There’s the story of the junior high school bully, who spends his days terrorizing any and all he can strike fear in. Rare is the encounter he doesn’t make some poor kid’s life a misery. One day he picks on the wrong kid and gets his butt whipped but good in front of much of the student body, who after seeing him taken to task, lose their fear and simply shun him for his trouble. Distraught, he sinks into depression, which leads his parents to seek a consult with school administrators.
At the meeting, a vice principal, well familiar with the boy and the events that led to his alienation, fills the parents in. They become incensed and demand to know why their son wasn’t better protected. Taken aback, the administrator reminds them their son had made many kids’ lives very difficult, and in fact was trying to bully the boy who beat him up. “So what,” the father bellows, “two wrongs don’t make a right!”
Similarly, there is a certain genius to the circular rationalizations of MAGA malevolence. After all, near thirty years of hourly Fox/AM story telling hasn’t been for nothing, even as it has near every minute been in service to nihilism. Malcolm Gladwell, in his classic study, Outliers, contends to become a true expert at anything, one has to put in at least 10,000 hours of practice. Say what you will about Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin etc., they have put in the time, relentlessly mastering propaganda techniques they now employ as naturally as expelling so much hot air. We currently suffer their President, a Frankenstein they created and now guide, spinning his gibberish like so much other grievance and resentment they have molded through the decades. Civil war appears to be the end game now that re-election looks unlikely.
False equivalence has always been the Alamo for Fox/AM-fabricated narratives. When it finally reaches the point truth has them cornered, and the pyramid scheme of lies one of their suppositions rests on totally collapses, the final Rushbo fallback is pointing the finger at the other side and squealing they do it too. So what if he did it, they’ve always done the same thing… and worse. Why didn’t you care when they did it?! What a double standard! It’s not fair! Near 200,000 Americans are dead? What about Benghazi?!
MAGA picks and chooses when the rules apply and when they don’t. Trump is like the bad guy in WWE wrestling, looking to the ref to enforce a break when his opponent has him at a disadvantage, but then throwing a flurry of cheap shots when the hapless zebra gets distracted. Woodward has Trump on tape, word for word. Who cares, what about Pelosi and Fauci?! Or as the despicable Peter Navarro spewed to Jake Tapper, just as casually as one would tell you the sun sets in the West, knee-jerk travel bans, one that did little to stem the outbreak, the other that wrecked chaos, creating super spreader events at several US airports, “saved a couple hundred thousand lives,” and Biden condemned them as xenophobic. No, Biden, like everyone else with the ability to discern, said it was impulsive and ill-conceived. Tapper tried to make that point but Navarro took umbrage at his tale being interrupted, his sacred right to a filibuster on Tapper’s forum a given.
It’s now clear a sizable American minority wants only to hear reaffirmation their wretchedness is an attribute, their ignorance preferable to what they don’t understand. They are followers and they are following, and that is a crisis we may not be able to resolve. This is a group looking to hurt those they despise, a long list that keeps getting longer. It’s a mob doing the bidding of the upper brackets, a short list that keeps getting shorter. And it’s millions with no intention of cooperating in anything not sanctioned by a narrative their sociopathic leader gulps down every bit as much as they do.
Fully willing to kill themselves and their neighbors rather than endure the ghosts created by their otherwise stilted imaginations, this totalitarian mass is itching for atrocity they expect Trump to deliver. Whenever truth causes too much of a problem with everybody else, work the refs! If it was so bad, why did Woodward wait? Pelosi and Fauci were no big mask fans back in March! It’s all equal. No more, no less. He’s just the President, what do you want from him? We want to be safe from Antifa and BLM! We’re keeping our eyes on the ball!
Democracies decline as their citizens descend down the slippery slope of civic disinclination. In America it’s far worse than that. Here, too many have begun to detest the bare minimum asked of them. Forget whining about taxes, or excusing a President who declares military service is for suckers, millions of us now actually find virtue in harming public safety, unable to make the connection between libertarian mania and the danger it poses to others, including our own loved ones. Meanwhile, the President has packed, maskless houses scheduled right up to Election Day, and surely past then, when he will foment violence while refusing to accept defeat.
Turns out, after a Civil War, two World Wars and a Cold War, the sweet spot for American demise was always there to be squeezed, it just required the technology to juice it at all hours, to all places. MAGA is constantly refreshed by messaging its followers now consider, not just religion, but existential necessity, and they aren’t about to forsake it. Nothing Trump can say or do will change that because his worst, even when exposed as in the Woodward tapes, will never be as bad as what the “radical left” can be claimed to have done in the past or hellbent to attempt in the future.
Cults don’t do re-examination. Doubling and tripling down, refusing to believe the evidence, or, as a final defense mechanism, false equivalence is their rabid comfort zone. Armed to the teeth and afraid of their shadows, what they are willing to do or abide their President ordering gets more ominous by the hour, with every tweet and rally, every Limbaugh monologue or Carlson meltdown. When democracy’s processes are no longer recognized, it’s not how many you have, only what you are willing to do. Nobody who listens to our wretch-in-chief these days can doubt there is much left he is not prepared to try. When he sweats and slurs how seditious he is, please take his word for it. It’s the only thing he says one can still believe. BC