A recent major poll showed Trump leading Biden in five of six key swing states. Many people won’t vote for Biden because he’s old. But will vote instead for a depraved comic-book villain?
Another poll showed just 33% for Biden in a 3-way race, with 24% for absurdist RFK Jr, and Trump leading with 35%.
Are only a third of American voters sane?
How to stay sane oneself in these “brutalizing times” is the subject of a recent David Brooks column. Saying “scenes of mass savagery pervade the media,” and people everywhere “are coping with an avalanche of negative emotions: shock, pain, contempt, anger, anxiety, fear.”
It does feel like the world is unraveling, compared against a relatively benign-seeming picture a decade or two ago. The Trump phenomenon threw American civic culture into the toilet. Russia’s Ukraine atrocity shockingly showed us such things were not consigned to a barbarous past. Then came Hamas’s bloodbath, and Israel’s even bloodier response. (Many Republicans perversely support backing Israel but not Ukraine.) Myanmar’s army wars against the whole population. While China becomes a creepy Orwellian dystopia, threatening the rape of Taiwan, which would really blow up the world order.
As to the mentioned polls, Brooks elsewhere theorizes they really just reflect people venting sourness toward the whole public landscape, rather than actual voting intentions. The electorate has indeed broadly rejected Trumpism ever since 2017. Yet so mucked up and fraught is our politics that another 2016-like shocker remains quite possible. Trump won then despite a majority against him. A significant third party vote could make that likely, given his irreducible hard-core cult support.
And I increasingly see many voters simply bedazzled by his aura of “strength” — even if epitomized by his attempt to seize power unlawfully. Which Democrats can’t match. Those pathetic pussies.
We survived one Trump term — sort of, barely — but all signs presage a second being “No More Mister Nice Guy.” The end of the world. Almost literally, not only shredding what America has represented, but with vast dire global repercussions. If you’re not scared shitless, you’re clueless. (Most MAGA voters are clueless about what they’re really voting for.)
“Modus vivendi” means a way of living; usually applied to conflict situations. I’m conflicted about how, psychologically, I could live in a Trumpian future. What then will be my modus vivendi?
Shall I continue, no matter how futile-seeming, to stand up for reason, battling its enemies? So much a part of who I am. Or give up, hunker down, shut out the world? Could I live that way?
So let’s return to Brooks, who starts off saying we Americans are still the lucky ones, and should count with gratitude our blessings. Which I fully do — understanding what an oasis of goodness this country is. And may to a considerable extent remain, even under Trump. Yet still I’d feel my love for America profoundly betrayed.
But Brooks does go on to the problem of how to avoid “becoming embittered, hate-filled, calloused over, suspicious and desensitized.” Now, those attributes are all basically at odds with my own personality. Yet with one I have trouble: hate-filled. Hatred for evil is an appropriate human emotion. Surely applicable toward today’s Republican party. How can I not feel that intensely? Yet I hate my own hatred, it roils peace of mind, warps one’s soul.
Relevant there, the ancient Greeks wisely urged moderation in all things. And as Brooks discusses, they were beset with violent upheavals, instilling “a tragic sensibility,” central to their wisdom. With “awareness that the crust of civilization is thin.” Which you can naively wish away, or realistically confront.
My own tragic sensibility confronts the reality that all lives end in the tragedy of death, meaning loss of everything. So we must make the most of the time we have. A tragic sensibility has also been a hallmark of traditional conservatism, inspiring caution toward radical notions of remaking society. Something lost in the perversion of “conservatism” today. And I’ve long warned that America’s wonderfulness can’t be taken for granted as somehow god-ordained forever. Fools are testing its vulnerability.
Consistent with all that, Brooks urges humility about one’s own particular agenda. Being “convinced of your own rightness” ultimately “blinds you and turns you into a hate-filled monster.” This he casts against both the “hard left,” with their cancel culture, and the “burn-it-all-down” House Republicans. A syndrome that “hardens into the sort of cold, amoral, nihilistic attitude” seen in Trump and his ilk.
But this whole tragic take on the human condition, he says, finally should lead us toward finding “our common humanity,” a compassion that “recognizes the infinite dignity of each human soul.” These passages evoke my own deepest feelings of kinship and, really, love for my fellow humans, admirably struggling to make good lives against so much adversity. Whose manifold imperfections, foibles, and even frequent horribleness I see as outweighed by the better angels of our nature.
And so with my own nature’s conflicting aspects I continue to grapple. Struggling to apply my love for humanity as a whole even unto MAGA cultists, those poor misguided souls. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do?”
