As Hannah Arendt once observed, fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust shrinks, and they only trust their own kind. Donald Trump is the great emblem of an age of distrust—a man unable to love, unable to trust. When many Americans see Trump’s distrust, they see a man who looks at the world as they do. By February 2020, America was a land mired in distrust. Then the plague arrived.
Fanaticism is the response of people who refuse to live inside-out and look to the mob to reinforce their shaken sense of self.
Brooks' Essay entitled "America Is Having a Moral Convulsion" is worth reading in its entirety. He's describing a condition I call "ontological dizziness". The existentialists called it "shipwreck"; Christians like me see ontological dizziness as an opportunity like that St. John of the Cross called the Dark Night of the Spirit.
The Dark Night is not a bad thing, but a phase in spiritual development that is necessary for growth in maturity. It happens when the foundations that support identity and one's sense of self dissolve. In the past, this happened mostly to spiritually gifted individuals and they either made it through the darkness, or they didn't. (Nietzsche, imo, was a spiritual prodigy who didn't make it.) But the point is that it's something that'a necessary for spiritual development--the external props have to be taken away so that you can discover that your life is something that must be lived inside out, not outside in.
The only true cure for ontological dizziness is to realize that the ontological ground on which you can set your feet is not found out there in society or up there in heaven or in some ideology or cult, but in one's own interior depths. Nietzsche said that God was dead, but he was looking in the wrong place. He was right that God was no longer to be found in the cultural forms, but that doesn't mean he died. He just moved underground.
In the past, this Dark Night and its possibilities for discovery were experienced by individuals, but we're experiencing it now as an entire society. Trump represents the worst possible response to this collective crisis/opportunity of the spirit, but it's inevitable that he should be there to present the country with this destructive possibility.
The question I have is whether there are enough people who are responding to this collective spiritual crisis in such a way as to realize its constructive possibilities. In other words, are there sufficient numbers of anonymous people who are now navigating the darkness in a way that will enable them when they get through it to imagine a different kind of a positive human future? I doubt I'll live long enough to get an answer.
For years I've been writing here that I agree with the conservative diagnosis about what ails us as a society, and that a large part of it is that Liberalism and its Enlightenment rationalist assumptions were always inadequate and have finally run their course. But the problem with religious cultural conservatives is that they spend too much time lamenting what was lost rather than looking forward in hope to something new. Conservatives cling to things that have to be let go because they lack the faith and the hope to do it. Their response to the dizziness is to grab whatever is near at hand to stabilize them, and, alas, the mob and its resentments are very seductive in that regard.