Alternative Feelings, Demagogues, and How Rights Die
This article continues the ideas laid out in Why You Matter, where I describe how being, doing, and belonging influence our self-worth. Here I describe how the need to belong can make us ignore other people’s need to be. The ideas draw heavily from Adam Sewer’s The Cruelty Is the Point.
Belonging is the most powerful need humans have, and we bond in many ways. There’s romantic love, obviously, but we also bond through liking the same activities, having similar ways of thinking, or belonging to the same group or religion. There’s one powerful way to bond that we’ve deliberately ignored in modern society. There’s joy to be had by inflicting pain, and humans can connect deeply to each other through cruelty. We see it in small children and punish them for picking on the kids who don’t fit in. It’s especially prominent in puberty when we’re at our most insecure. The hope is that as adults we’ve learned to bond with others in more positive ways, and we don’t need this negative technique to make ourselves feel good. Then we turn on reality TV and get a kick out of looking down on whoever the producers have chosen to play the villain or the idiot that week. It’s not as bad as the Roman Colosseum, but let’s face it, humans are mean.
Demagogues are ambitious bullshitters who know how to use our love of cruelty against us. They find people who feel disrespected as their support base, then they find people for them to look down on. If you can get enough people to blame others for all their negative feelings, you can get them together for a party. The supporters feel great because they’re finding acceptance in a group and connecting to others. The demagogue then enables them to criticize the scapegoats, and they have a lot of fun being mean together. The demagogue obviously doesn’t care about the rights of his scapegoats. He doesn’t care about the rights of his supporters either. What he wants is status and power. He sees his supporters as the suckers he can use to get them. Once in power demagogues battle against any constitutional constraints and use their position as leader to get rid of those who don’t like them. Their supporters feel so special that they cheer as rights are taken away from the people they think of as their enemies, then they cheer just as loudly when their own rights are gone, because their need to fit in has become more important than the need to tell the truth or be themselves. By the end of the process individual rights have died and the leader has unlimited power.
Thankfully the memory of World War II Is still alive, and since the end of the war, no country has fallen as far into the fascist trap as Nazi Germany did. Frustratingly, in recent years there are all too many examples of democracies being taken over by fascist-like movements. Viktor Orban has been able to kill freedom of the press and censor universities in Hungary by scapegoating foreigners and the European Union. Vladimir Putin maintains his corrupt control of Russia by demonizing the tolerance of Western Europe and starting border wars. That popularity lets him control the news, restrict freedom of assembly, and poison his enemies. Rodrigo Duterte has made the Philippines unsafe for everyone by scapegoating drug dealers and addicts. Murders are frequently shrugged off by police as okay, as long as it was someone they didn’t like. These leaders are not full-blown fascists, but they use fascist techniques like promoting fear of out-groups and allowing them to be dehumanized. We can hope that these trends are reversible, but progress doesn’t just happen on its own.
Compromises, Demagogues, and the USA
This is the part a lot of people aren’t going to like, and that’s okay. No matter what you say when you comment on politics in the US, you’re going get partisans screaming at you. Good partisans are useful to politicians because they support all the party’s positions no matter what, even when they change. These people like politics because it makes them feel like they belong. Every party has them, but needs to avoid being dominated by them. A democratic country is best served by people who decide what’s important to them, then decide their vote, not people who are just trying to fit in.
In my lifetime, the democratic party has been the party of minorities, women, union members, the poor, sustainability, and the environment. They’ve been more interested in ensuring a decent standard of living than keeping taxes low. They’ve been the party that focuses more on the value of every person rather than focusing on rewarding high-achievers. They emphasize that you matter just because you are.
Meanwhile, the Republican party has been the party of religious conservatives, foreign policy hawks, corporations, and people who just want lower taxes. They’ve focused on incentives to work, preferring a weak social safety net and low government spending. They were the party that emphasized that you matter because of what you can do.
Donald Trump has changed much of what the Republican Party stands for. They’re still a party that believes in low taxation, but he’s shown little enthusiasm for cutting the social safety net. Even though he will increase spending on the military, he doesn’t want to use it. He’s appointed conservative judges to appease religious conservatives, but has no understanding of Christianity. To him, a person’s value doesn’t depend on what they can do, it’s measured by what they are willing to do for him. It’s a party of loyalty now, not ability, and Trump has learned to buy it cheap.
President Trump’s 2016 campaign was all about who belonged and who didn’t. By portraying immigrants as criminals and President Obama as a foreigner, he became very popular, very fast. These core supporters are the frightening ones. They love him like any twelve-year-old girl loves a boy-band. They see no wrong in anything he does. When confronted with daily evidence of his incompetence, they choose to ignore it or explain it away. Especially concerning is the alternate reality they’ve created, Q-Anon which reads like bad fan-fiction. When everyone you don’t like is suddenly a pedophile sex-trafficker, and your hero is the only one who can save you, you’re daydreaming, not thinking. That’s fine if you’re reading a romance novel, but it’s not a basis for making any decisions back in reality. One follower of this idiocy will probably be seated in congress next year.
Thankfully most of President Trump’s conservative Christian voters aren’t like this. They’re compromising their ideals to vote on the issues they care about. I understand this in the abstract, but in this situation, I see two very big problems with it.
The first problem is that by making a deal with Trump, they’re destroying what they stand for. I think it’s okay for people to disagree about the value of an unborn life, but when people become single issue voters, the candidate can take advantage of them. Trump is hardly the first to realize this. Conservative Christians may think they’re using him for supreme court justices, but he’s using their support to cover his criminal conduct and corrupt the church. The impeachment trial was the perfect opportunity to justifiably remove a corrupt man from the highest office in the land and replace him with a conservative Christian, but most conservative Christians had learned to trust in President Trump instead of their own values.
The second problem with conservative Christian political strategy is that it pursues power without popular support. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. The only way to forbid a policy that popular is to have the Supreme Court strike it down as unconstitutional. If that longed-for dream comes to pass, it will be because the majority of the justices were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. If they do reverse Roe vs. Wade, there will almost certainly be enough support in congress to roll back the supreme court’s decision significantly. If the court tries to reverse the legalization of gay marriage it would be an even bigger disaster for them, most likely resulting in a constitutional amendment supporting it. Creating the conservative court will leave Christian conservatives with nothing but a long history of compromising their ideals. They will become the religious movement that insisted that basic healthcare is only for those who can afford it, that sacrificed our climate to the energy companies, and that chose to follow a white supremacist demagogue in order to temporarily impose unpopular rules on our most personal decisions.
I know I’ve been harsh, but I actually have even less sympathy for the economic conservatives who vote for Trump because they believe he will deliver more economic growth and lower taxation. Trump’s trade wars have cost the average household about $400 a year, and he has punished Canada twice as much as China. Goldman Sachs and Moody’s predict higher growth under Joe Biden’s policies. In a country where the top 10% of families control 76% of all the wealth, while the bottom 50% control 1%, I can’t really feel the pain of those at the top who want to pay less. When they vote for Trump this year, they’re trying to save a bit of money by rehiring an incompetent manager to look after their nation. It’s not a good idea.
In the US, we like to think we’re special as a country because we developed a constitutional system that protects our rights and secures our freedom to choose our government. That system is in danger. The President of the United Sates has made it clear he’s not a fan of democracy, insisting that our elections are corrupt even when he wins. He’s trying to slowly kill our faith in voting, the democratic process, and each other. He measures a person’s worth not by their ability, their beliefs, or their rights, but by their loyalty to him. He holds no convictions of his own, and he contradicts himself and objective reality so incessantly that his words carry no meaning. The only time he can stay on topic is when he’s complaining about how unfair the world has been to him and his supporters, or bragging, without evidence, of his greatness. The thing I love about America is that the vast majority of us see through this. We know he’s full of it. It’s time to stop compromising our ideals for a man who doesn’t have any. We need a functional Republican Party, but we won’t have one until the party learns to reject everything Trump stands for. For some it will feel like withdrawal, but for most of us it will feel like relief.
We’re all tired of measuring people’s worth by their loyalty or distrust of one person. It’s hard to remember the value of someone when they’re waving the flags of their dear leader and competing to see who can seem more loyal. I can respect that they’re human, but it’s hard to form connections to fanatics, and they are being taught to see us as fanatics too. We need to move on. I want to look at people and see them for what they can do, for what they truly believe in, and how deeply they love. Until we learn to value ourselves and others properly again, there will always be an empty place in our hearts that we can fill with demagogues. We need to be more vigilant with our own feelings or we’ll elect someone like him again.
