Just
When Did America Go Nuts?
By
“For there
shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and
wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very
elect.” —Matthew
24:24
“At first we thought they
were just another snake cult, but now their towers are everywhere.” —Conan the
Barbarian 1982
At the dawn of my congressional career,
after some of us staffers endured a particularly egregious dose of idiocy, one
of my colleagues was moved to compare our office to Saint Elizabeth’s, then
still functioning as a mental hospital in DC (and now, fittingly, as headquarters
of the Department of Homeland Security). “Not quite,” I responded.
“Here the lunatics are in charge.”
That exchange, alas, has become a
prophecy for the nation at large. It begins, as we are made aware by each daily
tweet-storm, at the very top, but this insanity could not persist without broad
and intense public support.
It has become commonplace to characterize such supporters as haters, but while it would be dangerous to underestimate the role of sheer malice, Trumpism could only sustain itself with tens of millions of people who might not fit the profile of a hater, but are assuredly either borderline imbeciles or not-quite-certifiably insane.
Examples there are in profusion; but rather than ringing the changes on every single winner of the Darwin Awards, let us examine three cases that have wider policy implications.
It has become commonplace to characterize such supporters as haters, but while it would be dangerous to underestimate the role of sheer malice, Trumpism could only sustain itself with tens of millions of people who might not fit the profile of a hater, but are assuredly either borderline imbeciles or not-quite-certifiably insane.
Examples there are in profusion; but rather than ringing the changes on every single winner of the Darwin Awards, let us examine three cases that have wider policy implications.
Item. Measles, an infectious disease
that each year once killed several hundred people and caused about a thousand
cases of encephalitis in America, was
declared eradicated in the United States in 2000. But thanks to a
kind of misbegotten Hitler-Stalin alliance between right-wing religious nuts
and New Age-Hollywood Hills types, the disease has come roaring back.
What other topic
could unite such a disparate gaggle of characters as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,trading on
his father’s martyr credibility to whisk us back to pre-Enlightenment times,
and Texas Republican State Rep. Jonathan Stickland, (apparently such an extreme
Neanderthal that even Texas’ own hardline Freedom Caucus was
too liberal for him) who has called vaccinations “sorcery?”
Mimicking the measles that their evangelism
spreads, American anti-vaxxers are also some of the most industrious Internet
pests known to science, even if their trolling is
supplemented by bots from a certain foreign country.
Item. One of the “noble lies”
undergirding modern society is the myth of the rational actor. So-called
enlightened self-interest suffuses economics (although corporations know
better, which explains their lavish expenditures on advertising); as well as game
theory, which supposedly prevents nuclear war from breaking out; and politics.
Political
scientists (and some psychologists) are fond of
proving that people “vote their interests” by the simple, circular expedient of
defining a subject’s true interests as whatever they opt for. It is time for a
sweeping reevaluation of this canard.
In 2016, American farmers voted by a margin of between 3 and 4 to 1 in
favor of Donald Trump over the Democrat.
This happened in spite of the fact that he told them in clear and unmistakable terms that he would, if elected, ignite a trade war with their most lucrative export market. Further, he would cut off their supply of the low cost, often undocumented labor needed for fruit and vegetable picking as well as beef, pork, and poultry processing.
This happened in spite of the fact that he told them in clear and unmistakable terms that he would, if elected, ignite a trade war with their most lucrative export market. Further, he would cut off their supply of the low cost, often undocumented labor needed for fruit and vegetable picking as well as beef, pork, and poultry processing.
As a result, farm income is down, even though
the income calculation includes the Market Facilitation Program, money extorted
from the rest of us to reward Trump’s political base. Farm bankruptcies have soared.
There is alleged evidence (not quantified by polling) that “farmers are losing their patience” amid mealy-mouthed equivocating from farm belt, GOP-elected officials over Trump’s latest tariff threats.
There is alleged evidence (not quantified by polling) that “farmers are losing their patience” amid mealy-mouthed equivocating from farm belt, GOP-elected officials over Trump’s latest tariff threats.
For now, though, it appears that farmers are sticking with
Trump. If his electoral margin among them should even fall to 2½ to
1 in 2020, Democrats will think of it as a miraculous breakthrough. The bulk of
farmers would likely prefer to go down in whatever fate decides will be
America’s functional equivalent of the rubble of Berlin.
Item. For decades, American religious
fundamentalists have ceaselessly worked to poison whole departments of
knowledge – from geology to history to herpetology – with ignorance
and disinformation. All of this in the service of a project to turn the country
into a living tableau of The Handmaid’s Tale.
But a funny thing happened on the way to
the Apocalypse. They seem to have dropped Jesus altogether as the ostensible
object of their adoration and instead became a cult of the Antichrist.
Every single sin they claimed to revile—adultery, fornication, false witness, the Mephistophelean sin of overweening pride—is now embodied in their new god incarnate, Donald Trump.
Every single sin they claimed to revile—adultery, fornication, false witness, the Mephistophelean sin of overweening pride—is now embodied in their new god incarnate, Donald Trump.
Like Lucifer, he led them to the
mountaintop and offered them the world if they would but bow down to him. And
they obediently dropped like ninepins.
Ecclesiastical dervishes like Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, and Robert Jeffressseem to be working
out the theology to replace Jesus in the holy trinity with Donald Trump. And
the faithful lap it all up like bulimics at
an all-you-can-eat buffet.
* * *
How in the world did we get here?
Journalist Kurt Andersen, writing in his abundantly detailed Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire,
believes craziness was baked into the American cake from the moment the
Mayflower hove to at Plymouth Rock.
Whether the holy man was Cotton Mather, P.T. Barnum, or Deepak Chopra, Americans have been primed to believe with the faith of a five-year-old in Santa Claus.
That said, he posits that there were cycles of remission, when rationality was apparently on top, and then outbreaks of fever, when the passion burned with naked flame. The latter applies to an age like this.
Whether the holy man was Cotton Mather, P.T. Barnum, or Deepak Chopra, Americans have been primed to believe with the faith of a five-year-old in Santa Claus.
That said, he posits that there were cycles of remission, when rationality was apparently on top, and then outbreaks of fever, when the passion burned with naked flame. The latter applies to an age like this.
My own pet theory is that American
craziness, while always abundant, was relatively contained until 9/11, which
opened a Pandora’s Box of hysterical fear, one of the basic ingredients of
irrationality.
It was quickly followed by the invasion of Iraq, which unloosed an avalanche of vaunting that we were endowed with special powers to remake the world. Note an essential component of stupidity: we retaliated for 9/11 by invading a country which had nothing to do with it.
It was quickly followed by the invasion of Iraq, which unloosed an avalanche of vaunting that we were endowed with special powers to remake the world. Note an essential component of stupidity: we retaliated for 9/11 by invading a country which had nothing to do with it.
On the heels of the mournful realization
that remaking the Middle East wasn’t all it was cracked up to be came the
financial crash of 2008, a folly of such greed and wishful thinking that it
pushed a sizable portion of the public, already emotionally labile from the
previous two shocks, right over the edge.
Everything that followed, like the birther mania, was a signal flare that the Republican Party and its assorted hangers-on had devolved from merely being a pack of cynical crooks to full-dress nihilistic cultists.
Everything that followed, like the birther mania, was a signal flare that the Republican Party and its assorted hangers-on had devolved from merely being a pack of cynical crooks to full-dress nihilistic cultists.
All of this was supercharged by the
Internet, right-wing talk radio, and Fox News – media nonexistent during
previous bouts of mania. They acted as an electronic petri dish to purify and
amplify the craziness.
We are now seeing the infection of
lunacy on full display, like the alien monster in John Carpenter’s The Thing
bursting out of its human hosts. Where exactly it will all end is anyone’s
guess, but the odds are not good that it will end well.
Mike Lofgren is
a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate
budget committees. His books include: "The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the
Rise of a Shadow Government" and "The
Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the
Middle Class Got Shafted."