Why is There a Fat Convicted Felon Shaped Hole in America's Soul?

The First Step to Defeating MAGA Once and For All is Introspection

If you are anything like me, the question you keep asking yourself these days is “How is it possible that the most repulsive and dangerous public figure in U.S. history has the apparent support of tens of millions of Americans?”

I mean, even scores of his own former top aides, his own cabinet, feel he is so odious and such a menace that they have renounced him and begun to campaign against him .

We read and hear many thoughtful analyses as to how this all came to pass. I wrote one here the other day that argued that Trump was just a vehicle, being used by the rich, powerful godfathers of his party to continue work they have done for decades to consolidate their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. He represented one way to plug into the zeitgeist. When he outlives his usefulness, they will move other to other means (confident that they have already claimed lasting power for themselves via other institutions, notably the Supreme Court, and laws that had been passed or decreed to empower them for years to come if not in perpetuity).

Other analyses rightly focus on Trump himself. Why is he the chosen avatar for his party? Why is he Mr. Zeitgeist for our era? I mean, for example, Liz Cheney is super conservative and smart and principled and would advocate a rich-get-richer agenda. Sure she is sentimental about democracy and the rule of law, but is that really it? Is fascism really so central to the agenda of the GOP aristocracy?

Or if they wanted a shallow more malleable figure than Cheney they could have gone with, I don’t know, Mike Pence or Nikki Haley or Tim Scott. But the GOP establishment did initially line up against Trump and he thrashed them. So, as much as the big powers in the party are content with Trump so long as he advances their agenda, maybe we really ought to look to the voters with whom he struck a chord. Was it because he was so charismatic? Was it because they believe he was really the wheeler dealer cartoon character from the Apprentice? Was it because he was famous? His hair? What?

Some his success with the voters surely must be attributed to him. He figured out what a big chunk of the public wanted and he gave it to them. Glitter. Cheese. Country music. But again, we need to go beyond what did party big shots or Trump or his campaign team do to win their votes and ask why did people buy what they were selling?

What Was Missing from Americans’ Lives or Character?

Why were they so angry? Why were they so turned off by politicians and government? Why were they so gullible? Why were they so full of hate?

The answer has to be that there was and still is a fat-convicted felon-shaped hole in America’s soul. Their support for Trump is as much about what was absent from their lives or their characters as it was their beliefs or political ideology. And because there are over seventy million of them (and their families) we have to acknowledge that Trump and MAGA are a sign of a deep flaw in our national character, something missing within us.

Some of the void can be attributed to ignorance. Some of it can be attributed to valuelessness. Some of it can be attributed to a lack of understanding of how the country works…pedestrian as it sounds, of civics. That in turn relates to a lack of sense of responsibility.  Some of it is related to nihilism, the sense that we’re all doomed and so fuck it and fuck you and fuck the world.

Some of this can be attributed to a failure in our schools, churches and families (which we should have known when the Projection Party started to complain that Democrats and Hollywood were destroying our schools, churches and families). Some has to do with having brains so plugged in to a constant stream of shit from TVs and the Internet that frankly they can feel hyper-stimulated without having an actual life or grappling with big questions. (People constantly ask me, “Why do I do my best thinking in the shower?” And of course I respond that it’s because the average American is plugged into a device of some sort having stimuli pumped into their passive numb cortexes for more than 16 hours a day. That is essentially 100 percent of the time that they are awake. It is hard to be creative or reflective or even a good simulation of conscious with when your brain is at the end of a firehose pushing out a high pressure stream of bits and bites. And then you get in the shower and you are actually alone in your own head and all of sudden you have thoughts and you go, shit, what the heck is that? It feels kind of good. Maybe it feels a little scary. And most folks then get out of the shower and turn the TV back on.)

But the point is that something has broken down in America, something is missing that we need to fill in or we will decline further. There have always been vapid people and dumb people and also evil people. But when you have too many of these and you are a democracy you reach a tipping point. Worse, as the Timothy Snyders and Ruth Ben Ghiats of this world will tell you, it is when a population is numb and dumb that it starts hankering for a Daddy to take care of things for them, to do their thinking, to tell them what to do.

Welcome to perfect conditions for the onset of fascism.

If we want to fix it we need to admit there is a problem first. That is hard for us as Americans. We love to pretend we’re special…you know that whole American exceptionalism thing which is, sorry, but it is, a total crock of shit. We, like many nations, create myths of our national greatness. But look more closely (Ron DeSantis hates that you will, but go ahead) and you will see a nation founded on genocide and slavery and the empowerment of a white male elite. Does we deserve credit for ending the genocide, the slavery and the super empowerment of white males? Um…some. We’re not quite there yet. We also love to talk about how we are the most innovative nation in the world…even though the vast majority of major technological innovations of the past 150 years or so have origins elsewhere. (Pick your favorite. Look it up. Look past the fake American iconography. You’ll see it is true.) We love to say we have made the world safe for democracy. But did you know the first directive of the NSC after it was established by the National Security Act of 1947 was to covertly intervene to throw the Italian elections in a direction we like. But you know our record is mixed on that at home and abroad.

Accept Hard Truths, Do the Hard Work

Why am I making this point? Because we need to look beyond easy analyses that say, hey, it’s all Trump, get rid of him and problem solved. We need to even get beyond analyses that look only at the strategies and actions of the puppeteers of the GOP (at home and abroad) that have backed and benefited from the Trump phenomenon. And we need to recognize that our society is hurting.

How do you fix it? A good place to start is education (which is why the MAGA crowd is so committed to getting rid of the Department of Education, dedicated to burning books, hot to skewer “elite” institutions of higher learning that are full of smart people who don’t buy their BS and to limiting the teaching of bits of history they don’t like.) Some of it are the examples and values our leader in politics and culture offer up. Perhaps we ought to actually invest in culture and the arts like other countries do, because they not only reveal but they help shape and create national character by promoting reflection and inspiring though and action. Some of it is only things we can do in our families.

It is not work that will produce results overnight. But fortunately, there are still more Americans who believe in our system and its ideals than there are nihilists, oligarchs, lackeys and fascists who want to tear it down. That is why I think that in the end, Biden will win in November and MAGA will go down in history as a deeply cynical and destructive symptom of a national crisis of character of the kind many nations go through from time to time.

But once that happens there is a job of work to do to start filling in that hole until it no longer resembles that fat felon. We must assess what damage has been done and how over the past fifty or sixty years and we must embrace the idea that as a nation we owe it to each other to start setting higher standards for our society again, that we start aspiring and celebrating the work needed to achieve our goals, that we return to the optimism that infuses nations that believe in themselves and their systems and their future and we reject the burn-it-to-the-ground lashing out of those who have lost their way and given up real hope of a better tomorrow.