- An essay about “contrasting views of reality” by the American right and the left;
- Short items about MAGA and pets; Republicans and raunch; Laura Loomer; Buttigieg explains Trump; Lance Wallnau blames witchcraft; and Trump’s new big lie about crime;
- And how Fox News keeps the MAGA faithful in a state of blissful ignorance.
Let’s take a look at another big picture essay, looking beyond current politics to the big ways people think about the world. I’ve captured some ideas about this already, in that table of moral polarities, which I recently suggested might be characterized as being more broadly about Human Nature, Morality, and Politics. From Haidt, we know of dueling grand narratives: the struggle to return to a golden past, on the right; the struggle for equality and happiness, on the left. This piece seems to be aligned the same way. (And where do most science fiction writers and readers lie…? One guess.)
NY Times, Peter Baker, 11 Sep 2024: Harris and Trump Bet on Their Own Sharply Contrasting Views of America, subtitled “Former President Donald J. Trump is gambling that Americans are as angry as he is, while Vice President Kamala Harris hopes voters are exhausted by the Trump era and ready to move on.” [gift link]
It opens:
Donald J. Trump’s America is a grim place, a nation awash in marauding immigrants stealing American jobs and eating American cats and dogs, a country devastated economically, humiliated internationally and perched on the cliff’s edge of an apocalyptic World War III.
Kamala Harris’s America is a weary but hopeful place, a nation fed up with the chaos of the Trump years and sick of all the drama and divisiveness, a country embarrassed by a crooked stuck-in-the-past former president facing prison time and eager for a new generation of leadership.
These two visions of America on display during the first and possibly only presidential debate between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump on Tuesday night encapsulated the gambles that each candidate is taking in this hotly contested campaign. Mr. Trump is betting on anger and Ms. Harris on exhaustion. Mr. Trump is trying to repackage and resell his “American carnage” theme eight years later, while Ms. Harris is appealing to those ready to leave that in the past.
Of course, entangled in this psychological divide, in which one side sees only the problems of the world and the other sees the promise, is the inability of many people to think independently past the ancient myths they’ve been taught as children. That some people yearn to return to a golden past is partly about the need for certainty and stability in one’s life, but it’s also about a kind of cultural inculcation from childhood that has trapped them into an unwillingness, even the inability, to understand and accept change.
Is it possible to objectively identify one of these sides as… more correct? By objective economic terms, the US is *not* backsliding. By cultural terms, many people do resent the loss of the monocultural society they grew up with. To them, the world really is falling apart. How to deal with such conflicting views in world which is inevitably multicultural?
Well, one way might be that one side is extremely simple-minded.
Mr. Trump has always been about extremes, articulating an all-or-nothing Manichaean worldview in which the country is a virtual paradise on earth when he is in charge and going to hell when he is not. “We had no problems when Trump was president,” he said, attributing the claim to a European autocrat. Now that he is out of office, Mr. Trump added, “the whole world” is “blowing up,” and “we’re a failing nation.”
While,
Ms. Harris offers subtlety and nuance in a political environment that does not always value either. She boasts of progress not perfection, promises seriousness not self-absorption. “What I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country,” she said, “one who believes in what is possible and one who brings a sense of optimism about what we can do instead of always disparaging the American people.”
I’ve long noted that conservatives don’t do nuance; to them, everything is black and white. Objectively, it isn’t; theirs is a psychological character flaw, one that might have worked among tribes on the ancient Savannah (which is why the inclination has survived), but which doesn’t work now.
And so the conservative vision is necessarily built on misrepresenting reality.
The former president’s vision is built partly on a foundation of fictions. So much of what he said over the course of an hour and a half onstage in Philadelphia was false, misleading or seemingly made up out of whole cloth that it could take a team of fact-checkers all night just to catch up. Crime is “up and through the roof,” he said, except that the authorities report that it is actually near its lowest level in decades. Ms. Harris and President Biden “got rid of” the petroleum industry, except that U.S. oil production has risen to record highs.
Not to mention Haitian immigrants eating dogs. There’s more in this essay about debate strategies; how Harris repeatedly got under Trump’s skin. So the election will come down to psychology:
If there are no more debates, then the two candidates will now separately crisscross their two Americas for the next 55 days in a high-stakes, this-is-for-all-the-marbles test of which one has a better sense of the country. And then it will be left to voters who are angry and voters who are exhausted — and those who are both — to decide which America they see and what kind of America they want to live in.
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And now another round of dispatches from or about Crazy-Land.
- Salon, Amanda Marcotte: Cat ladies and dog-eating: MAGA can’t quit the weird talk about pets, subtitled “Kristi Noem shoots her puppy. Trolls accuse Tim Walz of faking his dog. MAGA’s animal obsession is getting deranged”
- Vox, Constance Gracy: How Republicans became the party of raunch, subtitled “The right thinks that hot girls can ‘kill woke.’ What?”. Apparently raunch — i.e. girls with big boobs or butts — is the opposite of woke.
- Laura Loomer: “Haitian Immigrants Are Eating Humans”. No they’re not.
- Pete Buttigieg explains exactly why Donald Trump keeps taking about eating cats. To distract from his policy failures. Pete is really smart, but here I think he’s giving Trump too much credit.
- Lance Wallnau Blames the Seduction of Witchcraft for Kamala Harris’ Success
- The Atlantic, David A. Graham: Trump’s New Big Lie, subtitled “The goal is not to earnestly correct the record on crime but to spread an atmosphere of fear and paranoia.” Truth is not an authoritarian priority.
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An item worth a quote.
Washington Post, Dana Milbank: Opinion | Fox News cleans up another Trump mess, subtitled “After the debate, the network worked to keep the MAGA faithful in a state of blissful ignorance.”
The reason MAGA folk don’t know anything other than want Trump tells them is because they only watch Fox News.
It was a case study in how the dominant “news” organ of the right cleans up Trump’s messes. When President Joe Biden had his disastrous debate, liberal outlets and commentators panned the performance and ultimately helped to force him out of the race. But when Trump had what was, objectively, a bad night, Fox News led a movement to claim it didn’t happen.
…
Often, after my weekly cataloguing of Trump’s madness and mayhem, readers ask why his followers don’t see that he is off his rocker. This is why. Fox News sane-washes him — and it sets the tone for the entire MAGA social media ecosystem.
This is the most corrosive effect of cable TV and social media. There is no consensus reality.
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(New posting policy: if the post I’m linking to is dated today, I won’t indicate the date.)
