And he is the rest of us
Donald J. Trump is a catalyst not a cause. Trumpism and its nihilistic “Deep State” wreckers have deeper roots than the shallow, game-show grifter whose name attached to our grievance-fueled anti-democracy movement.
There is more than polarization afoot, argues Brian Klaas, writing from Britain. Unlike the U.S., few in England buy into conspiracy theories. Here, polarization “plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral.”
The paranoid style was with us since before Richard J. Hofstadter’s 1964 essay. Jared Yates Sexton argues that conspiratorial thinking found fertile ground in the New World and was present at the nation’s founding.
Klaas compares the belief gap (The Atlantic):
According to YouGov polling, a third of Americans believe that a small group of people secretly runs the world, while just 18 percent believe the same in the United Kingdom. Similarly, 9 percent of Americans think COVID-19 is a fake disease. In Britain, that figure is just 3 percent. Seventeen percent of Americans agree with the statement that “a secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles has taken control of parts of the U.S. Government and mainstream U.S. media,” compared with 8 percent of Britons.
What makes our domestic crackpots more of a threat today is they are being elected to positions of leadership. (Lunatics and asylums, as it were.) The consequences aren’t just a threat to democracy but to Americans’ lives, not to mention their liberty and pursuit of happiness. Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis is on its way to becoming the first among The Fascist States of America. Cranks like former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn should be laughingstocks, and would be in Britain, Klaas argues. Instead, they headline right-wing conferences here.
Deranged grifters profit from what the writer Kurt Andersen has called the “fantasy-industrial complex,” in which media provocateurs, including Infowars and Fox News, have cashed in on political messaging defined by a conspiratorial mindset.
They prey on susceptible individuals, particularly those who are lonely and bored, browsing alone, and finding online communities to replace real-world ones. People with paranoid personalities are particularly vulnerable, as are those with a Manichaean worldview—a perception that the entire world is a battle between good and evil. At the ReAwaken America event, one speaker advanced the outlandish claim that the election was stolen by demons.
The fringe right and evangelicals share common paranoid proclivities. Raimundo Barreto and João B. Chaves trace connections between the apocalyptic Christian nationalism that drove Trump’s January 6 insurrection and similar fervor that fueled the Bolsonaro insurrection in Brazil two years later. It is no coincidence that after the Civil War, “thousands of American Confederate families migrated to Brazil, partially attracted by the endurance of slavery there.” They brought their conservative theology with them (Washington Post):
Brazilian evangelicals often look to their U.S. counterparts for inspiration, resources and even the legitimacy of their beliefs. A new generation of Brazilian evangelicals is networking with Christian nationalists in the United States and other parts of the world. The significant evangelical participation in the crimes against democracy committed in Brazil on Jan. 8 suggests the potential dangers of this transnational religious phenomenon.
Thomas B. Edsall examines the personality characteristics at work among Republicans reaching for leadership roles. Their election denialism and racial resentments go hand-in-glove, finds Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at M.I.T. (New York Times):
According to Stewart’s calculations, “a Republican at the 10th percentile of the conspiracism scale has a 55.7 percent probability of embracing election denialism, compared to a Republican at the 90th percentile, at 86.6 percent, over 30 points higher. A Republican at the 10th percentile on the racial resentment scale has a 59.4 percent probability of embracing denialism, compared to 83.2 percent for a Republican at the 90th percentile on the same scale.”
In other words, the two most powerful factors driving Republicans who continue to believe that Trump actually won the 2020 election are receptivity to conspiracy thinking and racial resentment.
“The most confirmed Republican denialists,” Stewart writes, “believe that large malevolent forces are at work in world events, racial minorities are given too much deference in society and America’s destiny is a Christian one.”
One study from political scientists Alessandro Nai and Jürgen Maier at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Koblenz-Landau finds that “subclinical ‘psychopathy’ is significant in the behavior of a growing number of elected officials.”
Nai and Maier also refer to a character trait they consider politically relevant, Machiavellianism, which they describe as having
an aggressive and malicious side. People high in Machiavellianism are “characterized by cynical and misanthropic beliefs, callousness, a striving for argentic goals (i.e., money, power, and status), and the use of calculating and cunning manipulation tactics,” and in general tend to display a malevolent behavior intended to “seek control over others.”
Through generating chaos if need be.
A 2021 paper, “Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn: the Prevalence, Psychology and Politics of the ‘Need for Chaos’” argues:
Some people may be motivated to seek out chaos because they want to rebuild society, while others enjoy destruction for its own sake. We demonstrate that chaos-seekers are not a unified political group but a divergent set of malcontents. Multiple pathways can lead individuals to “want to watch the world burn.”
More strategic and less religiously dogmatic actors such as Steve Bannon may envision rebuilding from the ashes. Evangelicals view the conflagration as a trigger for the return of their heavenly king. In the meantime, they’ll settle for an earthly one. And install one by force if they can manage it. They’ve been primed from Sunday school to desire a king. Democracy is for unbelievers.
In a recent paper, Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux found
“the need for chaos is most strongly associated with worries about losing one’s own position in the social hierarchy and — to a lesser, but still significant extent — the perception that one is personally being kept back from climbing the social status ladder,” noting that “that white men react more aggressively than any other group to perceived status challenges.”
You didn’t need a scholarly study to confirm that, but there you go.
Klaas concludes:
To solve a problem, you first must agree it exists. Democracy therefore requires a shared sense of reality. Instead, America has splintered into a choose-your-own-reality society, in which citizens self-select into whatever version of the world they want to inhabit, reflected back at them by media outlets that earn most when they challenge worldviews least. Conversely, in Britain, the BBC continues to dominate broadcast-media market share, and outlets that push conspiracy theories have tiny audiences. Moreover, left-wing and right-wing politicians both watch and agree to be interviewed by the BBC, whereas in the U.S., politicians gravitate toward friendly partisan media outlets.
Even if politicians can agree a problem exists, the Manichaean nature of conspiracy theories—and the extreme claims embedded in conspiratorial cults such as QAnon—makes compromise unlikely. Trying to find shared ground with a fellow American who disagrees with you on health care or taxes is one thing, but if you believe that Democrats are harvesting children to suck their blood, then working together on, say, democratic reform becomes much harder. Granted, elected Republicans on the whole don’t truly believe those more outlandish claims, but some of their core voters do, and that puts pressure on them to treat Democrats like evil enemies rather than legitimate political opponents.
Their champion in the new Congress is a former(?) QAnon believer who has blamed wildfires on Jewish space lasers.