The fundamental choice in this presidential election is between Democracy and Fascism. And we can see that both sides have now agreed that this is the choice.
Trump is willingly portraying that as the choice with his increasingly dark announcements to characterize what he’s offering America:
- declares that those who criticize the Justices that helped Trump should be jailed; and
- that he intends to make the justice system, and the U.S. military, extensions of his power;
- threatens to violate the citizens freedoms of speech and the press;
- whipping up people against vulnerable minorities.
Kamala Harris is now highlighting the same basic choice, for example with her recent use in her own rallies of video clips of Trump’s expressing his fascistic intentions.
Clearly, the task for this moment is to see to it that Fascism is defeated and American Democracy can survive.
But even if America passes that fundamental test, we will need to ask the question: What does it mean that just over two weeks out from Election Day, it is not certain which — Democracy or Fasscism -- the American electorate will choose?
How can it be that so many Americans might choose the ugly thing that Trump represents?
I hear regularly from liberal friends who announce — with no prodding from me — how mystified they are by how many of our fellow Americans support this obviously most monstrous man and equally obviously morally bankrupt party.
Though I’m supposed to be an expert in what might be called “political psychology,” and though I’ve struggled for years to understand what’s happened to the consciousness of Conservative America, I have remained fundamentally mystified. The various psychological models I’ve learned have not seemed adequate to solve the mystery.
But, even if we win, solve it we must.
Even in the aftermath of the defeat of this (roughly) 46% of the American electorate, even if Trump exits the scene, we will be left with that almost-half of America who somehow have moved into a state of consciousness in which a Fascistic Leader seemed an OK choice.
Which means that it will behoove us to seek a good understanding of what that state of consciousness is, how they got there, and then — most practically — how the health of America’s political consciousness might best be restored.
The following piece — “The Angry Snarl” — is my latest attempt to illuminate at least a part of an answer to the question: how can apparently “good” people embrace a political force that’s the opposite of good, and how can apparently “intelligent” people believe things that are so obviously false?
“The Angry Snarl” appeared this past weekend in newspapers in my very red congressional district (VA-06).
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The Angry Snarl
The Mystery
Never have I seen more Americans so completely mystified by so many other Americans.
Here’s one way of articulating the mystery that puzzles so many in Liberal America about their fellow Americans on the other side:
How is it that good people can be led to throw their support to something that is the opposite of “Good,” and intelligent people can be led to a space where they will believe what is so obviously false?
(I repeatedly am hearing things like, “What are they thinking?” and “How does this happen?”)
I, too, have been mystified.
Never have I worked so hard and long on a phenomenon in the human world without being more satisfied with my answers. (The various psychological models I’ve worked with over the past 60 years seem inadequate to illuminate those questions.)
Let me now propose this as part of a solution to the mystery (how big a part, I won’t venture to estimate):
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The passions of the “Angry Snarl” – the welling up of feelings of rage, and eagerness for combat -- have gained control of the political consciousness of a lot of people. And the power of such passions has been sufficient to give themselves over to political forces -- a leader like Trump, and a party like today’s GOP – whose words and actions provide a channel for those passions to be expressed.
Certainly, it could not be any clearer that – at almost every turn -- the Republican party of this era chooses conflict over cooperation:
Starting with Gingrich and Limbaugh and Fox News, through the W presidency, then the across-the-board obstruction of Barack Obama, all the way to Trump as “the Divider-in-Chief,” and the Republicans’ choice, when fight and frustrate the newly-elected President Biden at every point (indifferent to the opportunity the United States had in 2021 to use its several crises as a positive transformative moment).
The idea of working with a Democratic President to achieve common purposes has not been alive in the Republican Party for decades.
So, regarding whether the Republican side of American politics expresses the Snarl, there can be no question. (Culminating now in a Republican standard-bearer overflowing with words of insult, rage, and false and fear-mongering accusations.)
The Power of the Primitive
But how can one explain how the passions of the Snarl could overpower people’s morality? How to account for intelligent people giving their power to leaders who feed them beliefs whose falseness is obvious?
Perhaps it demonstrates that what is primitive in us humans can overpower what’s more specifically human in us.
Think of it: those passions of the Angry Snarl– the feelings of rage, hatred, and urge to fight -- go way back, to long before we were human. For tens of millions of years, our ancestors had in their inventory the capacity for rage, and the impulse to strike at something that we see as a threat, or something that has wounded us.
It was much later – likely just tens of thousands of years -- that we humans developed a consciousness that comprehended our world in terms of Good-vs.-Evil and of True-vs.-False.
Perhaps those more recent (human) perspectives can get pushed aside by those (animal) passions arising from our ancient core.
(Perhaps the ancient impulse to hit back (if wounded and/or threatened) explains the appeal of a candidate who declares, “I am your Retribution.”)
Perhaps the “Angry Snarl’s” feeding of people’s deeply-engraved passions of rage (and hatred and an impulse to fight) -- can explain the transformation of the Republican base from one embracing Reagan’s hopeful “Morning in America” to one that gets in line behind Trump’s fear-mongering presentation of “American Carnage.” (From the sunny into the dark.)
A Vulnerability Exploited
But how did it come to pass that – in so many people – such dark passions could shove morality and critical thinking aside?
Maybe like this:
Begin with people having mere embers of frustration and anger within them, because of dissatisfaction with their experience in their world:
- Perhaps feeling they weren’t getting their fair share of the economic pie.
- Perhaps resenting how social changes had deprived them of the status and power they’d enjoyed in the old social order.
Angry, they gravitate toward politics as an arena for conflict.
Wounded, they find appealing a politics that gratifies the urge for revenge.
But, then, over the past generation, those embers have been fanned into flames by exceptionally effective propagandists.
Such skilled propagandists as Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Fox News, Karl Rove and now Donald Trump have sown rage in Conservative America by demonizing the other side (turning “others” into “enemies”) and using false and frightening pictures of reality to inflame people’s rage and fear.
The way conservatives regard our politics got fundamentally changed from what it had been for generations before: politics as war, driving out the possibility of the mutual goodwill and cooperation of peace.
Years of such messaging, it seems, could move people’s consciousness into a place where ancient passions could take control, where people fervently give their allegiance to a leader and a Party that make politics an arena where their rage and eagerness for combat can be expressed.
When governed by the passions of the Angry Snarl, good people can forget about what’s right and wrong, and lose their ability to differentiate between Truth and the Lie.