- Is MAGA a disease like violence is? Depends on your terms, and ideals.
- Items about Musk, Trump’s lie-industrial complex, and why Trump is doubling down on racism.
Three weeks to the election, yada yada, polls tied, yada yada, what is half the country thinking??
This sounds about right.
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 15 Oct 2024: “Brain flaws”: Understanding MAGA as an epidemic disease, subtitled “Epidemiologist Dr. Gary Slutkin: MAGA is a ‘dangerous and lethal syndrome’ of ‘Authoritarian Violence Disorder'”
Now this can’t actually be true, of course; if half the population exhibits some behavioral tendency, it’s an aspect of human nature, not a flaw. So what does he mean? Maybe he’s speaking only of the core of MAGA. Or, maybe it is a aspect of human nature that will forever hold the species back from what the idealists think might be possible, and therefore a flaw.
DeVega summarizes the current situation and then follows with comments from “a range of experts.” Here’s Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.
If Harris wins the election, we will be able to say, “Democracy prevailed and at least we have a further lease on the American experiment.” But if Trump wins, it will be clear that the U.S. is really moving toward an autocratic, cronyistic kleptocracy that will impoverish and weaken us as a nation. That will be bad news not just for four years but for some time to come. This election isn’t just about a set of policy preferences or issues where reasonable people can disagree. The facts are out there and the tragedy is that a large portion of the American electorate has been so propagandized and manipulated.
Part of me has always hoped that the American people would simply reject, out of good sense and common decency, the candidacy of a criminal who has attempted a coup. So, at some level, that will always surprise me. But at another level, am I surprised that Christian nationalists are completely unwilling to give up on the man they say was appointed by God? Am I surprised at their apparent immunity to evidence or correction? Afraid not. I was brought up to believe that America is a special country, and it is special because it is a democracy, which rests on the ideals, at least, of equality and justice. And part of me can’t accept that a psychologically unfit liar and criminal, who has demonstrated contempt for our form of government and for a majority of our citizens, should be so successful. I don’t think there’s an easy way to make yourself feel good about that.
And the part about brain flaws comes from epidemiologist Dr. Gary Slutkin, who has spent “15 years of experience living or working in dictatorships.”
I understand MAGA as an epidemic disease, infecting many through what I call “brain flaws.” It is not their fault. There are brain pathways for copying and following others — in the cortex, dopamine system, and pain centers, to motivate conformity and violence. This is a movement of violence. Violence is a disease, and specifically, a contagious disease. The disease spreads through these brain processes. The MAGA movement is a dangerous and lethal syndrome of what I describe as “Authoritarian Violence Disorder.” Donald Trump is a massive superspreader. The contagion and the moral disengagement it causes provokes cruelty and obedience. This is accelerated by the effects of “constant-lies.” Streams of lies are not just lies to be fact-checked, but an accelerant that impacts people’s brains, causing moral disengagement, allowing people to abandon their own decision-making and obey.
So MAGA is a disease in the same way violence is? Well, Steven Pinker, for one, would say violence is *not* a “disease,” it’s an aspect of human nature, part of baseline human nature, that will always be with us. And it may well be inappropriate in many cases, but it’s still a potential response that is available to individuals if circumstances warrant it. So too with the rest of what I’ve called “Savannah morality” or “tribal human nature.” However nice and egalitarian the world population becomes, should catastrophe hit and only pockets of survivors are left, those survivors might well be as ruthless and savage as our Savannah ancestors reputedly were, and they’d have to be, in order to survive at all. Diversity.
Whether violence is a disease or not perhaps depends on what kind of norms you want to establish in society. And that conservatives are obsessed with guns tells you about them.
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Short items.
- Musk is becoming as bad as Trump. Vox, Li Zhou, 2 Oct 2024 now updated: Elon Musk’s nonsensical lies about immigrant voting, briefly explained, subtitled “Musk and Republicans have embraced falsehoods that undermine the legitimacy of the election.”
- Salon, Lucian K. Truscott IV, 15 Oct 2024: Trump’s lie-industrial complex, subtitled “Real time fact-checking has gotten under Trump’s skin this time around”
Lying and denial go hand in hand. Every time a lie is told, a denial must be concocted to protect the lie by denying that it is a lie. What Donald Trump realized decades ago when he was pursuing fame in the New York tabloids is that his denials did not need facts or evidence to back them up. Protecting his lies needed repetition, first of the lie, then of the denial, then of attacks on his accusers.
It’s been written that Trump learned this from his mentor, Roy Cohn, who was a criminal attorney in both senses of the words. But Trump didn’t need to learn how to lie and protect his lies from Roy Cohn. His own father taught him a master class in lying with his racist practice of either refusing to rent apartments to Black people or “steering” them into substandard dwellings and charging them more rent than he charged White people.
- And you can always appeal to the conservative base this way. Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin, 15 Oct 2024: Opinion | Why Trump is doubling down on racism, subtitled “In the closing weeks of a tight campaign, the former president returns to his core message.”
Former president Donald Trump has gone full racist (or “nativist,” as some outlets delicately describe it). In Aurora, Colo., the New York Times reports, he spewed “repeated claims, which have been debunked by local officials, that Aurora had been ‘invaded and conquered,’ described the United States as an ‘occupied state’ … and revived a promise to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process.” He has continued demonizing legal immigrants from Haiti in Springfield, Ohio. In Detroit, as he does in many cities with large numbers of African American voters, he bashed the city. (“The whole country is going to be like — you want to know the truth? It’ll be like Detroit,” he said. “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”)
Regardless of his location, he invokes the specter of a non-White horde displacing Whites. Illegal immigrants are “evil,” are “taking your jobs,” and have “bad genes.” Right-wing hosts, elected Republicans and most down-ticket Republican candidates don’t blanch, let alone denounce racism unprecedented in modern American presidential elections. The mainstream media has begun to feature Trump’s racism (sometimes thinly disguised with fuzzy language) in headlines.
