BraverAngels.org just initiated a Rise for America campaign launched at Gettysburg College. Those of us who were delegates have pledged to do all we can to restore civic discourse and stop the polarization which leads to violence. Also, be prepared when Trump is indicted again to join a rally or an event in your area. see https://ourfreedomourvote.com.
Dr Lee, appreciate your work on Dangerous case of Donald Trump. But one thing i find somewhat missing.
Why people (& specially Republican voters) are attracted to conspiracy theories? The theories on vaccines, QAnon, Wokeism, Jew cabals etc . What pathology makes people vulnerable to gravitate towards these bizarre theories? The Republican candidates have mastered "art of the deal" to lure people into these conspiracy theories. Dems planning to alter sexuality of American children (theory peddled by DeSantis), Pedophiles Satanic cult running the world (QAnon), vaccines making American children autistic (peddled by RFK Jr) etc.
Looking forward to your next book on Trumpism. Please give insight on how & why these conspiracy theories get stronghold in American society.
My hunch is that it is an attempt to strengthen one’s “tribal affiliation” without the burden of owning and claiming a reasoned thought process and considered choice of what team to play on, so to speak. The conspiracy is just that, others conspiring in secret ... this fear and outrage leads the divide of “us vs them”
Thanks. Yes, i have read this article & its insightful. Still, i have not fully understood why a modern developed scientific nation like America is full of such destructive irrational backward social phenomenon. Various kinds of conspiracy theories have deeply penetrated into American society (why?) & this has been happening since last several decades. But after Trump, the conspiracy theories have become mainstream.
I also do my own research. Some of the things i have articulated in this article.
The answer to why is in your blog post. We are in a time of crisis. The authoritarian disposition (see https://www.karenstenner.com/), which about 30-40% of any human population has, across cultures and across centuried, comes to the fore under certain conditions. As I see it, the conditions bringing it to the fore in our time are marked by the rapid cultural change we've undergone as a society. Dr. Lee writes about this as the cause of the decline in societal mental health.
We are the same people we were before the internet. But our worst tendencies then required investment and effort to express - - - so friction in the system slowed things down. Technology has since changed that. Now each of us theoretically has access to millions of others, through multiple channels, at little or no cost. He who gets the most "likes" today wins, and getting 'likes" rewards the sensational and manipulative. The general tone of our national conversation is correspondingly darker now, more destructive, and becomes more so as time goes on. Trump's hold on his millions of followers depends on the constant access to our alarming national conversation.
Do we need a summer of love moment (1960s). Would an influx of kindness help influence trumpet hate philosophy or are they beyond repair? I have to admit, that my soft progressive interior gets angry at trumpet mentality. I have even come to the point of disowning my trumpet relatives. And they can't understand my decision.
Julian, here is how I understand them (I don't know any personally): They are becoming a minority (white, Christian, not college-educated). They don't like the cultural changes in our country., especially those that violate their Biblical understanding of sexual morality. Things are changing fast and they don't like it. They fear being a minority. And Trump and all of right-wing media exploits their fear for their own purposes.
1. Take a look at David French's recent column, "Building a Legal Wall Around Donald Trump". (It's NYTimes so it's paywalled unfortunately.) The main idea is the legal efforts have contained some of the MAGA violence. "The 2022 election was relatively routine and uneventful (because) the right’s most lawless members have been prosecuted, sued and sanctioned." But, if he wins in '24, in spite of his indictments, "(the American people will empower him to end his own federal criminal prosecutions and render state prosecutions a practical impossibility. They will empower him to pardon his allies. The American voters will break through the legal firewall that preserves our democracy from insurrection and rebellion."
His conclusion: "We can’t ask for too much from any legal system. A code of laws is ultimately no substitute for moral norms. Our constitutional republic cannot last indefinitely in the face of misinformation, conspiracy and violence. It can remove the worst actors from positions of power and influence. But it cannot ultimately save us from ourselves. American legal institutions have responded to a historical crisis, but all its victories could still be temporary. Our nation can choose the law, or it can choose Trump. It cannot choose both."
So he must be defeated in '24.
In Jan, '21, Juliette Kayyem, a national leader in homeland security and crisis management, wrote "How MAGA Extremism Ends: If Trump keeps losing, the risk of future violence will abate" (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/stop-domestic-terrorism-shut-down-its-leader/617640/ 🔐). Based on her experience with terrorist groups, she knows that if the leader is taken down, the group begins to fracture. In her most recent essay, "The Threat From Trump’s Supporters Has Evolved: Their words are hot, but coordination is lacking"(https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/trump-arraignment-florida-january-6-political-violence-differences/674378/) she said, "(The MAGA) threat has not disappeared, it has evolved. Highly organized violence like the January 6 riot now appears less likely. The urgent question is what dangerous individuals might do on their own and whether authorities are prepared to stop them."
2. How to restore the moral norms? I'm looking to Dr. Lee for that plan.
Dr. Lee’s expertise and experience in dealing with violence of all kinds deserves our greatest respect. Those of us who have followed her continue to learn from her, and we are all invested in the success of her efforts.
However, it is not correct to say that the contemporary “situation” in the US “is leading to social discord and tensions as never before experienced in our own country,” even during the Civil War; and that this is a new situation created by modern technologies for social communication, which have “set” new “conditions for the spread of pathology.”
The conditions under which the Civil War occurred were not different from our contemporary conditions because “uniformed armies” faced each other then. This explanation reverses the actual causal relationship. The reason uniformed armies faced each other from 1861 to 1865 was that the US was then divided geographically and politically into a South with an agrarian economy based almost entirely on slave labor, and an industrialized North (by 1871 the US had the largest economy of any nation in the world.) Today the US is a highly heterogeneous nation economically, politically, and ethnically. Blue and red states are distributed across the country, and every state with a large population has both blue and red counties. Modern transportation would in many ways affect the form of a new “civil war” far more than modern communications. The form a new “civil war” in the US might take is unknowable.
For example, Russia and Ukraine have a long history as neighboring nations with populations highly integrated linguistically, ethnically, and by individual family bloodlines. Therefore the war in which they are now engaged is in a sense a civil war, in which they have uniformed armies facing each other; the reason for these uniformed armies is that Russia and Ukraine are distinct sovereign nations. But in addition to this, after the US helped stage an illegal coup in 2014, replacing the legally-elected president of Ukraine with an American-sponsored president, the political boundaries and political allegiances broke down in eastern Ukraine, and a hybrid civil war broke out in which Ukrainian government forces have killed 14,000 fellow Ukrainians. (This was the real start of the war between Russia and Ukraine.) This warfare is one form of the hybrid warfare that has taken place throughout the contemporary world, involving war between uniformed armies, guerrilla warfare, urban warfare, asymmetrical warfare, terrorist activity, and other forms of violence. It is impossible to say in 2023 what kind of hybrid “civil war” might be taking place in the US in 2030.
The ground from which American violence springs is not changing technologies or changing forms of warfare. The US is a martial nation dedicated to the violent domination of human beings, and has been from its earliest formation. As soon as the settler-colonialists arrived in the New World from Europe, they started massacring and enslaving Native Americans, and didn’t stop until they had reduced them to impotence. When the Civil War occurred, a third or a century before the official closing of the American “frontier,” “the only good Indian was a dead Indian”; on the same day Custer’s Last Stand was fought, the Chicago Cubs played the St. Louis Cardinals in a baseball game. The Northern economy was financially integrated with the slave economy and greatly benefitted from it, while the great majority of Northerners were indifferent to the brutal treatment of slaves in the South. The military-industrial complex has long taken up half the discretionary federal budget, in order to defend us against imaginary enemies while slaughtering foreigners by the millions and transferring that wealth from the vast majority of the population to a tiny elite. Democrats are entirely at one with Republicans in insisting on shoveling more billions of dollars into the Pentagon budget every year than the Pentagon knows what to do with. In our faux, peace-loving democracy, it is impossible to vote against the military budget or the military-industrial complex.
The tribes who occupy the far western end of the Eurasian landmass have spent the last half-millenium subjugating, massacring, enslaving, and looting the other nations of the earth. The US is the current—and final—heir of these tribes. The epoch of the Western imperialist domination of the globe is coming to an end. In its desperation to prolong this dying age a few more years, the US elite has mounted a military, political, and economic assault on the great nations of the East. The US claims that this assault is “defensive,” but the only thing it is defending is the West’s imperial domination of the globe. At the same time, the US domestic population, as Dr. Lee observes, is experiencing “increasing polarization, discord, alienation, and an escalation of anger and discontent.” The fundamental reason Americans are experiencing these things is not modern communication technologies; it is that the modern technologies of transportation, communication, and business administration, together with reactionary political and legal arrangements, have enabled the US elite to reduce the vast majority of Americans to the condition of internal colonial subjects.
The US remains lost in self-admiration as a nation dedicated to the values of the Enlightenment and the Abrahamic religions. In reality, from its earliest origins the US has followed not Athens or Jerusalem, but Rome. Athens represents the arts of the intellect and of the nine muses. Jerusalem represents the arts of love and forgiveness. Rome represents the arts of war and domination. As Americans we are the heirs of twenty generations and more “that have never tired of the sword.” Violence is intrinsic to the psyches of Americans, right, center, and left. Since violence has been an integral part of our civilization from the very beginning, our psychic diseases of violence and chronic war psychosis can ultimately be addressed only on a civilizational level—through the arts of the intellect and the nine muses, and the arts of love and forgiveness.
Dr. Lee is an eminent, tireless, and extremely courageous practitioner of one of the arts of the intellect, and, bless her, her writing continues to help us to clarify our endlessly complex contemporary situation.
BraverAngels.org just initiated a Rise for America campaign launched at Gettysburg College. Those of us who were delegates have pledged to do all we can to restore civic discourse and stop the polarization which leads to violence. Also, be prepared when Trump is indicted again to join a rally or an event in your area. see https://ourfreedomourvote.com.
thank you for providing concrete action items.
Thx for the link. I've known about Braver Angels, but I signed up for more info.
hi, neither of these links are working on my cell phone.
Dr Lee, appreciate your work on Dangerous case of Donald Trump. But one thing i find somewhat missing.
Why people (& specially Republican voters) are attracted to conspiracy theories? The theories on vaccines, QAnon, Wokeism, Jew cabals etc . What pathology makes people vulnerable to gravitate towards these bizarre theories? The Republican candidates have mastered "art of the deal" to lure people into these conspiracy theories. Dems planning to alter sexuality of American children (theory peddled by DeSantis), Pedophiles Satanic cult running the world (QAnon), vaccines making American children autistic (peddled by RFK Jr) etc.
Looking forward to your next book on Trumpism. Please give insight on how & why these conspiracy theories get stronghold in American society.
My hunch is that it is an attempt to strengthen one’s “tribal affiliation” without the burden of owning and claiming a reasoned thought process and considered choice of what team to play on, so to speak. The conspiracy is just that, others conspiring in secret ... this fear and outrage leads the divide of “us vs them”
Have you read Dr. Lee's essay, "The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists"? (See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-donald-trump-and-his-loyalists/.)
I think it answers your question. I found it profoundly insightful into the psychology on both sides of his personality cult.
Thanks. Yes, i have read this article & its insightful. Still, i have not fully understood why a modern developed scientific nation like America is full of such destructive irrational backward social phenomenon. Various kinds of conspiracy theories have deeply penetrated into American society (why?) & this has been happening since last several decades. But after Trump, the conspiracy theories have become mainstream.
I also do my own research. Some of the things i have articulated in this article.
https://takeindiaforward.blogspot.com/2023/04/religion-mass-psychosis-and-fascism.html
The answer to why is in your blog post. We are in a time of crisis. The authoritarian disposition (see https://www.karenstenner.com/), which about 30-40% of any human population has, across cultures and across centuried, comes to the fore under certain conditions. As I see it, the conditions bringing it to the fore in our time are marked by the rapid cultural change we've undergone as a society. Dr. Lee writes about this as the cause of the decline in societal mental health.
We are the same people we were before the internet. But our worst tendencies then required investment and effort to express - - - so friction in the system slowed things down. Technology has since changed that. Now each of us theoretically has access to millions of others, through multiple channels, at little or no cost. He who gets the most "likes" today wins, and getting 'likes" rewards the sensational and manipulative. The general tone of our national conversation is correspondingly darker now, more destructive, and becomes more so as time goes on. Trump's hold on his millions of followers depends on the constant access to our alarming national conversation.
Well put.
Do we need a summer of love moment (1960s). Would an influx of kindness help influence trumpet hate philosophy or are they beyond repair? I have to admit, that my soft progressive interior gets angry at trumpet mentality. I have even come to the point of disowning my trumpet relatives. And they can't understand my decision.
Julian, here is how I understand them (I don't know any personally): They are becoming a minority (white, Christian, not college-educated). They don't like the cultural changes in our country., especially those that violate their Biblical understanding of sexual morality. Things are changing fast and they don't like it. They fear being a minority. And Trump and all of right-wing media exploits their fear for their own purposes.
And they hate anyone not white and not a fake Christian as they themselves aren't exactly jesus-like.
Is Justice all the prevention we need?
2 thoughts:
1. Take a look at David French's recent column, "Building a Legal Wall Around Donald Trump". (It's NYTimes so it's paywalled unfortunately.) The main idea is the legal efforts have contained some of the MAGA violence. "The 2022 election was relatively routine and uneventful (because) the right’s most lawless members have been prosecuted, sued and sanctioned." But, if he wins in '24, in spite of his indictments, "(the American people will empower him to end his own federal criminal prosecutions and render state prosecutions a practical impossibility. They will empower him to pardon his allies. The American voters will break through the legal firewall that preserves our democracy from insurrection and rebellion."
His conclusion: "We can’t ask for too much from any legal system. A code of laws is ultimately no substitute for moral norms. Our constitutional republic cannot last indefinitely in the face of misinformation, conspiracy and violence. It can remove the worst actors from positions of power and influence. But it cannot ultimately save us from ourselves. American legal institutions have responded to a historical crisis, but all its victories could still be temporary. Our nation can choose the law, or it can choose Trump. It cannot choose both."
So he must be defeated in '24.
In Jan, '21, Juliette Kayyem, a national leader in homeland security and crisis management, wrote "How MAGA Extremism Ends: If Trump keeps losing, the risk of future violence will abate" (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/stop-domestic-terrorism-shut-down-its-leader/617640/ 🔐). Based on her experience with terrorist groups, she knows that if the leader is taken down, the group begins to fracture. In her most recent essay, "The Threat From Trump’s Supporters Has Evolved: Their words are hot, but coordination is lacking"(https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/trump-arraignment-florida-january-6-political-violence-differences/674378/) she said, "(The MAGA) threat has not disappeared, it has evolved. Highly organized violence like the January 6 riot now appears less likely. The urgent question is what dangerous individuals might do on their own and whether authorities are prepared to stop them."
2. How to restore the moral norms? I'm looking to Dr. Lee for that plan.
Dr Lee, how do we go about removing this unfit candidate?
Barring something unexpected, like an act of God, he will win the R primary. So we must defeat him in '24. If you live in a swing state (WI, PA, GA, AZ or NV), get involved with your state Dem party and sign up to canvass, phone bank or anything you can do to support Biden's win. If you don't, donate! See https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ads-gs-dd-search-apr2023?refcode=om2023_ads_gs_230630_exmdonate_dd_us_all_donate&gclid=Cj0KCQjwn_OlBhDhARIsAG2y6zM7pR0Hk5i1WmijCKCl3-imz01hKR0uz1SWW3rU4nrWCoTcnvT0NacaAnSiEALw_wcB. And make it monthly!
Dr. Lee’s expertise and experience in dealing with violence of all kinds deserves our greatest respect. Those of us who have followed her continue to learn from her, and we are all invested in the success of her efforts.
However, it is not correct to say that the contemporary “situation” in the US “is leading to social discord and tensions as never before experienced in our own country,” even during the Civil War; and that this is a new situation created by modern technologies for social communication, which have “set” new “conditions for the spread of pathology.”
The conditions under which the Civil War occurred were not different from our contemporary conditions because “uniformed armies” faced each other then. This explanation reverses the actual causal relationship. The reason uniformed armies faced each other from 1861 to 1865 was that the US was then divided geographically and politically into a South with an agrarian economy based almost entirely on slave labor, and an industrialized North (by 1871 the US had the largest economy of any nation in the world.) Today the US is a highly heterogeneous nation economically, politically, and ethnically. Blue and red states are distributed across the country, and every state with a large population has both blue and red counties. Modern transportation would in many ways affect the form of a new “civil war” far more than modern communications. The form a new “civil war” in the US might take is unknowable.
For example, Russia and Ukraine have a long history as neighboring nations with populations highly integrated linguistically, ethnically, and by individual family bloodlines. Therefore the war in which they are now engaged is in a sense a civil war, in which they have uniformed armies facing each other; the reason for these uniformed armies is that Russia and Ukraine are distinct sovereign nations. But in addition to this, after the US helped stage an illegal coup in 2014, replacing the legally-elected president of Ukraine with an American-sponsored president, the political boundaries and political allegiances broke down in eastern Ukraine, and a hybrid civil war broke out in which Ukrainian government forces have killed 14,000 fellow Ukrainians. (This was the real start of the war between Russia and Ukraine.) This warfare is one form of the hybrid warfare that has taken place throughout the contemporary world, involving war between uniformed armies, guerrilla warfare, urban warfare, asymmetrical warfare, terrorist activity, and other forms of violence. It is impossible to say in 2023 what kind of hybrid “civil war” might be taking place in the US in 2030.
The ground from which American violence springs is not changing technologies or changing forms of warfare. The US is a martial nation dedicated to the violent domination of human beings, and has been from its earliest formation. As soon as the settler-colonialists arrived in the New World from Europe, they started massacring and enslaving Native Americans, and didn’t stop until they had reduced them to impotence. When the Civil War occurred, a third or a century before the official closing of the American “frontier,” “the only good Indian was a dead Indian”; on the same day Custer’s Last Stand was fought, the Chicago Cubs played the St. Louis Cardinals in a baseball game. The Northern economy was financially integrated with the slave economy and greatly benefitted from it, while the great majority of Northerners were indifferent to the brutal treatment of slaves in the South. The military-industrial complex has long taken up half the discretionary federal budget, in order to defend us against imaginary enemies while slaughtering foreigners by the millions and transferring that wealth from the vast majority of the population to a tiny elite. Democrats are entirely at one with Republicans in insisting on shoveling more billions of dollars into the Pentagon budget every year than the Pentagon knows what to do with. In our faux, peace-loving democracy, it is impossible to vote against the military budget or the military-industrial complex.
The tribes who occupy the far western end of the Eurasian landmass have spent the last half-millenium subjugating, massacring, enslaving, and looting the other nations of the earth. The US is the current—and final—heir of these tribes. The epoch of the Western imperialist domination of the globe is coming to an end. In its desperation to prolong this dying age a few more years, the US elite has mounted a military, political, and economic assault on the great nations of the East. The US claims that this assault is “defensive,” but the only thing it is defending is the West’s imperial domination of the globe. At the same time, the US domestic population, as Dr. Lee observes, is experiencing “increasing polarization, discord, alienation, and an escalation of anger and discontent.” The fundamental reason Americans are experiencing these things is not modern communication technologies; it is that the modern technologies of transportation, communication, and business administration, together with reactionary political and legal arrangements, have enabled the US elite to reduce the vast majority of Americans to the condition of internal colonial subjects.
The US remains lost in self-admiration as a nation dedicated to the values of the Enlightenment and the Abrahamic religions. In reality, from its earliest origins the US has followed not Athens or Jerusalem, but Rome. Athens represents the arts of the intellect and of the nine muses. Jerusalem represents the arts of love and forgiveness. Rome represents the arts of war and domination. As Americans we are the heirs of twenty generations and more “that have never tired of the sword.” Violence is intrinsic to the psyches of Americans, right, center, and left. Since violence has been an integral part of our civilization from the very beginning, our psychic diseases of violence and chronic war psychosis can ultimately be addressed only on a civilizational level—through the arts of the intellect and the nine muses, and the arts of love and forgiveness.
Dr. Lee is an eminent, tireless, and extremely courageous practitioner of one of the arts of the intellect, and, bless her, her writing continues to help us to clarify our endlessly complex contemporary situation.