Fantastic article with a great summary.
On the surface it’s amusing that you place the motives and thinking of Trump supporters on par with other wonders of the modern age like quantum mechanics and whether God exists. But looking deeper, we have to wonder what Trump supporters are telling us about human nature, cults, willful ignorance, and the kind of tremendous fear needed in order to accept lies where facts are so easy to find.
Sadly, the major media are all about ratings and not about providing useful and in-depth information. One might even think that their sole objective is to stir things up and keep the fire of animosity and unrest going. So the media is of no help, and Trump, like Hitler before him, has poisoned the well by labeling everything that is not his own lie a lie. It’s Hitlerism 101. We are all too fortunate that Trump is too lazy and aimless to walk in Hitler’s shoes. Still, the threat of damage is ever-looming as long as he runs for office.
I am not a political scientist, economist, or philosopher, but I am not so sure that Libertarians actually qualify to be social-Darwinians in a literal sense, because they are lack the qualification of being the fittest. Libertarianism has been defined as the political position that advocates a radical redistribution of power from the coercive state to voluntary associations of free individuals. But it seems that to be at the top of the Darwinian food chain, so to speak, suggests that there would be no need to monkey around with the distribution of power. The pernicious white supremacist movement suggests that all those people marching around with KKK and Nazi insignias already believe they are superior, so why the need to cause an upheaval and overthrow of the government? Or do they really believe their own rhetoric and ideology?
It seems that the real problem is a kind of group neurosis and sunken self-esteem among Trump supporters large and small, especially the most radical. An argument can be made that those proclaiming to be superior really don’t believe their own proclamations.
The support for Trump seems easy to understand. Simple minds are simple to read. A deep-seated lack of self worth leads to either self-harm or harm to others. Unable and/or unwilling to figure out their personal problems, people flock to anyone with a promise and persona that are represented in a father figure. The lies, pathology, racism, disrespect, immortality, ignorance, bullyism (new word) and all the rest, are dismissed in favor of the messianic promise. Anyone who has truly studied what happened to the “undesirables” in Hitler’s Nazi conquest understands how this works. And any semblance of morality, ethics, and compassion are easily pushed aside in a feat and fit of schizophrenia. “I was just doing my job” was a widespread excuse for torture, murder, and dehumanization of millions.
We don’t need better media, we need a super-psychologist who knows how to change millions of minds and cure the trauma that has led to the mass hypnosis of Trump supporters.
