This piece has appeared as a newspaper op/ed in the very red congressional district in which I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in 2012.
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In a previous piece, I puzzled over the question of how people -- whom we might reasonably call “good” people – might come to support the opposite of what they claim to value. (I offered there a conjecture about how some kinds of child-rearing practices might make people vulnerable to “mistaking the Evil for the Good.”)
Here I want to look at a specific domain of that mistake, in which a number of people in today’s Conservative America appear to misjudge which the specific people they see as “Evil,” and which as “Good.”
What launched me on this line of thinking was my feeling of astonishment and outrage at how people on the right demonized Anthony Fauci. Anyone who has followed Fauci’s long career – especially his heroic conduct, even at the age of 80, in this once-in-a-century public health crisis, -- should see clearly that this is one of our national heroes. His batting average in being right has been outstanding, and he’s acknowledged those few times he’s been wrong.
In Japan, I bet he’d be deemed a “National Treasure.”
Yet on the right, one could hear Newt Gingrich and Fox News others slurring him ridiculously, posturing as though they know epidemiology better than this expert – a man respected around the whole world for his competence, integrity, and decency.
There even have been death threats – issuing from the anti-science right -- of sufficient seriousness that this splendid old medical scientist and his family required a security detail for their protection.
What does it mean when millions of Americans look at this man, and see Evil?
Likewise Barack Obama.
I’ve got so much less enthusiasm for Obama than I did the night he won in 2008. Obama really blew it, as far as I’m concerned, with his failure to understand what he was up against, and to deal with it accordingly. (That failure paved the way for the takeover of the Republican Party by an obvious human monster like Donald Trump.)
But for all Obama’s utter inadequacy for the challenge the times forced upon him to be the protector of American democracy, he consistently showed himself an extraordinarily decent man. It’s quite possible Obama was the most decent President we’ve ever had, and one of the most reliably responsible.
Quite clearly, Obama was the opposite of how the Republican world evidently saw him. In that world, Obama was misperceived as an America-hating, illegitimate president who paled around with terrorists.
What does it mean when millions of people mistake the Good for the Evil, when the contrary evidence was daily displayed right there in front of them? Was it really so hard to see?
Anyone watching Obama’s way of dealing with people and Trump’s would immediately know a difference between a good man who was civil and considerate, and another who was habitually insulting and abusive.
It is Trump himself, of course, who epitomizes this kind of weirdly mistaken moral judgment: weird, when tens of millions of today’s American conservatives lionize as a great hero a man regarded by most of our traditional decent friends around the world as morally grotesque.
How can so many people see as “good” a man
- who has obviously used his power for selfish purposes,
- who set never-to-be-surpassed records for presidential lying,
- who invariably worked to divide Americans against each other, and
- who surrounded himself with men who are not behind bars only because, after they were convicted of crimes, Trump pardoned them like a Mob Boss who’s been put in charge of the Justice System to reward them for not telling the truth about his crimes?
Returning to the other side of mistaking the Evil and the Good: it seems that many of those who make a hero of the sociopathic Trump are prone also to demonizing Biden (literally “demonizing,” in the case of my neighbor, mentioned in a previous column, with his “Biden is Satan” banner).
Biden as Evil? The man whom the Republican Lindsey Graham described enthusiastically (in 2015) as being “as good a man as God created”?
I realize that I am not immune to the general human tendency to see “our” guys as better than “their” guys.
Nonetheless, I’d bet the proverbial farm what judgment we’d hear – from a group of perceptive people, who knew nothing about our political figures – if we presented them with detailed portraits of the conduct of the members of the Republican Party of our times (stripped of any of the conservative-vs.-liberal political content).
More than with any major political party in our history, they’d declare the assemblage from this era’s Republican Party a real Rogues Gallery. (Starting with Limbaugh and Gingrich, going up to Roger Ailes and Karl Rove, then Tom Delay and Mitch McConnell and finally – in the era of Trump -- Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, and Ron DeSantis.)
What does it mean when people make heroes of the Evil and demonize the Good?
Is it that they don’t see clearly—can’t see who is decent and caring, and who’s a self-centered con man?
Or is it that – rather than simply mistaking the Evil for the Good – something in them is drawn to the Evil?
Or is it, as I suspect, a combination of both?