A: Because they want to.
Q: But why do they want to?
A: Many reasons, but in politics It gives them a feeling of communion and solidarity with others who believe the same nonsense. Both Liberals and Conservatives do it.
Q: But why believe nonsense when they could believe something that's not?
A: Who is not talking nonsense? All the people who agree with you? If you're a Liberal, how do you know that you're your opinions are not as nonsensical as the MAGA folks?
Q: Well, I am a Liberal, and it's clear that my opinions are based in facts and theirs are not. My views are magnanimous and compassionate, and theirs are small and cruel.
A: Are you magnanimous and compassionate toward all the people who are voting for Trump today? And besides, how do you know your facts are really facts? And even if they are facts, how do you know that you're interpreting them correctly? Maybe you're blind to other facts that if you knew them, would make you see the facts you are aware of differently. Have you never negatively judged someone's obviously bad behavior to learn later that there were good reasons for it? Context is everything, and we can never know the entire context.
Q: So are you saying that Trump voters and Harris voters are equally deluded?
A: It depends.
Q: Depends on what?
A: It depends on the degree to which one's vote is shaped by tribal thinking or by a shrewder assessment regarding what's happening. It depends on how much practical wisdom or phronesis you've developed.
Q: Well, how can anybody be justified in voting for someone as clearly unfit as Trump? The only reason I can think of is that they see their own stupidity, vulgarity, and ignorance reflected in him.
A? Is that your magnanimity and compassion speaking?
Look, have you considered that perhaps that MAGA voters are not voting for Trump so much as they are voting against the Techno-Capitalist Matrix--the suffocating, soulless, nihilistic system that I've been talking so much about in these posts? Isn't it possible that in some quasi-conscious, instinctive sense they see Trump as an explosive device that they are throwing at an evil system as a desperate attempt to bring it crashing down? Is that so irrational? Is that so beyond your sympathies?
Q: Wait. Are you justifying things like J6?
No. I'm trying to understand it, and to suggest that there might be something in MAGA that is struggling to be more in touch with reality despite what it looks like.
Q: Are you saying MAGA is in touch with reality?
A: No. Mostly it's not, but I am saying that it knows that there is something deeply wrong about the system, even if they would not call it the TCM as I do. They identify it with the Liberal establishment with the Washington consensus that brought us Iraq, subprime mortgages, the financial crash of 2008, the bailouts of the banks and of none of the culprits going to jail. Occupy Wall Street and MAGA are born of the same instinct. MAGA has a champion, and OWS doesn't. Their champion is flawed, but they give thme a flag to rally around. So are they so irrational? Isn't it possible to understand why they see themselves as restorers of sanity in a world they believe has lost its collective mind. Are they so wrong that the world they live in is insane?
Q: Are you saying that you hope Trump wins?
A: No. Of course not. I'm no bomb thrower. The suffering that would follow his election would be too unconscionable ever to hope or it or to vote for. He is the chaos archetype incarnated and as such is the dying spirit of the Neoliberal Order which must now be replaced by another order.
Q: New order? Isn't that a bit grandiose?
A: I mean it in the sense that Gary Gerstle lays out in his The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. If you want a good summary listen to his interview last week with Ezra Klein.
Q: Well give me the crux.
A: He tells the story of how the New Deal Order crashed and burned in the 1970s and was replaced by the Neoliberal Order in the 80s and 90s, and is in the process of crashing and burning in the 2010s, the Tea Party and MAGA being its primary incendiary devices. And so now the question is What comes next?
Q: What does he think comes next?
A: He's not in the prediction business. But clearly the Biden administration adopted policies that are clearly a rejection of the Neoliberal Order, and the Republicans didn't seem to object too much because they don't seem to be interested in policy anymore. But there are people on the religious Right--like the people behind Project 2025--who clearly see this moment as an opportunity to assert themselves to impose their order.
Q: Do you think that Project 2025 could work to define the New Order?
A: No. Project 2025 is one possible imagination of a New Order, but it's an incoherent hodgepodge of free market ideas and quasi-theocratic, Neo-Victorian moralistic thinking that--even if Trump wins--nobody serious can take seriously. If he does win, the Project 2025 folks will be just one in-fighting faction among many in the Trump orbit, most of them cranks and crooks, all jockeying for position, and it's unlikely theocracy is going to be popular with that crowd. But who knows? Bottom line: I expect nothing but chaos if Trump wins. The bomb throwers will have gotten their way, and we'll have to wait for the dust to settle and and then determine what possibilities there are for rebuilding.
Q: Well let's assume Trump will lose. If Gerstle is right that we're at the birth of a new order, what better alternatives are there?
A: I don't see anything concrete, but I hope that MAGA has given the culture's intelligentsia, at least those who have retained some sense of the Tao of things, enough of a scare that they start to think about an American future in terms other than the materialistic and utilitarian. I have no blueprint. I see it rather as a shift in orientation, gradual at first, but a shift that in time establishes a new healthier, saner consensus reality. It remains to be seen whether Harris/Walz get this or are insensible to it. If they win, that gives us a chance. Will we seize it, or will just start telling ourselves that the danger has passed; the institutions held; we're safe again? No worries. The grownups have retained control. But are they in control, or is the TCM? Will Harris Walz be looking for a real cure, or will they just be content to give us political opioids to dull the pain?
Q: If Trump loses, what happens to MAGA?
A: MAGA is a symptom of a collective illness that results from the deep imbalances of a TCM-dominated American society. We see it most obviously in the things that can be measured, like how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, in the suicide rates, in the mass shootings, in Qanon cargo cults, in the fentanyl crisis, and in all the confusion and suffering around issues of sex and gender. MAGA is a crude, irrational, violent attempt to redress the balance. It offers no real solutions, but it will not go away, and it will continue to be disruptive until its underlying causes are identified and remedied.
And so I've been arguing that the deep cause of this illness is a metaphysical imbalance, and so the cure must be finding our way toward rebalance.
Q: Metaphysical balance or imbalance? Who talks like that and expects to be taken seriously?
A: I know. I know. But I will stick to my guns. Such language makes no sense in the world whose presuppositions are shaped by the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, and that's the heart of the problem. No solutions for the underlying illness can be found within this system. It is the illness. The TCM has crowded out every other possibility, and in doing so it has become a totalizing system that seeks to flatten everything that is truly living and soulful and to replace it with some mechanical simulacra of life. Insofar as we have become inured to our captivity within the TCM, we become insensible to any language that does not make sense in the terms it defines.
Q: Aren't you being hyperbolic?
A: Well, let me ask you this. If somebody in 2016 predicted all the things that would happen during the Trump presidency and after, wouldn't that person have been dismissed as hyperbolic? We were shocked in 2016, but none of us thought that he would be as bad as he actually turned out to be. That's my model now for thinking about the future: We are living in a time when things are changing so fast and in ways that are so beyond what one would ordinarily expect that we can not assimilate them in real time and so the most outrageous and unthinkable things become normalized. There is no normal anymore, so any unthinkable thing becomes acceptable as soon as someone makes even the flimsiest case for it. We have lost any sense of having a foundation that provides a standard that defines what is healthy, true, good, and normal. In such a society, things unimaginable to us now will happen precisely because there are no longer any constraints on anything, and they will be accepted because, you know, it's the next new thing. It's what the kids are into. And we'll find clever ways to justify it. So the fact is that we've lost our collective mind, and we must recover it, and with it find the collective will to find a cure for all the ways that the TCM ails us if the human project is to survive. If that sounds hyperbolic, so be it.