Us vs. Them on steroids
What drove our disloyal opposition to reject democracy for autocracy and authoritarian strongmen?
Amanda Marcotte interviews Jared Yates Sexton whose new book, “The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis,” plumbs the depths of the Grand Old Personality disorder crowd. Growing up as he did in “a really problematic, radicalized environment” makes QAnon and other eschatological beliefs quite familar.
“When you take a look at these ideas and these conspiracy theories, one of the things you start to realize is if you believe these things, if these actually build the world around you or the way that you interact with politics or even your neighbors or your day-to-day life, you’re living in literal terror,” Sexton tells Salon. “And when you feel that way, when you believe that you’re in the middle of a supernatural battle, you literally will do anything in order to protect yourself and the people around you.”
It’s Us vs. Them on steroids.
Apocalyptic thinking made up some of the fuel that caught fire on January 6, says Sexton, and cast the 2020 election as a life-or-death struggle:
The right says there is a conspiracy against them — an incredibly powerful, well-resourced sadistic conspiracy. Unless they do everything in their power, it is going to mean the difference between living and dying. Or, if you want to take it down the supernatural route, they worry about actually losing their spiritual power or spiritual vitality. It creates a story that these people can use to carry out previously unthinkable actions, including assaulting people, breaking into public buildings. There’s a willingness to carry out full-fledged violence or anti-democratic actions. And when you take a look at it from that standpoint, you start to understand that these stories and these mindsets are precursors to something larger, as opposed to being the end result of something.
Conspiratorial thinking goes back to the founding of the republic, Sexton believes:
From the very beginning of conservatism, it was based on the idea of natural hierarchies, that there is a natural elite that rises to the top of society, and as a result, they should be the ones who run the world in political affairs. This is a leftover from monarchical thinking. Edmund Burke and others looked at these revolutions, they saw an unnatural leveling. They believed democratic energies were very destructive. So conservatives ascribed these movements to the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the Jews, supposedly overthrowing society as it should be.
Nowadays, never-Trumpers blame all of this conspiracy thinking on Donald Trump, right? That everything was fine before Donald Trump came along. In truth, the origins of that movement are hierarchical thinking that is bolstered and founded or founded in conspiratorial worldviews. They’ve always couched hierarchical thinking in an ideology that there is a conspiracy that has to be protected against. Conservative thinking always relies on those stories.
I’d suggest they are not just authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers as social psychologist Bob Altemeyer outlines. That description is too clinical. For all the right’s breast-beating about freedom, they are in fact royalists and scraping subjects. They remain committed to a system of government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry.
And like the Trump University suckers, they think by showing sufficient fealty and entrepreneurship, their “betters” will treat them as equals, maybe let them marry into royalty, hit the lottery. They will follow their sovereign, Donald Trump, anywhere so long as he’s perceived a “winner.” And dump him for another as soon as the gilt rubs off and reveals the dross underneath.
Sexton is ultimately optimistic. “The illusion of the meritocracy, the illusion of American exceptionalism, I think those things are falling apart,” he tells Marcotte:
Their solutions are making people work for cents on the dollar, relegating women to second-class birthing machines. But I think the window is open for a positive, generational change. And I think that’s where we’re going to go. I don’t think it’s going to be easy, but I do think that that is the direction we’re heading in.
I’m less certain. Remember these guys?