Trump “imprinted his moral pathologies … on the Republican Party”
The Doge of Mar-a-Lago is a walking catalog of personality disorders. Mentally unstable, emotionally stunted, needy, insecure, amoral. And worse.
The worse part, writes Peter Wehner in The Atlantic, is how Donald J. Trump has “imprinted his moral pathologies, his will-to-power ethic, on the Republican Party. It is the most important political development of this century.” (At least, in this country.)
Trump reeled in his party the way he suckered marks into paying hard-won cash for Trump University. Ever prone to the sunk-cost fallacy, conservatives once entrapped who perceived what they’d let happen could not extricate themselves. The party as a whole doubled down then tripled down in supplication to Trump and in fear of the angry MAGA faithful who attended his tent revivals.
Wehner recounts the obvious:
Republican officials showed fealty to Trump despite his ceaseless lying and dehumanizing rhetoric, his misogyny and appeals to racism, his bullying and conspiracy theories. No matter the offense, Republicans always found a way to look the other way, to rationalize their support for him, to shift their focus to their progressive enemies. As Trump got worse, so did they.
Even to the point of downplaying a violent insurrection that put their own leadership’s lives at risk. And now, to the point of dismissing Trump’s theft of state secrets that in theory could put all our lives at risk. If you’ve ever referenced mass insanity on Wikipedia and wondered what it would be like to live through one, now you know.
Karen Stenner, author of The Authoritarian Dynamic, concludes that about a third of people in liberal democracies she studied are, across the political spectrum, psychologically predisposed to authoritarianism.
Stenner defines authoritarianism, which she believes is about 50 percent heritable, as a deep-seated psychological predisposition to demand obedience and conformity—what she calls “oneness and sameness”—over freedom and diversity. Authoritarians have an aversion to complexity and diversity. They tend to be intolerant on matters of race, politics, and morals; to glorify the in-group and denigrate the out-group; and to “reward or punish others according to their conformity to this ‘normative order.’”
The danger, Stenner says, arises when that tendency, which is often latent, is activated by “normative threats,” a deep fear of change, and a loss of trust in our institutions. She also made this point to my colleague Helen Lewis: In normal, reassuring, and comforting conditions, people with authoritarian tendencies could be your best neighbor. But those predispositions “are activated under conditions of threat and produce greater intolerance to differences.”
Donald Trump has made his supporters feel “permanently panicked,” according to Stenner. He “never got past the constant-rage-and-fear stage.” And it doesn’t help that modern life’s complexity is overwhelming for many people.
Her recommendation to find ways to coax “activated authoritarians” off the ledge is laudable, Wehner believes, but unlikely to reform a party committed to xenophobia, conspiracy theories, and election-rigging as a winning electoral strategy. Mollycoddling MAGA won’t reform a might-makes-right movement whose foot soldiers believe themselves holy warriors.
Wehner agrees that Liz Cheney’s approach is the correct one for the times. We must speak honestly, boldly, about the threat.
MAGA supporters have had countless opportunities to take the exit ramp, and they have always found reasons not to. At some point, when an enterprise is thoroughly corrupt, staying a part of it, helping it along, refusing to ever speak up, is not just a mistake in judgment; it is a failure of intellectual and moral integrity. This doesn’t mean that every area of a MAGA supporter’s life is devoid of rectitude, of course. But it does mean that one important area is. And that needs to be said.
President Biden did just that one week ago. How to know if his punches landed? By the howls.
The right-wing has bred a generation as addicted to grievance as to opioids. Why? It tickles the brain stem, sells advertising, enrichens purveyors, and motivates voters. Right-wing pundits and talk-show hosts know to personalize (rather than generalize) feelings of offense and loss:
Voter fraud frauds have for years scare-mongered Republican voters that should anyone anywhere cast even a single ballot improperly, it “steals your vote.” Your vote.
Trump’s cult was conditioned long before his arrival to see themselves as the only true, the only legitimate “owners” of this country — victims of democracy if it fails to deliver them power. They’ve viewed politics as a zero-sum game in which for Others to rise meant less freedom for them. Sharing is not part of their constitutional bargain. All those references to voting and the right to vote and decisions made by majorities? Well, that’s only for the privileged. And they get to say who is.
Long before Trump, America’s once-conservative party decided that if it loses, the Irresponsibles must have cheated. Conservatives have given themselves over to a Caesar whose instincts and moral pathologies are inimical to republican government. Now what?
Wehner concludes:
I am suggesting that much of MAGA world is authoritarian; that Liz Cheney is right to turn all her political energies to opposing it; and that containing and defeating MAGA—not hoping it will change, not placating its grievances—is now the No. 1 priority for friends of democracy. Maybe we’ll succeed, maybe we’ll fail, but the mission is unavoidable. And honorable.
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