Am I Taking Crazy Pills?
For a guy with a bunch of hard opinions, I’m actually frequently wracked by self-doubt. I have a bit of a contrarian streak, so I don’t mind being the “10th man,” but it can be tedious being the 10th man inside your own head. Every so often, though, I can’t shake the feeling that maybe I’m just wrong about everything. Given that my preferred candidate for president has won his party’s nomination and then the presidency precisely once in my voting life — enough to keep me at the Mendoza Line, though 2024 seems destined to drop me below it — I’ve gotten used to being in the minority of popular opinion. But after almost 15 years in the political wilderness, including nearly a decade of estrangement from my erstwhile partisan allegiance, I can’t help but wonder…is it me? Maybe it’s me. As the song goes, 50 million Frenchman can’t be wrong. Or, for our purposes, 50 million Trumpists can’t be wrong. [I mean, they can and they are, but perpetually swimming upstream like this can have a gaslighting effect.]
The comedian Neil Brennan [probably best known as being Dave Chappelle’s writing partner] has a joke about how atheism is the epitome of white privilege, because only a white person could hear the pitch for an afterlife and smugly say “Oh, no thanks, how much better could it be?” So when I’m constantly told, by people who know more about this sort of thing than I do, that voters don’t vote based on abstract ideas like democracy and the constitutional order, but rather much more tangible issues like the economy, immigration, and crime. Which got me thinking…is worrying about democracy or America’s constitutional order a form of privilege? After all, I’ve been accused of sneering at the “forgotten man” from atop my high horse for believing things like “participating in or condoning a violent attempt to prevent the transfer of power is not only disqualifying for public office, but anyone who does so permanently forfeits the right to be considered a constitutionalist or a patriot.” So what if I’m the jerk?
The polling as of late has been pretty clear — despite President Biden’s opponent likely being an emotionally-unstable, constitution-defiling, law-breaking leader of a personality cult prone to political violence, the state of the race is such that Biden is currently at-best a coinflip to win. In reality, he’s probably a slight underdog. And as a high-and-mighty Deep State shill [or so I’m told at family gatherings], I find that pretty baffling. Not because I think Joe Biden has been crushing it — I too believe he is unsettlingly old, wrong on most policy, and less than ideal for pursuing American interests abroad — but because I look at the other side of the proverbial debate stage and cannot comprehend how that flimflam man garners more than zero votes.
“Oh, but inflation!” we’re told. I mean, maybe? I’m probably the wrong person to ask because inflation has almost entirely been a marginal nuisance for me rather than a life-altering challenge. Sure, it’s less than ideal that the monthly grocery expense for my family is now $700 instead of $600, but it’s not worth ruining America over, y’know?
So in that sense I can afford, I guess literally, to care about abstract ideas like democracy or the American constitutional order. But even if I were in a different economic situation, I don’t imagine I would suddenly start donning a red hat, simply because of what I believe to be true about the relation of the presidency to the economy. Which is to say, it’s a category error to think 1. The president can affect the economy to that extent; and 2. That Donald Trump specifically has better economic policies that could justify overlooking his mountain of other, uh, shortcomings.
The American economy often performs well in spite of a president’s policies, much more than it ever would because of a particular president’s policies. The global economy in which the United States participates is an incredibly complex system with literally innumerable inputs and variables that determine prices. The idea that one man, powerful though he may be, deserves credit or blame for the state of the economy has always struck me as silly. It’s not as if there’s a knob in the Oval Office that says “Inflation” that Joe Biden has turned to the right that Donald Trump could then turn back to the left like they’re adjusting a thermostat. But maybe it’s another form of “privilege” to be aware of that sort of thing? I dunno. I feel like it shouldn’t be, it’s not exactly Master’s Thesis sort of information, but yet one of the strongest predictors of incumbent president reelection is public sentiment about the economy.
Democrat strategist James Carville, who famously advised Bill Clinton’s winning presidential campaign with “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” recently told ABC News “The venue makes some sense and the timing makes some sense. It makes sense on January 6th, but don’t kid yourself. On January 8th and 9th, Americans will still be going to the grocery store. People live in the economy and experience it many times a day. They don’t live on January 6th.” [The “it” he’s referring to is President Biden’s speech last Friday in Valley Forge where he accused Donald Trump of being a threat to American democracy.] Now, James Carville obviously knows more about political messaging than I do, and maybe he’s right that most voters don’t care about the abstract over the practical. But if that’s the case, isn’t that an indictment of the American electorate? How many of us are there, exactly, that would vote for the clearly-unwell demagogue simply because groceries are more expensive? As someone who’s been banging the drum about an electorally-significant slice of the populace abdicating their civic duty, I guess the idea shouldn’t be so controversial. I’m sure there are people so disconnected from politics that they would vote for Trump simply because the price of ground beef has noticeably increased, and would do so without much of a thought of the broader consequences. There may not be many such people, percentage wise, but when you add those people on top of Trump’s immovable base, that’s when it becomes a problem.
And while it might be a form of privilege to be concerned about abstracts like democracy, and small-L liberalism [which is to say, classical liberalism], and America’s constitutional system, the actual privilege is living under the American constitutional system. If we stop treating it like a privilege and putting in the necessary effort to maintain it, it could go away. It shouldn’t be condescending to say to voters, “Hey I know things are maybe less than ideal right now, but I’m not sure you’ve thought this all the way through.” It comes back to an idea I bring up sort of a lot. Voters should be treated like adults with agency. Believing that “voters don’t care about democracy, they care about the economy” is a confession of the belief that voters are either too dumb or selfish to understand that there are higher-order issues at stake in a given election. And maybe that’s true, but we should proceed as if it’s not in the event that there are enough people receptive to the message. This seems self-evident to me, but given all the fretting these days, it doesn’t appear to be a widely-held opinion. So again, maybe I’m the weirdo.
Symptoms of Spiritual Starvation
As part my never-ending vision quest, my Ahabian obsession to understand how we ended up in this political moment, I read this New York Times article that’s been making the rounds. Ostensibly it’s about the changing definition of the term “evangelical” in the context of American Christianity, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s fervent support among people who call themselves “evangelical” but are not particularly well-connected to, y’know, the actual theology of evangelicalism.
There’s a few quotes that make me simultaneously raise by eyebrows and shake my head. To wit:
No one plays a more central role in her perspective than Donald J. Trump, the man she believes can defeat the Democrats who, she is certain, are destroying the country and bound for hell.
“Trump is our David and our Goliath,” Ms. Johnson said recently as she waited outside a hotel in eastern Iowa to hear the former president speak. […]
“I voted for Trump twice, and I’ll vote for him again,” said Cydney Hatfield, a retired corrections officer in Lohrville, a town of 381 people in Calhoun County. “He’s the only savior I can see.” Raised as a Baptist, Ms. Hatfield no longer attends church. “I just try to do right,” she said. “I pray to God every night.” […]
At Mr. Trump’s rally in Coralville, it was Joel Tenney, a 27-year-old local evangelist who does not lead a church, who delivered the opening prayer.
The crowd responded tepidly to his impassioned recitation of several Bible verses. But the rallygoers roared to life when he set aside the Scripture and told them what they had come to hear.
“This election is part of a spiritual battle,” Mr. Tenney said. “When Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”
As I often confess, I am not what anyone would call a biblical scholar. But I am curious, given what I do know, how the same person could be both David and Goliath. I’m also curious how a self-professed Christian could call Donald Trump “the only savior I can see.” I feel like may there’s another one this woman may have heard of, even if she no longer attends church. I also have questions on where she gets her standard for “doing right” and who she thinks she’s praying to at night, if not “the only savior [she] see[s].” And the bit about this election being a spiritual battle is the truest part, I think, of the entire article. I think a lot of Trump voters genuinely believe that, which is the root of a lot of the recent unpleasantness. As I’ve said before, when people start conflating political pursuits with religious pursuits, it’s a recipe for disaster.
There certainly seems to be some innate human need for spiritual connection, and people will seek to fill it with whatever scratches that itch. I don’t generally have a preference for what people choose to use to scratch that itch, so long as it 1. Brings them peace, and 2. Makes them a more conscientious participant in society. I have a friend who, as an adult, converted out of his parents religion and into another. His parents were crestfallen, saying things like “How can you do this knowing everything we know?” That always struck me as a strange formulation, because what is faith other than belief in spite of an absence of knowledge? “Knowing” has nothing to do with it. Plus, this particular friend was struggling against some proverbial demons that his new religion seemed more effective in combatting, so who was I to argue? Whatever silences the screams, y’know?
Too many people, I think, view religion as some sort of debate club where whoever makes the most convincing arguments “wins” the followers, and anyone who doesn’t believe those arguments is therefore denying reason, and that’s just never been my experience. For one, I’ve yet to encounter a religion that doesn’t sound absurd on its face. People raising from the dead, omnipotent beings taking human form, paradise on a different plane of reality — none of it makes any sense, that’s the point. For what it’s worth, non-belief doesn’t make any sense to me either. We appear to exist in an infinite universe, which apparently spontaneously sprang into existence from nothingness, whose structure of laws for extremely large objects bears no resemblance to the structure of laws for extremely small objects — which in itself makes no sense — and for people to look at that and say “nope, nothing to see here” makes no sense to me. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t exempt myself from this — if there is a creator of this infinite universe, the idea that He/She/It would have an opinion on the diet of a bipedal hairless ape on one of trillions of planets in one of trillions of galaxies, I admit, sounds silly. And yet here I am ordering turkey sausage with my breakfast because them’s the rules. But I digress.
As I said, I don’t generally have a preference for what people use to scratch their spiritual itch as long as it brings them peace and makes their presence in society a net-positive. But I can’t help but notice that so many of these so-called evangelicals are some of the least-peaceful people around. Just full of anger, fear, contempt, and resentment. And I can’t help but think, maybe they’re trying to fill their spiritual void with the wrong stuff? Which is to say, if these people are relying on Donald Trump for their spiritual nourishment, it’s no wonder they’re miserable. There’s nothing there. Maybe they’re not angry, they’re just hungry. Devotion to Donald Trump has got to be the spiritual equivalent of eating junk food for dinner. It may momentarily scratch a human itch, but there is no nutritional value, it’s ultimately unsatisfying, and is detrimental to long term health. Just as actual starvation is dangerous, spiritual starvation should also be a concern. Maybe I’m a schmuck for pointing out that these people are malnourished without providing an alternative, but then again, I’m just some guy on the internet. I don’t have any suggestions for what they should be doing, I just know that this [gestures broadly] isn’t working.
A Malicious Ghoul
I always mean to write things about stuttering, but the older I get, the fewer experiences I have that seem worth sharing. But sometimes my passions overlap, such as late last week when Donald Trump mocked Joe Biden’s stuttering. The clip played on my local news, and it made me so angry that I recorded it off of my own television:
This sort of thing strains my charity. I think about people like that woman from the New York Times piece, and can’t help but wonder “This is your savior?” But even for the people who don’t blaspheme on Trump’s behalf, this is your political avatar? This bullying schmuck?
And it’s not as if Trump’s penchant for ridicule is seen by his supporters as some unfortunate vice to be tolerated in exchange for whatever policy victories he delivers. The fact that he’s a cruel, sadistic, browbeater is — for reasons that continue to elude me — a chief part of his appeal. They positively love that he makes fun of people, even for terrible things like speech disorders or family members struggling with addiction.
The most disgusted I have ever been with Donald Trump was during his disaster of a debate with Joe Biden in 2020. You might recall, Trump was just an insufferable prick the entire time, belligerently talking over Biden, ignoring the moderator, just generally being a [I’m running out of words here] putz. But the worst thing for me was when he used Hunter Biden’s drug addition as a cudgel against Joe. The level of indecency required to throw a son’s addiction into the face of the father in an effort to score cheap political points is unfathomable to me. But it really laid bare for me the fact that, at his core, Donald Trump is just a malicious ghoul. He has no recognition of the humanity in others. He has no qualms about ridiculing even the most sensitive of subjects. And why would he? He gets rewarded with rapturous applause.
I know I shouldn’t make it so personal, but I have no doubt that if Donald Trump heard me speak — particularly if he knew my politics! — that he would mock me for it. He has the emotional development of a 6th grader, and I got mocked sort of a lot by 6th graders in my time. But what galls me is that I have people in my life who are aware of my struggles, who know full well what makes the sort of person that ridicules others, who are part of his rapturous applause, who are so all-in on this guy that they buy and wear his merchandise. I dunno what I should expect, to be fair. The fact that Donald Trump has the psychological profile of the kids who used to bully me in middle school clearly isn’t a deal-breaker for these people, y’know? I guess I can’t ask them to refrain from voting for the guy because he’s a schmuck to people. But do they have to buy the hat? It’s one thing to vote for the sort of person who mocks a challenge I’ve struggled with for my entire life, it’s the reveling in it that gets me. But then they get incensed when the rest of us notice, as if they should be allowed to revel in cruelty without the rest of us acting like they revel in cruelty. Well, nuts to that. Vote for the vicious bully if you feel so compelled, but the rest of us get to adjust our opinions accordingly if we learn that you’re the type that votes for the vicious bully.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Today’s clue: Children’s Literature
Clue: In this magical book, young Omri receives an old medicine chest that brings his toys to life.
The Indian in the Cupboard
Today’s clue:
Category: Exotic foods
Clue: Found in dishes like pho, tripe is the lining of this digestive organ of cattle.
Dispatches from the Homefront
We were running errands over the weekend when my oldest daughter noticed the spare tire on the back of another car.
“That car has an extra tire on the back,” she said.
“It sure does.”
“Is it so that if one of the tires on the bottom breaks, they can use that one?”
“You’re pretty smart.”
“Yeah, it’s because I’m a great thinker.”
“…and so humble.”