Saturday, September 2, 2023

Today's musing minute: mindless passion and partisan hatred


It seems to be getting harder to get away from the bad news that suggests an accelerating decline in the fabric of American civilization. Could be that I cannot see the wood for the trees. A better, more zoomed-out perspective may reveal a significant growing awareness of the bankruptcy of current political and social trends, and portend a swing back of the pendulum, similar to the 1960's. I certainly hope so.

But, meantime, I read in the WSJ opinion pages today four or five pieces on the growing power of labor unions, especially the (constitutionally dubious) government employee unions, and how they have destroyed the fiscal integrity of our states, any semblance of accountability of our public deeply-failing schools, and similar depressing accounts. I read of stubborn multi-billion climate agenda policies in the face of massive failures, subsidies piling on subsidies, diverting resources and destroying jobs for no-good reason, absolutely no connection to any climate mitigation effect.

And, wherever, I turn among friends and acquaintances, I encounter angst reflecting polarization in the political discourse. This polarization is characterized very little by reasoned disagreement, and very much by unreasoned emotional commitment. Explosive anger is easily triggered by any attempt I make to try to enter into an exchange of views based on reason and evidence. (Let me admit that I too am probably somewhat vulnerable to emotional commitment, though I try hard to transcend it.) The dominance of emotion over reason takes the form of affiliation and loyalty to identified groups and personalities, rather than to principles and policies. The former drowns out any examination of the latter. The very term "independent" in connection to political point of view attests to the dominance of a broad two-party system regardless of their programs.

Some examples:

My friends and acquaintances who cleave to the legend of Trump. They see him as representing the refreshing wrecking-ball that will wipe away the decadence of social degeneration, fiscal irresponsibility and foreign policy weakness and disgrace, characteristic of the Democratically sponsored Biden agenda. The disenchantment rises to the level of agitated hatred and conviction that only Trump in spite of any argument to the contrary can save us from this damnation. Without any examination of the merits they cling to the conviction that all of the charges against Trump are baseless, that the 2020 election was stolen, and that the storming of the Capital on January 6 was not that significant (after all, the Democrats completely whitewashed the terrible riots that occurred across the nation in the recent past – both sides do this. Apparently the one thing wipes out the significance of the other.) They deny or minimize any role that Trump played in the effort to prevent the certification of the election. They turn a blind eye or support the vilification of, and even possible palpable threat to, Mike Pence, for doing his constitutional duty. (In fact, both sides now boldly condemn those aspects of the constitution they don’t like, that they see as obstacles to their preferred outcomes.). In short, they completely dismiss the threat that Trump poses to liberal democracy by subverting the political process. It is a threat that I was made aware of prior to the 2020 election, and, I confess, I discounted it in favor of hoping Trump would be a much-preferred alternative to, what I saw as, a runaway radically subversive Obama-controlled Joe Biden. I underestimated both problems. Both likely candidates now strike me as horrible.

My friends and acquaintances who cleave to the Democratic party “liberal” legend. It’s a mirror image. The unreasoned passion of hatred for Trump drowns out any discussion. It is all-pervasive. It produces egregious double standards – a dismissal of the significance of ongoing deep malfeasance by the federal government justice agencies in obstructing the investigations into Hunter Biden and likely involvement of his father, and the ongoing cover up of same, involving many high-ups in the Biden administration and beyond; schadenfreude about the health struggles of Mitch McConnel, while papering over and minimizing the significance of the cognitive breakdown of the chief executive officer, who also happens to be the commander in chief and the face of America to the nations; complete indifference to unprecedentedly radical social and economic policies that reasoned reflection would reveal as alarmingly corrosive to the long term wellbeing of all Americans, most especially those at the bottom of the income distribution; the list goes on. Like their partisan opponents, their thinking is pathetically superficial, juvenile, ignorant, economically illiterate.

On both sides, it is a matter of (sometimes unconscious) emotional commitments seriously distorting the capacity for rational thinking. This is not unusual in humans. Is it worse now? And what does it portend?  

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