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary have another answer — they are all currently swerving to the far right. Which path will we take?