- The core belief that explains extremism on the right;
- Peter Wehner on how Republicans have chosen nihilism;
- My wondering what the deep explanation is for what’s happened on the right;
- Short items about GOP tax cheats, Trump’s latest outrageous lies, his gaffes and incoherent statements, how people willfully choose to be ignorant, beliefs about evolution, Hubble vs. Webb, a weird conspiracy theory about the history of architecture, and religious Americans’ taste for political violence.
Whenever I see an article that purports to explain or reveal the motivations behind the conservative movement, and/or its admiration for Donald Trump, I look closely to see if there’s anything new. There rarely is.
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 6 Nov 2023: “Apocalypticism”: Polling expert reveals the root of “panic among conservative White Christians”, subtitled “‘That core belief explains so much of the extremism and the proclivity toward violence on the political right'”
More from that recent PRRI American Values Survey, and an interview with the president of PRRI. It takes a while to get to its point; what *is* that core belief…? It’s stated at the very end of the piece.
How can the American people and their leaders solve the many problems facing the country if they cannot even agree on what they are – or on basic facts and the nature of reality and the truth more generally?
…
I think the deepest vein that they’re mining is a belief and feeling that America was supposed to belong to European Christians, and they’re desperately afraid that it no longer does. As they understand it, they were given the responsibility by God to create this Christian country, and it’s slipping away from them. That core belief explains so much of the extremism and the proclivity toward violence on the political right today.
\\\
This piece is significant because the writer is “a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.”
NY Times, Peter Wehner, 6 Nov 2023: Republicans Have Chosen Nihilism
Here the irony is about how the Republicans were once the party of law and order and moral standards. No more. The piece begins by discussing the infamous 1987 book by Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students:
Over the past half-century, one of the books that most electrified conservatives was Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind.” Bloom, a political philosopher, warned of the dangers posed by moral relativism and nihilism, of “accepting everything and denying reason’s power.”
The book, published in 1987, sold more than a million copies and spent 10 weeks at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. It argued that the denial of truth and the suppression of reason were leading to a civilizational crisis — and the fault for this lay at the feet of the New Left.
I have a copy of that book (the first edition of course) and have flipped through it, but even in this summary I’ve never resolved its claims of “denial of truth and the suppression of reason” when the truth he refers to is the tradition of Christianity. But that’s beside the point, now.
Yet today it is the American right that most fully embodies the attitudes that so alarmed Mr. Bloom. We see that most clearly in the right’s embrace of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement he represents. Mr. Trump is cruel and remorseless, compulsive and vindictive, an accomplished conspiracy theorist. He delights in inflaming hatreds and shattering moral codes.
No other president has been as disdainful of knowledge or as untroubled by his benightedness. No other has been as intentional not just to lie but to annihilate truth. And no other president has explicitly attempted to overturn an election and encouraged an angry mob to march on the Capitol.
His fans not only are not bothered… I’m beginning to suspect they’re completely unaware of who they’ve become.
The writer goes on to discuss Jonathan Rauch and his 2021 book, The Constitution of Knowledge (that I finished reading last week and will write up here soon.)
Those who once celebrated the three transcendentals — the true, the good and the beautiful — now delight in deceit, coarseness and squalor. Jonathan Rauch, a friend and sometime collaborator, calls this a “degenerate postmodernism.”
Mr. Rauch’s book “The Constitution of Knowledge” examined the collapse of shared standards of truth. He suggested that the incentive structure on the right has played an indispensable role in its epistemic crisis. Right-wing media discovered that spreading lies, inflaming resentments and stoking nihilism were extremely profitable because there was an enormous audience for it. Republican politicians similarly found they could energize their base by doing the same. Initially, the media and politicians cynically exploited these tactics; soon they became dependent on them. “They got high on their own supply and couldn’t stop using without infuriating the base,” as Mr. Rauch put it. There was nothing they would not defend, no exit ramp they would take.
And Wehner concludes,
The original left-wing version of postmodernism that Mr. Bloom complained about was corrosive for the reasons he discussed, and it still is, but the right-wing version is several orders of magnitude more cynical, irrational and destructive. Nihilism is a choice — it is forced on no one — and conservatives must somehow find a way to turn back toward their original ideals.
The core concern expressed by Mr. Bloom more than 35 years ago was that relativism and nihilism would lead to impoverished souls, especially among the young, the decomposition of America’s social contract and its political culture, and a “chaos of the instincts or passions.” His worst fears have been realized. What Mr. Bloom could not have imagined is that it would be the right that would be the author of this catastrophe.
As for the existential issue, why has it come to this?, I haven’t seen a good explanation. The only outline of a deep explanation I have is the simple matter of change, and how some people react against it. Changes in society, ever since the 1960s — that’s why MAGAites want to return to the 1950s. And deeper than that, the limited human capacity to absorb change, in a world in which change has been accelerating for centuries, as people have filled up the planet. Is there an upper limit to the human capacity to absorb change, and to react to issues beyond the local?
\\
And this aligns with the above….
AlterNet, Thom Hartmann, 6 Nov 2023: Opinion | How the GOP became the party of tax cheats
With a history of Republican tax policies, all the way back to the (MAGA) 1950s when the top income tax bracket for “the morbidly rich” was 92%. And here’s an interesting aside about how, for example during Mike Johnson’s press conference announcing his plans to cut funding for the IRS,
No reporter — as is so often the case when interviewing Republicans — was willing to point out what BS his pitch on behalf of his billionaire owners was. (Nobody wants to be banned from future press conferences or ignored during question time.)
\\\
Just some headlines.
Salon, 5 Nov 2023: Trump claims he won all 50 states in the 2020 election, subtitled “‘The whole thing is a lie . . . the whole election is a lie,’ Trump said during an event in Florida on Saturday”
CNN, 4 Nov 2023: Fact check: Trump falsely claims California had ‘blackouts all over the place this summer’
Media Matters, 30 Oct 2023: National broadcast and cable networks are barely covering Trump’s recent gaffes and incoherent statements
While his live audiences don’t care.
Big Think, 4 Nov 2023: 40% of people willfully choose to be ignorant. Here’s why, subtitled “We all have a place in our lives where we look the other way and pretend everything is fine. It’s a built-in excuse to act selfishly.” (But I’ll cover this again later when discussing the idea of civil responsibilities.)
Speaking of which.
Washington Post, 31 Oct 2023: A plurality of Americans believe God created humans without evolution, subtitled “Most believe in a divine role in human emergence”
Salon, 31 Oct 2023: Fox News host Laura Ingraham learns James Webb Space Telescope is a thing, subtitled “‘There is a Webb telescope that I didn’t know about,’ says newly educated conservative pundit”
(She criticized Biden for mispronouncing “Hubble,” then had to apologize.)
Bloomberg, 27 Apr 2021 (via some more recent post): Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture, subtitled “On YouTube videos and Reddit boards, adherents of a bizarre conspiracy theory argue that everything you know about the history of architecture is wrong.”
The irony is people like these are so anxious to believe things for which there is no evidence except that which they manufacture or imagine, while rejecting things (like that the Earth isn’t flat, and that vaccines work) for which are mountains of evidence compiled over centuries. Again: it’s all psychological. And tribal. They are not thinking, rational people. Thus:
Religion News Service, 25 Oct 2023: Poll: More religious Americans support the use of political violence, subtitled “One-third of white evangelical Protestants support the idea, significantly more than any other religious group.”
