HUMAN NATURE (2)
For the last two weeks I have been dealing daily with the realization that I live in a country where a man who seems entirely self centered, not caring about anyone else, who has repeatedly lied and broken the law and violated and harmed other people through his actions could have been elected by the one third of the voters who voted for him because they approved of all of these actions. Another third of the voters thought he was a menace to democracy and unfit to be president. And apparently one third of the eligible voters didn’t care enough even to vote.
My response has been at times to disregard what has happened and to say that democracy has prevailed and then to go on with my life as if nothing has happened. But at other times I have felt completely despondent because I’ve had the feeling that the United States is falling apart and that everything I had thought America represented has been undermined. My American identity was threatened, I certainly didn’t belong here, and I was devastated.
But flipping back and forth between disregard and dismay didn’t seem to be a solution. One reason that it didn’t seem to be a solution was because I also sensed that the people who voted for Donald Trump had felt the same way when Biden was elected four years ago, a feeling that their traditional American cultural values had been so betrayed that it was unthinkable that Donald Trump had lost fairly, the election must have been rigged.
I sense that traditional American cultural values that I had believed in when young and still harbored as prejudices when older were so important to one third of the country, the MAGA crowd, that they felt they were saving the country by voting for Donald Trump. They really believed in white supremacy, male domination, Christian fundamentalism, gender rigidity, distrust of immigrants, freedom from big government and American exceptionalism. They were good church going people trying to save these cultural values that were under threat by liberals.
But this plunged me further into despondency. Because it meant to me that human nature, the deep drives embedded in human DNA by the random process of evolution, the life force within us that made it possible for the human species to survive, the same life force making it possible for all species to survive until some huge threat wiped out the species or forced it to veer in a new direction, was what was driving MAGA politics. Defending cultural identity is basic to human nature and that is what MAGA people are doing.
Trump is not at fault, MAGA backlash at their values being threatened is not at fault, if there is any reason for MAGA behavior it is human nature. We are caught in our own human nature and our polarization is a result of this.
This thought that the values that are driving the backlash are embedded in human nature and that people were behaving normally and naturally really depressed me. The way MAGA people are responding is built into our human nature. We are naturally paranoid, we naturally distrust and feel superior to people whose skin color is different or whose values are different, men are naturally dominant and women submissive, it is normal to think that your own culture is exceptional, it is normal feel your religion is fundamental and others wrong.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 