Fighting Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. That saying appropriated from UCLA Bruins football coach “Red” Sanders might accurately describe Donald J. Trump’s Republican Party. Americans do love a fighter, as I noted here days ago. But there should be a point to the fighting. An end goal. For the party of Trump, the means is the end.
Our conservative neighbors, for example, have made freedom (and liberty) a shibboleth, a code word called out in the dark to identify other members of the tribe. Ask, “Freedom to do what?” and you might draw a blank stare. Just freedom, lib. You don’t get it, do you?
Fighting has become like that for Republicans. Not fighting for anything in particular. Just fighting, argues Joel Mathis at The Week. It is what made Donald Trump such a darling for supplicants both intimidated and energized by Trump’s eagerness to set fires, pick fights, and punish adversaries. Some among the base perceive less-belligerent Republicans as members of the “surrender caucus” who don’t get that politics now is a perpetual culture war. Trump is their first wartime president.
Mathis writes:
The big problem with the right’s “always fight harder” mentality is that it is anti-democratic, reducing politics purely to the exercise of your own side’s will, instead of acknowledging that other factions will sometimes win elections for lots of other reasons — a bad economy, an unexpected pandemic, or a platform that simply appeals to more voters. It also exerts negative pressure on politics, which should be about getting things done for all Americans. Instead, the fight becomes the most important thing, the only thing, with participants judged primarily on their ability to “own the libs” or “have all the right enemies” instead of their capacity to do anything useful.
As always, Trump didn’t create such attitudes within the Republican Party, but he has been masterful at identifying, exploiting, and encouraging them. He was rewarded with the presidency for doing so, and still retains the loyalty — and votes — of tens of millions of Americans. Which means that trouble still lurks. As long as a significant portion of society elevates an irrational fighting spirit as the highest quality in our leaders, fighting is mostly what we’ll get.
Upon being declared the victor in NC-11 last month, know-little Republican Madison Cawthorn, 25, fired off his first tweet as congressman-elect: “Cry more, lib.”
James Kimmel, Jr., a psychiatry lecturer and violence researcher at the Yale University School of Medicine, wrote at Politico last week that Trump’s uncontrollable urge to lash out at perceived enemies fits a pattern consistent with a kind of addiction. Specifically, revenge addiction.
In pursuing the role of grievance and retaliation in violent crime, Kimmel writes that brain imaging studies show that “harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.”
Kimmel continues:
This isn’t a metaphor; it’s brain biology. Scientists have found that in substance addiction, environmental cues such as being in a place where drugs are taken or meeting another person who takes drugs cause sharp surges of dopamine in crucial reward and habit regions of the brain, specifically, the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum. This triggers cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through intoxication. Recent studies show that similarly, cues such as experiencing or being reminded of a perceived wrong or injustice — a grievance — activate these same reward and habit regions of the brain, triggering cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through retaliation. To be clear, the retaliation doesn’t need to be physically violent—an unkind word, or tweet, can also be very gratifying.
Pleasurable even. (See: Donald Trump.)
The research remains unsettled, but suggests people may become addicted to revenge the way others become addicted to drugs or gambling. In some cases, carrying grievances others let go can result in violence.
Kimmel explains that this form of addiction can also be contagious:
Like substance addiction, revenge addiction appears to spread from person to person. For instance, inner-city gun violence spreads in neighborhoods like a social contagion, with one person’s grievances infecting others with a desire to seek vengeance. Because of his unique position and use of the media and social networks, Trump is able to spread his grievances to thousands or millions of others through Twitter, TV and rallies. His demand for retribution becomes their demand, causing his supporters to crave retaliation—and, in a vicious cycle, this in turn causes Trump’s targets and their supporters to feel aggrieved and want to retaliate, too.
The outgoing president’s daily grievance tweets have held the nation’s attention for over five years. That, as always, is Trump’s primary goal, attention being as necessary for him as oxygen. But addicting a large portion of the electorate to grievance is both the political project and the business model of conservative media. Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, Mark, Levin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Fox News, etc., have spoon-fed listeners their daily dose of outrage for decades. Day after day and all day they tune in to get their “hits.”
The result can be destroyed families, “relationship problems and conflicts, display periods of euphoria followed by depression and restlessness,” and so forth. So long as the ad revenue keeps streaming in, the dealers will keep feeding the addicts.
“There are no quick fixes with addiction,” Kimmel writes. “More people need to become savvy about how, why and for whose benefit they are being made to feel aggrieved and must decide to stop dealing in the drug of their own destruction.”
But it feels so good to get even. That is why fighting has become an end in itself on the right and another reason why the republic is in such disrepair. Getting anything useful done is no longer the point.
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