I don't post much on politics, because I think many others are more eloquent on the subject. What is most notable about Trump's four years of hell is the way he has shat on the values of his followers. Christianity? The value of military service? Populism? He openly mocks all those things, or pays the most transparently hypocritical allegiance to them. For example, he favors billionaires economically, is personally irreligious and dissolute, and mocks as suckers people who have died or been captured in wars. The wall on the Mexico border is purely symbolic.
The mistake is to think that people who really have those values will wake up to this fact and reject him. We keep waiting until the right-leaning people rise up en masse and say enough is enough, but that is never going to happen.
It could be that those values are bogus in the first place. In other words, the followers themselves are just like Trump, with the same underlying contempt for those things. The values are a cynical performative facade and nothing more. That is why the waking up moment never occurs, or occurs only when some official falls out of favor with Trump, or some Republican senator retires and can speak freely.
Some might hold those values sincerely, and simply be too stupid, uninformed, or insane to realize the cognitive dissonance involved. What I've noticed is a lot of flat-earthism. If you see people who sincerely believe the earth is flat on youtube, you realize there is no argument to be made. It is more important to have a sense of solidarity with a group of like-minded people, than to use common sense and come up with a scientifically informed view. The people who believe the election was stolen are similar.
2 comments:
Living among the Trumper Christians I will say this:
1/ Many really are against abortion and reproductive choice for women. They are willing to accept all kinds of things to get these.
2/ A sizeable group only believes so they can get into Heaven not Hell. They don't believe in the other teachings, they just believe Jesus is real and they believe that is enough to get them into Heaven, where they won't suffer. They transfer this attitude to everything in life, cheating, lying, stealing, committing other crimes is OK so long as they get the benefit of it and they get impunity. Accepting Christ as your Personal Savior gets you safety in the afterlife the way being friends with a few judges and DAs gets you safety here.
The abortion issue, yes. That seems to be 90% of Christianity. Religious freedom is mostly cast as freedom to discriminate against gays. Gun rights is about being able to fantasize about not letting them take your guns away. I get what you say about knowing the DA being like knowing Jesus personally. That's brilliant.
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