Is it possible that one half of America’s political culture is eroding into madness and moral pathology? Incredibly, it seems more and more likely every day. It’s a terrible sight to behold. Is the virus of hate eating holes in their brains?
The screaming temper tantrums, delusions of grandeur, vile threats of retribution and displays of violence, hate-filled xenophobia, lunatic conspiracy theories, a comradery with dictators and autocrats, disgraceful racism and misogyny, it’s all turning us into an explosive and dysfunctional country, an ugly caricature of ourselves. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Trumpian takeover of the GOP appears to be doing its best to ignite another civil war.
What’s happening? This is a very bad time to be confused and drenched in the anxiety that dark puzzlement can cause. I’ve taken some solace lately in the thinking of Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist who authored “Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind.” It explains a lot about the madness of the moment and about the nature of our political culture in general.
Our politics has always been a deadly serious contest between two ways of thinking and seeing the world. If all goes well, our vitality, inventiveness, viability, and flourishing as a nation is generated by the competitive tensions between these two political mindsets and subcultures. Everything depends on both sides playing by the same rules and cooperating altruistically for the good of the country, a pattern of behavior we’ve come to call the rule of law, particularly when it applies to the orderly transfer of power after an election. That sacred rule has held true throughout our history until January 6, 2020 when the Trumpian GOP made a crackpot but tragically lethal attempt to overturn the election of Joe Biden.
The founders of our political system looked upon American political dualism with unabashed dread. James Madison, in the Federalist Papers, pronounced the “mischiefs of faction” as the enemies of democracy. President James Monroe in 1822 went so far as to call political parties, and the factionalism they foster, “the curse of the country.” It turns out they were prophetic.
Reading Mark Pagel’s insightful book “Wired for Culture” has led me to rethink our political subcultures and see them as inescapable if troubling expressions of our divided culture as a whole. Pagel describes cultures as, “packets of information” that serve as “vehicles of survival,” augmenting our other genetic attributes with everything from language, religion science, business, technology, customs, laws, and morals, or as one wag wrote with, “everything we have that the monkeys don’t.”
The dualism of American political culture is not unique among the some 7,000 extant cultures in the world today, nor among the cultures of our ancestors. The Byzantine civilization of the Eastern Roman empire, for instance, was riven by a duality and yet historian Peter Brown in his book, “Journeys of the Mind,” asserts that Byzantium was, “a vibrant society in which seemingly incompatible traditions (Christian and Classical) coexisted” until its fall some 800 years ago.
Cultures and their political factions, Pagel writes, work “by exercising a form of mind control over us.” They become part of our identities. We tend not to question them. We stick with them come hell or high water. What’s terrifying about this political moment in America is that one of our mind-controlling political subcultures has been infected by the viruses of hate and malicious misinformation. Not only does the Republican Partry refuse to operate altruistically with its opposition, it inculcates its members with a virulent animosity toward any group it considers to be its enemy. The competing but cooperative tensions that used to generate vitality and innovation in our country, now create the futile chaos of bedlam. As Ian Bremmer in Time wrote in 2021, “There is no advanced industrial democracy in the world more politically divided, or politically dysfunctional, than the United States today.”
When the virus of hate infected our political subcultures in the past, the country fell apart into the calamity of civil war, or McCarthyite witch hunts, or murderous union busting. Today we’re seeing a felonious presidential candidate who’s actually proposing to become a dictator, who expresses admiration for autocrats and tyrants, who promises to unleash brutal suppressions of dissent, and who vows to take revenge against those who have not only challenged the legality of his actions but have committed the sin of failing to worship him.
The virus of hate is driving half of our electorate stark raving nuts. Hatred works like syphilis. It moves its way through your system and finally gets into your brains and addles your common sense so thoroughly you even remain steadfastly loyal to an insidious and deranged leader like Big Brother Donald who could turn on anyone, even you, in an instant of unbridled rage.
Will Trumpism leave the Republican Party permanently loony? Can people who’ve been brainwashed by the propaganda of their political subculture somehow snap out it and regain their sanity and help their political party recover from its self-destructive views? It would take an enormous amount of courage and inspiration to try to cure oneself of the mind control of hate.
There are a lot of us in American who believe Kamala Harris could be the inspirational source of such courageous healing in many people who’ve been hoodwinked by the moral degeneracy of the current Republican party.
Harris is a steady, cool-headed leader whose life experiences have made her immune to considering hate as a viable tool of leadership. She knows directly the pain that hate inflects. She acts, instead, as a force for cooperation and the rebirth of “reciprocal altruism.” I think well more than half the country senses that the healing power of her integrity and open mindedness is the only thing right now that has a chance to bring sanity back to American politics over the next eight years.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
V.B., another good article. Thank you. I believe the level of intolerance is more generalized than you have observed. Few people are willing to listen to others regardless of their party affiliation. It is tragic, when we need the ability to communicate to solve the rapidly accelerating impacts of climate disruption, our species is actively cannibalizing each other. Best regards. Ray Powell
Thank you for having captured the character of our current polity in this piece. I believe that part of the problem is that people tend to identify with political parties, or at least the ones we have, in much the same way that people identify with religions. So when the Republican Party became what it is today, many Republicans stayed with it.