Even a very determined political optimist like myself can understand why it seems like the world’s gone crazy lately.
It hasn’t, of course. This is still the best time to be alive on planet Earth that there has ever been. All the things that make it seem like the world is going crazy – the rise of right wing politicians all over the world’s democracies, American political paralysis in the face of amazing amounts of horrific gun violence, the rise of Trump as the summation of all that is evil about modern conservatism – all of this is bad, but most of it does not actually change anything. If you live in a country that has the luxury of worrying about right wingers rising in the polls, congratulations, because that means you live in a democracy and probably have it better off than at least half of the world no matter how poor you are.
And sure, there are a lot of shootings in America – it’s never been more popular – but these are still tiny blips on the statistical radar. The average person is just as safe as they would be if none of those shootings had of those shootings had ever happened. Yes, these crimes are horrific, senseless acts of brutal violence, and that tends to command our attention – that’s why people do it, after all. But they mean very little to your daily life.
The rise of the right wing is considerably more damaging, but I can’t see a way out of it. Right minded individuals can only do their best to limit the damage and talk the general public down from their crazed state. Demographics have a rather cruel inevitability to them, and as the Baby Boomers age they get stupider and meaner and more on the market for easy solutions that don’t require thinking but that let you vent your impotent rage on targets so weak that even a coward like you doesn’t feel like they are a threat.
The best thing I can say about this period is that once these fuckheads get into power, it becomes obvious even to their supporters that they have made a terrible mistake and that the things that they thought sounded so good when they were just political slogans and talking points are actually phenomenally stupid ideas that never should have been implemented by anyone, ever. After all, one of the many things the world had learned from the Brexit fiasco is that right wingers are perfectly willing to vociferously and wholehearted support policies that they know would be a bad idea if they were implemented, but sure are fun when you and your buddies get together for a good old fashioned hate-fest.
And yes… this applies to extreme left wingers too. Neither side has a monopoly on substituting emotionally appealing ideology for thought, reason, common sense, and connection to reality.
And Trump is the Lizard King of it all. He’s officially the Republican Annointed One now, and there’s nothing they can do to stop him. These next few days should be mighty interesting, then, because now the GOP has absolutely no way to separate themselves from the things he says. He speaks for the GOP now, and no matter what idiotic, psychotic, sociopathic thing he says, all the people who are still in the party will have to support and defend it.
And if that becomes too painful, they will leave the party. Some vocally, but most quietly. They will just stop showing up to certain events, and stop participating in certain forums. Up until now, supporting Trump in public has not been too painful, and could actually be fun when it got you on TV to defend yourself.
But the closer the actual election gets, the greater the pain – both from the growing hordes of right wing Trump haters and from the massive amounts of cognitive dissonance building up in the brains of people trying to keep the ideas of “Trump should be President” and “absolutely everything he says, does, and says he’ll do” from making their brains melt and flow out their ears.
Like I have said in this space before, conservatives do not have a choice as to what to believe. They lack the metacognitive strength for it. They can’t actually derive their beliefs from observation and analysis because that’s just too much information with insufficient mental bandwidth to spare for it. So they have to believe what they are told to believe by the people they have accepted as smart and trustworthy and politically palatable. If it doesn’t pass the sniff test, they reject it. If they do, they accept it, at least consciously.
And thought it may seem sometimes like they are immune to cognitive dissonance, they are not. They simply have a deep driving emotional need that can, in some circumstances, override it. They can gloss over a lot in order to maintain their all important sense of certainty – but this is an emotional act, and as such is subject to emotional disturbance. If Trump stops feeling right to them, then the anti-Trump Republicans can gain the upper hand. And all that takes is that the deep down feeling of wrongness that is growing within even the diehards continues to grow until it poisons the warm glow of certainty and forces the populace to leap for the next source of certainty : that Trump is terrible.
A lot of the GOP have already made that jump. More will follow, I think. Trump is an out of control pedagogue, and sooner than people think and later than they hope, they go too far and say something that their audience simply refuses to assimilate, and therefore can act as their face-saving “jump ship” signal.
“I was with him up till that point, but when he said age of consent laws coddle children, I had to put my foot down. ”
It’s tempting to think that there is nothing he can say to lose his rabid supporters now.
And it’s true, there won’t be…. until he says it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.