Online friends wondering how to bridge the gap in a divided America: You can’t, and you shouldn’t even try.
Why you can’t: First, we all know that cynical GOP politicians willing to watch the world burn in order to keep positions of power have placed themselves beyond human aid. That’s over.
Forget them. Let’s talk about rank-and-file Trump supporters and defenders, the knuckleheads you went to high school with who seemed more-or-less okay at the time. They too have placed themselves beyond human aid, or at least yours. They are in an arrested state of development, an adolescent denial of adult authority that we have seen before. The refusal to listen to educated, accomplished experts, the hostility toward intellectual endeavor, the “you can’t make me” behavior – throwing temper tantrums and responding with physical violence when asked to wear masks even when doing so would help protect them and their loved ones – these are all hallmarks of adolescent behavior, all encouraged and abetted by their adolescent gang leader, Donald J. Trump. You can’t bridge the gap to unreasoning behavior, just as you can’t argue someone out of a position they didn’t reach by way of reason.
Erik Erikson, expanding on a theme he first set forth in a 1942 essay, wrote extensively on the metaphor of Hitler as gang leader who “…appealed to estranged German adolescents to defy their parents and respectable society, and to believe ‘that the adolescent is always right, that aggression is good, that conscience is an affliction, adjustment a crime.’ This ‘adolescent Imagery’ bonding the Führer to German youth eventually won acceptance by the ‘whole nation.’ Suspending their moral judgments, German citizens accepted Hitler’s appeals to delinquency as a form of morality.” [Friedman, Lawrence Jacob. (2000). Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]
It’s a good fit. It partially explains the juvenile rejection of established media – reporting based on fact-finding investigation – in favor of the ludicrous inaccuracies in right-wing media sources: the adolescent rejection of anything that does not fit their world view, but now writ large on a national stage. They are just shooting the breeze with their adolescent pals in a teenage echo chamber where their half-baked nonsense is as good as a dissertation backed by a decade of research, and if you challenge that nonsense, if you ask for the sources, you’ll get exactly that response: It’s my opinion, and you should respect it. “My opinion is as good as your fact” is the bottom line, when you dig down deep enough.
And you can’t argue them out of their positions not only because their positions are unreasoned but because they don’t care about the facts. They don’t care if their arguments are factually accurate. They repeat the lies even when, and apparently ESPECIALLY when, their sources are proved to disseminate falsehoods. They love it. Red meat for the base. Trolling the libs. This is the explanation for the popularity among the base for a president who has been proven to lie more than thirty thousand times, the popularity of media outlets that broadcast lie after lie after lie, proven lies. This has little to do with simple confirmation bias. This is not the unshakeable conviction of the zealot or the deep-seated fear of the bigot. It’s a joyful disregard for and rejection of anything that the adults in the room like. Including the truth, including the facts, including masks that might save lives.
You can’t bridge that gap. And you shouldn’t.
Back to Erikson’s metaphor: The aggrieved German people, smarting under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, find analogue among America’s frightened working-class Whites, for the first time seeing White privilege in actual danger. The 400-year-old contract may finally be broken. The reaction is predictable, with predictably adolescent binary thinking: If I’m not on top anymore, then someone else is going to be on top. There’s going to be reverse discrimination, etc., etc., etc., nasty women telling us what to do, etc. White evangelicals cling to Trump because this faithless, feckless, philandering imbecile is the champion of their true Holy Trinity: racism, authoritarianism, and misogyny. They’re a very special demographic, but it’s pretty clear for the wider base: Trump-supporting Whites are afraid because they simply cannot imagine an America NOT based on oppression.
You shouldn’t try to reassure them. Let the fever burn itself out.
Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), a 1979 film based on books 1 and 2 of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel, details the experiences of Oskar, a boy who chooses to stop growing up. His story reflects the stunted life of the Danzig during the Third Reich. Oskar begins maturing again at the grave of his father (perhaps – his parentage is uncertain), an abusive Nazi who died at the hands of the Soviet occupation.
It’s worth rewatching. It’s worth rethinking how a state’s power structures rotted such that adolescent mob-think could fill the vacuum (punchline being that Grass himself turned out to be Hitler Youth!). It’s worth consideration of what had to happen to that savage, infantilized society in order to put its governance back into the hands of the adults.
I know one thing: Pandering to the adolescent behavior will not solve anything. Bridging the gap? I for one, am not interested. Let’s label the lies as we find them, call out the trolls and purveyors of adolescent fantasy, and see where it takes us.
And yes, vote, even when they try to stop you at the polls, because they will. And yes, march, and yes, protest, to prove that they are still in the minority. And yes, stand up to their guns, and yes, push to take the guns out of the hands of adolescent reactionaries — so-called militias and hired thugs.
Me, I don’t have a single second to trade in sophomoric banter with the developmentally arrested of America anymore.
I’m done trying to bridge that gap. One way or another, they will have to grow up.