Liberals tend to regard the neo-fascist nationalists as bad people. And it’s true that, with their tendency to xenophobia and racism, they do show serious defects.
But there’s another way of looking at them —one not only more compassionate, but also perhaps more fundamentally true about why they are broken as they are.
According to my hypothesis, people can be divided into two groups:
Those in one group need some meaningful connection with some human grouping-- a sacred “We,” larger than themselves.
People in the other group are more content for their social environment to be just an address, a place that enables them to find their meaningfulness in private terms, not in terms of membership in a larger human grouping.
Both of those approaches to finding meaning in life, I’d say, are worthy of respect.
My hypothesis is that a lot of people who look rather ugly these days in their politics – the racists and xenophobes in the U.S. and Europe, for example – are people of the first sort.
The idea is that these people -- feeling that need to experience themselves as part of some meaningful “We” -- attach themselves to whatever they can find in their society that provides that sense of meaningful connection to some human group.
The neo-fascists who marched in Charlottesville chanted “Blood and Soil,” echoing the Nazis’ slogan in Germany to affirm an emotional charged membership defined by their race and their connection with a particular part of the earth sacred to them.
In nations across Europe these days, the same turning to race and nationalism is fueling the rise of far-right populist parties. With the influx of immigrants, and the faltering of the European Union, they are seizing on a kind of tribalism, getting their meaningful connection to an “Us” that defines itself against a “them.”
All that supports the liberal condemnation of these people as bigots, whose inflamed hostility against “the Other” tears at the social fabric and undermines the peace. Clearly, something broken in the psychological structure of bigots makes antagonism against the “Other” congruent with some of their emotional needs.
But I am suggesting that some of these people might have followed a better path, had their societies offered a better alternative for meeting their legitimate need for a meaningful “We.”
If, for example, the liberal side of the American political picture had been presenting a more inspiring vision for the nation, a great many the people of these people who have gone down the path of xenophobia, racism, and nationalistic chauvinism, might have rallied instead to that more positive cause. And American politics could have taken a more benign course.
Isn’t that what FDR accomplished? While fascism was taking over in other nations in the 1930s, and even threatening in the U.S., the inspiring leadership of President Roosevelt – “I See an America” http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15893 – held off the fascistic impulse and led America onto a more humane course.
Indeed, were not a great many of the people who supported FDR in election after election basically the same kind of people who now are backing the ugly politics of chest-thumping jingoism and torch-bearing racism?
People who are participants in human systems that are fractured tend to perceive the problems in the system as residing entirely on the other side of the fracture. But the parts of the system do not evolve independently from what’s going on in the other parts. And when pathology develops in one area, as in our politics in recent years, the problem is best understood as growing out of the system as a whole.
It’s like in families, where someone in the group might be the “identified patient,” but the good therapist knows that it’s the whole family that needs to be treated.
Right now, the racists and nationalists, and the he-could-shoot-somebody-on-Fifth-Avenue Trump supporters might reasonably be identified as the patient in need of treatment. And surely, that would not be wrong.
But the brokenness on the right is only part of the picture.
When the more reality-based, more humane side of the system is not offering the kind of pulsing meaning that many people need, it creates a vacuum that will be filled by something else. Some people, if there’s no positive, truthful, and benign path that meets such needs, will take the negative, lie-filled, malignant path to get the meaning they need rather than find no meaning at all.
So their need for depth drives them into the clutches of a force of evil that builds meaning in terms of the depth of fear and hatred.
The compassion for those whose brokenness has been accentuated by these times comes from recognizing that the ugliness that’s been brought out of them is a function of their bad timing in being born when the liberal side of American politics had become spiritually shallow (lacking the depth of vision of an FDR) and the conservative side had become spiritually broken.
(And those two developments – on the right and the left -- are different sides of the same systemic problem.)
Curing America’s systemic malady will require change from all the components in the system.
In the current emergency, the urgent task is to fight and win the battle against “the other side,” to stop the damage that side is inflicting on America.
But, at the same time, some deeper work on the liberal side of the divide is also required: To lower our bucket into a deeper well, and to bring forth an inspiring vision of the America that we’re called upon to build, a message that gives the feeling that building such an America is a sacred task.