The big question for me going forward is to what degree the craziness of the hard right in this country will retain the level of legitimacy it now enjoys? A related question is what has to happen for its grip on so many Americans to loosen? The answer to the second question is foundational for any answer for the first.
Why is the hard-right fantasy that America is being taken over by evil Liberals so attractive? I just spent a weekend with a family member who believes that the Democratic Party is a subsidiary of an international Jewish oligarchy that seeks to establish a new world order that will exterminate religion and freedom. He believes Putin is a good guy who is just trying to restore Christian traditions after atheistic communism, that the anti-Putin Democrats in the U.S. are bent on starting a new Cold War.
He believes that this oligarchy controls the mainstream media and so everybody getting his information from the New York Times, CNN, etc. is being brainwashed. He believes that the election was stolen because this kind of control is so powerful that it reaches into the voting machines in all the states. It's a seamless explanation impenetrable by any information that doesn't fit. Clearly this narrative makes sense of the world for him in a way that other narratives don't.
This family member is not crazy or stupid. He's a kind, thoughtful man who, who, however, spends a lot of time on the internet, and mostly talks with others who reinforce this world view. I hope my conversation with him planted some seeds of doubt that might germinate later, but while he respects me, he believes I'm being duped. He sees me as I see him. So this is the state of things. Two world views both of which see the other as being brainwashed and with no neutrally respected arbiter to mediate.
If this were twenty years ago, I'd just shrug my shoulders and think of him as a lovable eccentric. But twenty years ago this was fringe thinking--it was in the same category as thinking that the moon landing was faked by filming it on a movie set.
Most people don't spend the time or make the effort to think things through. They just go along to get along, and so that's what frightens me about this level of delusion. More and more people are going along with this than with what has been a flawed but relatively sane mainstream or conventional narrative. The legitimacy of the conventional narrative is breaking down progressively year after years, and I don't see how to stop it. There seem to be no more conventional narratives to organize our imagination of what's real within American society, so anything goes, and this creates a situation where worst who are full of passionate intensity are carrying the day against the best who are hamstrung by their convictionless embrace of complexity.
Because anything goes without a mainstream narrative, a field opens up for the craziest and most aggressive subcultures in this potage of world views to push their way into power. This is exactly what we see going on in the right right now. They just keep telling their big lies over and over again, and more and more Americans have no resistance to it. If so many people believe it, more Americans come to reason, there must be some truth to it. What do I know? If everybody in my church believes it, well, they're good people. It must be true. it must be true.
In most fights, those who lack conviction are going to get steamrollered by those whose convictions are passionately held, no matter how delusional. So how does this end well for the forces of sanity in America? It's clear that it can only end well if a more robust narrative emerges that is grounded in reality and which provides a satisfactory alternative for people otherwise drawn to the delusional narrative. People are not going to give up what gives their lives meaning for a narrative of complexity that doesn't fit well with their presuppositions and that they find difficult to understand.
People are starved for meaning, and they will take it wherever they can find it. I think this is hard for Liberals to understand because many of them are quite comfortable living in a world where there need be no overarching, collective meaning narrative. It would be great if that were possible for everybody, but it's become clear that for a huge swath of the American populace it is not. This is a real problem, and it's not going away. So the challenge is to develop a meaning narrative that is both healthily realistic and that works with many of the traditional suppositions of the the people who cannot live without the overarching narrative.
The churches used to do this insofar as there were many levels of entry from the kind of simple peasant piety one found in the countryside to the kind of intellectual sophistication you found coming from great souls and minds from the early church fathers through Aquinas and Bonaventure to Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King. So the problem comes down to Liberals who are comfortable in a complex, pluralistic world where there is no one overarching meaning narrative facing down Conservatives who feel a kind of desperate need for an overarching meaning narrative.
And while I realize it seems crazy unrealistic, it seems that some kind of socially integrating big story has to develop if the centrifugal forces working within American society don't lead to his utter disintegration. We need a coherent metanarrative in which both sophisticated cultural elites and simple ordinary folk feel that they belong in the same world and where there is mutual respect for the one by the other.
All I know is that being religious is baked in to the human condition, and we have a choice going forward to either be overwhelmed by really bad religion or to develop a healthy alternative out of the historical cultural resources available to us. What that would look like I have no idea, but I think that something that developed a system of what Charles Taylor calls hierarchical complementarity as found in Buddhist and in Catholic or Orthodox Christian societies would provide a framework for people participating a different levels of seriousness but within a larger cosmic imaginary and a compelling theological mythopoeisis of history that is not in contradiction to what science tells us.
I have written here for years that the I suspect that the way forward into the postmodern--i.e., whatever comes after the modern--will be a synthesis of modern critical left-brained techno thinking with a retrieval of aspects of premodern religiosity that has a more right-brained receptive approach to the mystery of being than currently acceptable, an approach, in other words that can be comfortable with sacraments and shamans as well as computers and biotechnology, that integrates the pre-Axial with the post Axial, Heidegger with Silicon Valley in a dynamically evolving coincidentia oppositorum. This is what I believe needs to happen, but how it happens I have no idea. But I feel fairly certain that unless it does, unless there is some kind of transcultural awakening or renaissance along these lines, the machines will win by default.