Sunday, December 31, 2017

Why it’s not a good idea to keep a tiger as a pet

Tigers are among the most beautiful animals on earth. It's no wonder that some people are fascinated by them and feel a desire to keep them as pets. However, tigers are not domesticated animals. Small tiger cubs will soon grow up to weigh hundreds of pounds, and they can easily overpower and kill a person. Furthermore, because tigers are endangered, it is especially important to the overall tiger population and the ecosystem for more tigers to live in the wild.

Don't get a tiger

Tigers are stunning creatures, but their care and feeding is a delicate matter that requires heroic effort. They can kill their human keepers, they are difficult to capture once they've escaped, and because of this, a license is generally required to keep one. If you are inclined to keep a cat, an animal shelter will have a small one for you. (Millions of unwanted cats are euthanized in the United States each year.) If you are inclined to help tigers, a good start would be a donation to a wildlife charity or to an organization like the Shambala Preserve that takes large cats from people "who realize they have purchased an animal they can no longer handle".

For kids, check out the book Big Cats Are Not Pets! by Julie S. Marzolf.

But if you do have a tiger, and if you're married, I guess you should write a tiger custody agreement so you know who will take care of it in the event of a divorce.

Tigers can turn on their human keepers

Tigers occasionally maul their keepers. In 1998, in Florida, a tiger put Richard Chipperfield in critical condition. It was shot by Graham Chipperfield. The brothers were trainers for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.


In 2003, Antoine Yates was mauled by a 500-pound tiger that he secretly kept in his apartment in a Harlem housing project. His brother found him injured on the floor and brought him to the hospital. To capture the tiger, police had to rappel down the side of the apartment building with a tranquilizer gun. Yates served six months in jail for endangerment.

He fondly explained his relationship with the tiger, "Ming": "To be close to such a beautiful animal 24 hours a day is magical. I began to really understand a big cat. At that point I was ready to disconnect from the world."

Also in 2003, a leashed white tiger mauled Roy Horn during a performance in Las Vegas. Horn, who had performed with tigers for three decades, lost enough blood to put him in critical condition.


In December 2013, a circus tiger mauled its trainer, Danny Gottani, in front of spectators in Madrid, including Gottani's own mother. Gottani had nearly two decades of experience with tigers. His injuries were not life-threatening. A spectator captured cell phone footage of the mauling.

Tigers are difficult to contain

One might think that the risk could be minimized simply by keeping the animal in a cage. It's not quite that simple. It's one thing to put a tiger in a box, and another thing to keep the box sealed.

In 1893, the Walter L. Main Circus Train derailed in Pennsylvania as it traveled downhill, leading to the escape of many exotic animals. One tiger entered a barn where it killed a cow and scared away the milkmaid. The farmer, Alfred Thomas, shot it.

The obvious danger presented by captive tigers was alluring to one depressed man who climbed into a tiger enclosure in China in a suicide attempt in 2014. (The tiger dragged him but refused to eat him.)

In the wild, tigers rarely bother humans. However, once a tiger learns to stalk humans as prey, it becomes a menace. A Royal Bengal tiger killed 10 people in Northern India over just two months in early 2014 and remained on the loose. Villagers were intent on finding and shooting the rogue animal, but it is easier said than done.

Celebrities who are known to have tigers


Tigers are expensive, and celebrities sometimes purchase them as status symbols or curiosities. These arrangements are usually short-term, as keeping a tiger is a lot of work.


An article in USA Today in 2003 reported that Michael Jackson kept two tigers ("Thriller" and "Sabu") on his Neverland Ranch; Mike Tyson kept three tigers at home ("Kenya," "Storm" and "Boris"); and Paris Hilton kept a mostly untamed tiger ("London"). All of these tigers were subsequently sent to live elsewhere. Hilton, whose TV show is ironically called "The Simple Life," wisely said of her tiger: "I don't have it anymore...[It] got too big, and if it ever got loose I'd be in so much trouble."

A four-month-old female tiger cub was given to Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko during her presidential campaign in 2009. Tymoshenko became a political prisoner, and the tiger, who had been named "Tigryulia" during its stint as campaign mascot, was sent to a zoo, where it gave birth to four cubs in 2012.


In 1837, U.S. President Martin van Buren was sent a pair of tiger cubs by the Sultan of Oman. Congress did not permit van Buren to keep the tigers and had them sent to a zoo.

Tigers are endangered

Tigers are endangered in the wild. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 2011 that more tigers live in captivity in the United States than roam wild in all the world: "Because of a flourishing trade in exotic animals, there are an estimated 5,000 privately owned Bengal tigers in the U.S. There are only 3,600 Bengal tigers left in the wild."

In addition for the demand for tigers as pets, the demand for products made from slaughtered tigers leaves them vulnerable to hunters. For example, on Sept. 4, 2012, the HuffingtonPost reported:
 "Police have seized four baby tigers and more than 100 pangolins being transported in a car in central Vietnam...Tiger bones are used in Vietnam to make a traditional painkiller that sells for several hundred dollars an ounce." Superstitions about the curative properties of tiger products thus sadly contribute to the animals' decline.


This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Feb. 27, 2014.

Tiger image by Eddy Van 3000 from in Flanders fields - Belgiquistan - United Tribes ov Europe (Sleeping beauty, dreaming of lots of meat.) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Why people believe the president is mentally 'unleashed'

What people were saying at the end of November 2017

The New York Daily News published an editorial on Nov. 29 marveling that, while Congress is in “delicate negotiations” over his tax reform bill and a day after North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, he tweeted “demanding the firing of a private citizen who happens to run MSNBC, a news channel he hates” and “casually accused a congressman-turned-TV-host of murder" (the latter of which PolitiFact rated as a "Pants on Fire" lie and which received a tweet in response from the accused Joe Scarborough: "Looks like I picked a good day to stop responding to Trump's bizarre tweets. He is not well."). The newspaper concluded from this “latest spasm of deranged tweets” that the president is “profoundly unstable,” “mad,” “mentally unwell and viciously lashing out...we are witnessing signs of mania.” That same day, he also thrice retweeted anti-Muslim content posted by a leader of an extremist hate group.

Stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post describe “what can only be described as the president suffering some kind of break with reality,” according to Tina Nguyen in Vanity Fair. She says that “his private misstatements, within the White House, about easily verifiable facts, are harder to explain.” Perhaps some statements “were delivered in bad faith,” but it is also possible that he suffers from “a much more serious break from reality.”

Stephen Collinson, Nov. 29:

“Conversations about Trump's fitness and mental state have percolated in Washington for months. They have been fanned by the comments of GOP Sen. Bob Corker who warned the President could spark World War III.

Republican Sen. Jeff Flake last month fired off an explosive Senate speech in which he said that no one should stay silent, "as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters.”

His actions are not in his own interest, which is another indicator that he is not thinking rationally. Attacking others based on unsupported accusations could lead to the revival of accusations against his own checkered past. Experts say that his vocal declamations against the influence of Muslims contributes to worldwide terrorist recruitment. Chris Cillizza pointed out that his retweets of the alleged Muslim/Christian violence videos may impact his "tenuous efforts to convince the courts — which have previously cited his comments on Islam — that he has the power to institute a travel ban from several majority-Muslim nations."

"Something is unleashed with him lately. I don't know what is causing it, I don't know how to describe it," said New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman on CNN on Nov. 29. Two days later, Michelle Goldberg published this opinion in the New York Times:

"He seems to be cracking up.

There is a debate over whether Trump is unaware of reality or merely indifferent to it. He might be delusional, or he might simply be asserting the power to blithely override truth, which is the ultimate privilege of a despot. But reports from the administration all suggest an increasingly unhinged and chaotic president. Trump’s aides are trying to spin his behavior, which they clearly expect to get worse, as a sign of heightened confidence. “Officials tell us Trump seems more self-assured, more prone to confidently indulging wild conspiracies and fantasies, more quick-triggered to fight than he was during the Wild West of the first 100 days in office,” Mike Allen reports on Axios.

This should be seen as an emergency situation. But now that Republicans are about to get their tax cuts, they appear to have decided that it doesn’t matter whether the president is sane. ... On CNN, Senator Lindsey Graham chided the press for treating Trump like “some kind of kook not fit to be president,” which is some serious gaslighting from a man who previously called Trump “crazy,” a “kook” and “unfit for office.”

The message here is clear: Republicans aren’t going to defy their mad king over anything as mushy and amorphous as democratic norms, rationality or national honor.

* * *

If you think 2017 was bad, imagine an America without allies fighting another two-front war, this one involving nuclear weapons, under the leadership of the most hated president in modern history, while a torture apologist runs the C.I.A. The world right now is a powder keg. Trump, an untethered maniac, sits atop it, flicking a lighter that Republicans in Congress could take away, but won’t."

December 28, 2017 interview with the New York Times

On Dec. 28, Trump gave a half-hour interview to the New York Times. His words are incomprehensible. Ezra Klein described the interview as containing "a string of falsehoods that make it difficult to tell whether the leader of the free world is lying or delusional," and he commented that the latter is the "scarier" option. Among the interview excerpts that Klein unpacks is one that causes specific political alarm:

"He [Trump] appears to believe that he is engaged in some explicit or implicit quid pro quo with the Department of Justice: He doesn't fire Jeff Sessions, or demand prosecution of his political enemies, or whatever it is he imagines doing with his 'absolute right to do what I want to do,' so long as they treat him and his associates 'fairly,' which likely means protecting him from Mueller's investigation.

Imagine reading this comment on transcripts from Richard Nixon's tapes. It would be the kind of comment that would leave us glad Nixon was forced from office, chilled that such a man ever occupied the presidency at all."

And in another excerpt:

"Trump's premise in this section appears to be that President Obama engaged in a wide array of criminal, undemocratic, and negligent behaviors but his attorney general protected him from justice. And Trump's conclusion is that Obama's attorney general did his job well. To Trump, the attorney general doesn't serve the country, or the Constitution, but the president."

Part of what is so alarming here is not just that the president says these things, but that he says them on the record to the New York Times, suggesting that he is out of touch not only with the facts but also with ethics, the limits of power, and decorum. And to the New York Times, he shares this message about how he perceives their role in the upcoming 2020 election: "...all forms of media will tank if I'm not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes. Without me, The New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times. So they basically have to let me win." It is unclear whether he thinks the newspaper is currently succeeding (given that they currently cover his presidency) or failing (for some other reason), how this status would be assessed, and why he thinks the newspaper has power to "let [him] win" an election.

Klein says that, in his role as White House reporter, he's talked to Republicans and Democrats who have the president's ear, and uniformly they have told him that the president "is not just notably uninformed but also notably difficult to inform — his attention span is thin, he hears what he wants to hear, he wanders off topic, he has trouble following complex arguments. Trump has trouble following his briefings or even correctly repeating what he has heard."

He concludes that regardless of whether the president has "some form of cognitive decline or psychological malady...it is plainly obvious from Trump's words that this is not a man fit to be president, that he is not well or capable in some fundamental way."

Aaron Sorkin, creator of the TV series "West Wing," said in December that the president has an "observable psychiatric disorder."

John Harwood said of the same interview that the president displayed "delusions of omnipotence," referring to himself "in terms so grandiose and extreme as to be self-evidently false. Taken together, his comments signaled an inability to grasp conditions in the country, the limitations of his own capacities and the nature of the office he holds."

To Charles P. Pierce, the president's performance in the interview suggested signs of Alzheimer's. He was "only intermittently coherent. He talks in semi-sentences and is always groping for something that sounds familiar, even if it makes no sense whatsoever and even if it blatantly contradicts something he said two minutes earlier. To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president*’s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart." He added that the president's self-designation of his understanding of taxes as "better than the greatest C.P.A." is "more than simple grandiosity. This is someone fighting something happening to him that he is losing the capacity to understand."

What can be done?

The 25th amendment allows for a procedure to remove presidents from office when they are unfit.

Friday, December 29, 2017

Who 'war' it better?: Why it's bogus to tweet about military prowess, especially with these numbers

President Trump recently distributed the following information, presenting it as a personal accomplishment that proves he is more competent or effective than his predecessor, President Obama. Here's why it is a mistake to use this information to make a point about who is more effective than whom.

Screenshot taken from the Washington Examiner the morning of Dec. 29, 2017. The article was dated Dec. 23. A factual error in the information circulated widely online before the media outlet corrected it.

  1. Seemingly forgetting that the war against ISIS is about an international coalition defeating a common enemy, Trump self-promotes an argument that he is a better commander-in-chief than his predecessor. This is problematic on several levels. The war is about the freedom and safety of the people of Syria and Iraq; it should not be presented as a pissing content between Trump and Obama. It is morally repugnant to do so and, in its blatancy, it undermines U.S. credibility as a leader in international security. Also, credit for any successes needs to be shared with the dozens of countries who have served as coalition partners.
  2. War is not a "who wore it better" contest.

    Photo credit: Metmuseum.org This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons by as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy বাংলা | Deutsch | English | Esperanto | português | සිංහල | +/−, CC0, Link

  3. The numbers show that about the same area of land was liberated from ISIS during the first 11 months of the Trump administration as during the final 28 months of the Obama administration. Trump seems to want us to infer that his military campaign got the same results twice as fast. He is treating these numbers as a businessman looks at a balance sheet. This is a misunderstanding of how military campaigns work. Square miles are not dollars; they are not identical and interchangeable. Terrain, for example, plays a role in how difficult it is to conquer land. So does the civilian population you have to work around. And, of course, the level of resistance from enemy fighters is crucial. The chart reflects the U.S. Defense Department's assessment that Trump only had to contend with 35,000 ISIS fighters when he took office; it does not reflect how many fighters Obama's administration had to deal with at the outset nor how many additional fighters entered the fray during those years. The numbers indicate that the military sped up the rate at which it conquered land, but one possible explanation is that conquering land became easier.
  4. Similarly, if half the number of bombs are required to capture the same amount of land, that suggests that the nature of the combat has changed. Bombs suggest an air war; ground combat may use fewer bombs. Indeed bombs are expensive for the country that drops them and they are destructive of lives and property on the ground, yet they may also be cheaper and less destructive than alternative weapons. Therefore, the military has its reasons for using or not using them. The way this information is presented, it appears at first glance that the international coalition used half the violence to conquer the same amount of land. This is not necessarily true. They used half the amount of one kind of violence. Other types of weapons and tactics are missing from the chart. Furthermore, the decision about whether to use bombs is not always up to the U.S. president. Most, but not all, bombs in this conflict have come at U.S. direction and expense. The second-most prolific bomber is Britain's RAF.
  5. The numbers show that twice the number of people were liberated from ISIS under Trump as under Obama. That only means that the land taken from ISIS in 2017 was twice as densely populated as the land taken in 2014-2016. It probably reflects the 2017 victory in the Iraqi city of Mosul, a city whose population has been estimated between one and two million.
  6. In listing the number of U.S. deaths, remaining ISIS fighters, and "people freed," an important category is missing: Iraqi and Syrian civilian deaths. Inevitably, in any war, some innocent people intended to be freed are killed in the conflict. In Iraq alone, where documentation of civilian deaths is spottier than in Syria, the U.S.-led coalition confirmed its responsibility for 971 civilian deaths in 51 incidents during the Obama administration (the end of 2014 through 2016) and 1,119 civilian deaths in 56 incidents in the beginning of the Trump administration. Iraq also has a number of civilian casualties for which responsibility is “contested”: 63 incidents under Obama and 213 incidents under Trump. (Source: Airwars) This gives a more complete picture of the human cost of war. Reducing the number of ISIS fighters in a territory with millions of inhabitants does not come without a price, and the president ought not to seem glib about it by erasing those casualties from the record as he claims to be a better commander-in-chief than his predecessor.
  7. Charlie Kirk tweeted this information from the Washington Examiner on Dec. 27 at 3:14 p.m. and it was immediately retweeted by the president. In the original version of the information that was tweeted and retweeted, the arithmetic has an obvious error. If only 17,500 square miles were “held by ISIS” at the end of Obama’s administration, Trump could not have caused 26,000 square miles to be “liberated from ISIS” (unless he had lost ground to ISIS and then had to reclaim it). Accordingly, the Washington Examiner acknowledged their own mathematical error and corrected their article with an erratum. The president followed up at 6:09 p.m. with a tweet of a visual meme with a corrected number and a text caption that made his point without explicitly referencing the number in question. He did not acknowledge that he was correcting an error, but you can see the error for yourself since, as of Dec. 29, neither Charlie Kirk nor the President had deleted their original tweet with the wrong information. (Screenshots below were taken from the president's Twitter page the morning of Dec. 29. Red arrows are superimposed to highlight the error and subsequent correction.)

I do not argue that the President should waste a single hour of his time figuring this out. Instead I argue that he should not waste untold hours of everyone else's fact-checking time by tweeting things that either he does not understand or that he does understand and about which is happy to mislead everyone else.




Update: News broke on 14 February 2019 that President Trump would declare a national emergency to get funding for a border wall with Mexico on the grounds that terrorists are crossing the border. This is not true.

"In the United States since the 9/11 attacks, 455 jihadist terrorists have been charged or convicted or died before they faced trial. Not one of these terrorists crossed the southern border....And anyway, the vast majority of terrorists don't enter the United States at the southern border or anywhere else, because they are already in the country. Of the 455 jihadist terrorism cases since 9/11, 84% involved US citizens or permanent residents, and every lethal terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 was carried out by a US citizen or legal resident....And there isn't a case since 9/11 of a terrorist being arrested at the border, according to New America's research." (Peter Bergen, CNN, 14 February 2019)
Furthermore, "the United States has seen a steep decline in the number of jihadist terrorism cases over the past four years," Bergen says, since "the geographical caliphate [of ISIS] is almost entirely gone and ISIS recruitment has slowed to a trickle."

And on 17 February 2019, CNN reported that over a thousand well-funded ISIS fighters had simply relocated to Iraq: "More than 1,000 ISIS fighters have likely fled from Syria into the mountains and deserts of western Iraq in the past six months, and they may have up to $200 million in cash with them, according to a US military official familiar with situation."




On October 14, 2019, David Rothkopf wrote:

The United States has a long history of debacles, mistakes, and catastrophes in the Middle East. But Donald Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds manages the near impossible. It incorporates all our past failures and then goes a step further by actually placing us on the side of our enemies while embracing their worst characteristics.

This time, we have joined the Axis of Evil.

It "is a new kind of low point," Rothkopf argues, because it "combines every single type of error noted above [in a list of U.S. foreign policy failures in the Middle East] and some new ones."

On October 16, 2019, asked about why he removed U.S. troops from northern Syria, Trump said: "It's been going on for a long time. Syria may have some help with Russia. And that's fine. It's a lot of sand. There's a lot of sand over there. So, there's a lot of sand that they can play with."

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Quotes: On time

Erich Maria Remarque:

After a while he says suddenly in the half-darkness: "What actually is time?"

George puts his glass down in astonishment. "The pepper of life," I reply. The old rascal can't catch me so easily with his tricks. Not for nothing am I a member of the Werdenbrück Poets' Club: we are used to big questions.

Riesenfeld disregards me. "What's your opinion, Herr Kroll?" he asks.

"I'm a simple man," George says. "Prost!"

"Time," Riesenfeld continues doggedly. "Time, this uninterrupted flow — not our lousy time! Time, this gradual death."


Marcel Proust:

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say, after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier and in some far distant country.


Douwe Draaisma:

In hourglasses the grains of sand increasingly rub one another smooth until finally they flow almost without friction from one bulb into the other, polishing the neck wider all the time. The older an hourglass the more quickly it runs. Unnoticed, the hourglass measures out ever shorter hours. This chronometric imperfection hides a metaphor: 'For man, too, the recurring years fly past more and more quickly, until finally the measure is full. Man, too, is increasingly permeated by impressions.


Abraham Joshua Heschel:

Indeed, we know what to do with space but do not know what to do about time, except to make it subservient to space. Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face.


E. B. White:

She is at that enviable moment in life [I thought] when she believes she can go once around the ring, make one complete circuit, and at the end be exactly the same age as at the start.


Charles Ray Goff:

But why are we so important? We have only 613,200 hours to live if we live to the age of seventy. We sleep a lot of that away; then there are four or five early years that we can't remember; also, there's a lot more time that's wasted in useless activities. And so we really don't have many years to live. This leaves us wondering why all this fuss about our importance.


Zora Neale Hurston:

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.


Michael N. McGregor:

Although the trip lasted only a month, it stayed with him the rest of his life. When someone asked in his later years how long he traveled with the Cristianis, he answered, ‘Even till now.’


Charles Baxter:

Any writer can learn how to use a request moment to enliven a story. King Lear asks his daughters to tell him how much they love him. The ghost of Hamlet’s father has a series of requests for his son. Lady Macbeth asks, or tells, her husband to fulfill his fate. A request — a demand — forces a character into action, or dramatically charged inaction, as in the case of Hamlet. One character turns to another character and says, ‘There’s something I want you to do. Oh, and by the way, the clock is ticking. I want you to do it by Friday.’


Terry Pratchett:

Your whole life passes in front of your eyes before you die. This is called living.


George Packer:

By 50, the obvious fact of your own decline is easily mistaken for an intimation of the world's.


E. M. Cioran:

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, ‘What’s your rush? Your can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down.’


Jeanette Winterson:

I keep pulling at the rope. I keep pulling at life as hard as I can. If the rope starts to fray in places, it doesn't matter. I am so tightly folded, like a fern or an ammonite, that as I unravel, the actual and the imagined unloose together, just as they are spliced together — life's fibres knotted into time.


Art Greer:

Happily retired people spend their time doing what they've always enjoyed doing, only more of it.


Anthony Doerr:

He thinks of the old broken miners he’d see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.


Andy Andrews:

Why do the ages of our world’s greatest civilizations average around two hundred years?

Why do these civilizations all seem to follow the same identifiable sequence — from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, and finally from dependence back into bondage?


Peter S. Beagle:

"Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?" "No, but I wonder if any man before us ever thought his time a good time for unicorns."


Paul Virilio:

To what utopia and, more importantly, to what uchronia, to what new relationship with time?

A. E. Osworth:

"And now, a partial list of things that happen so we can move time forward very quickly to the important bits. The end bits. The bits we remember and take with us, instead of the bits that are simply bits: ..."

Sources

Erich Maria Remarque. The Black Obelisk (1957). USA: Crest, 1958. p. 46.

Marcel Proust. Swann's Way (Du Cote de Chez Swann, 1917). Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1921). New York: The Heritage Press, 1954. p. 5.

Douwe Draaisma. Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past. (2001) Translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans in 2004. Cambridge University Press, 2005. p 201.

Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1951. p. 5.

“The Ring of Time” by E. B. White. Reprinted in Understanding the Essay, edited by Edward O. Shakespeare, Peter H. Reinke, and Elliot W. Fenander. USA: The Odyssey Press, 1966. p. 186.

Charles Ray Goff. Shelters and Sanctuaries: Christian Hope in a Time of Confusion. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1961. p. 18.

Zora Neale Hurston, quoted in the Associated Press, quoted in The Week, Sept. 26, 2014, p. 17.

Michael N. McGregor. Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. Fordham University Press, 2015.

“Undoings: An Essay in Three Parts.” Charles Baxter. Colorado Review, Spring 2012, Vol. 39, No. 1. p. 106.

Terry Pratchett, quoted in TheBrowser.com. Quoting The Week, July 18, 2014. p. 15.

George Packer in The New Yorker. Quoted as "Viewpoint" in The Week. Feb. 22, 2013. p. 12.

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, quoted in Simon Critchley. Suicide. Thought Catalog, 2015.

Jeanette Winterson. The PowerBook. London: Vintage, 2001. p. 210.

Art Greer. The Sacred Cows are Dying: Exploding the Myths We Try to Live By. New York: Hawthorne Books, Inc., 1978. p. 93.

Anthony Doerr. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner, 2014.

Andy Andrews. How Do You Kill 11 Million People?: Why the Truth Matters More Than You Think. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2011. p. 46. Citing Andy Andrews, The Heart Mender (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 141-42.

Peter S. Beagle. The Last Unicorn. (1968) New York: Penguin, 2008. p. 5.

Paul Virilio, with Bertrand Richard. The Administration of Fear. Translated by Ames Hodges. Les editions Textuel, 2012. Translation: Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012. p. 77.

A. E. Osworth, We Are Watching Eliza Bright. Grand Central Publishing, 2022.

Sunday, December 24, 2017

The forces behind political polarization

If you say, Disagreement is a social problem, your interlocutor is prompted to respond, I agree. Perhaps that's why, as Thomas Zimmer writes, "The least controversial thing one can do in American politics is to decry 'polarization.'"

Of course "polarization exists as an observable phenomenon in distinct areas and dimensions"; the problem, Zimmer says, is with "a narrative" that "dogmatically demands we put it at the center of our interpretation of the present and accept it as the key challenge the country is facing today." By tending to ignore counterexamples of non-polarization, it highlights "what historian Matthew Lassiter has rightfully criticized as an 'artificial red-blue binary.'"

First of all, many Americans share values, including across liberal and conservative identities. Placing the focus on ordinary American voters who supposedly have diametrically opposed viewpoints (maybe they do, maybe they don't, so what?) may simply serve to obscure the problem that "authoritarian reactionaries [are] taking over one of the major parties." Zimmer posits: "Every serious scholar and observer of American democracy, politics, and history agrees that a return of Donald Trump to the White House would constitute an acute threat to the future of democracy and constitutional government in this country. Would we really be better off if Democrats *didn’t* see him and the party that has elevated him as a major problem?" See here: "One party is dominated by a shrinking white reactionary minority that is rapidly radicalizing against democracy and will no longer accept the principle of majoritarian rule; the other thinks democracy and constitutional government should be upheld. That's not 'polarization.'"

Secondly, where among ordinary individuals the left-right gap is indeed "very wide, and has been widening," for example "on guns, pandemic response, the question of whether you should accept the results of an election your side doesn’t win or stage a violent coup," the blame doesn't lie on both sides; rather, "this has been almost entirely a function of conservatives moving sharply to the Right." So for example, on acknowledging climate change as an urgent problem, "Democrats aren’t moving to an 'extreme' position, certainly not by international comparison – they are getting in line with what is the position shared by nearly all serious experts in the world. Meanwhile, a sizable percentage of Republicans is drifting further away into fantasy land."


Jonathan Haidt explains in a recent essay that we become politically polarized when centripetal or centrifugal forces are imbalanced. These are the forces that draw us together or pull us apart.

“Imagine three kids making a human chain with their arms, and one kid has his free hand wrapped around a pole. The kids start running around in a circle, around the pole, faster and faster. The centrifugal force increases. That’s the force pulling outward as the human centrifuge speeds up. But at the same time, the kids strengthen their grip. That’s the centripetal force, pulling them inward along the chain of their arms. Eventually the centrifugal force exceeds the centripetal force and their hands slip. The chain breaks.”

The “good kind of identity politics,” according to Haidt, is exemplified by MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech that ”framed our greatest moral failing as an opportunity for centripetal redemption.” Identity becomes centrifugal “when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions” identifying which groups have power over which others and furthermore when you say that they must “fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male.” When students are told to examine everything “in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people....This is induction into a cult, a fundamentalist religion, a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.”

Polarization is a problem insofar as it prevents people from working together to maintain a democracy. “Here," Haidt says, "is the fine-tuned liberal democracy hypothesis: as tribal primates, human beings are unsuited for life in large, diverse secular democracies, unless you get certain settings finely adjusted to make possible the development of stable political life.” Therefore the Founding Fathers of the United States designed a constitution as if it were “a clock that might run forever if they chose the right springs and gears.” They “built in safeguards against runaway factionalism, such as the division of powers among the three branches, and an elaborate series of checks and balances. But they also knew that they had to train future generations of clock mechanics. They were creating a new kind of republic, which would demand far more maturity from its citizens than was needed in nations ruled by a king or other Leviathan.” Today, however, “our government is divided into two all-consuming factions, which cut right down the middle of each of the three branches, uniting the three red half-branches against the three blue half-branches”.

Haidt referred to a previous essay in which he argued that polarization was caused by the following trends. In his words:

  1. The two parties purified themselves ideologically
  2. As politicians polarized, so did many Americans
  3. The urban-rural divide grew into a gulf, reflecting diverging interests and values
  4. Immigration was rising, leading to larger racial and ethnic divisions
  5. The net effect of all these trends is that partisans dislike one another more intensely
  6. Meanwhile, rule changes and culture changes in Congress made it harder to maintain cross-party friendships
  7. The media environment changed, making it easier for partisans to confirm their worst suspicions, and putting greater pressure on politicians to play to the extremes
  8. As the costs of campaigns increased, politicians have become increasingly afraid of offending their party’s donors
  9. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States lost a common enemy that had once unified the country
  10. The end of the Cold War coincided with the baton pass from the Greatest Generation to the baby boomers, who may be more prone to hyper-partisanship

Nina Khrushcheva has a more specific observation about clock mechanics. She applauded moments in U.S. history where politicians defended the procedural checks and balances even against other pressing moral demands, such as when "Secretary of State Daniel Webster supported the Compromise of 1850, despite his hatred of slavery, in order to save the union" and when "Robert Taft denounced the Nuremberg Trials, despite his hatred of the Nazis, to defend the fundamental US legal principle that a person could not be criminally charged on the basis of a retroactive statute." (Both of these examples were featured in President John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.) She notes the current initiative in late 2017 "to pass a tax bill that would benefit America’s wealthiest households at the expense of saddling the country with more than $1 trillion in additional debt" and she implies that the process could have benefited from "thorough public committee hearings" and with less willingness on the part of politicians to "trade their honor for the approval of their tribe."

Adam Garfinkle gives seven reasons for the decline of trust in society. The first three or four overlap with Haidt's reasons for polarization.
  1. heterogeneous demographics driven by immigration
  2. the lack of a "common language to discuss good and evil" and the rise of "Christian neo-fundamentalism"
  3. less face-to-face interaction due to technology and class segregation
  4. institutional and bureaucratic failure
  5. media portrayals of the world as a mean place
  6. breakdown of family leading to emotional insecurity
  7. too much state intrusion

Being open to changing one's beliefs according to evidence

Various recent studies have found that American conservatives are more likely to share fake news, more prone to self-deception, and less likely to change their beliefs in response to evidence. They use simpler language and many of them are falling prone to authoritarianism. This is discussed in a July 2020 New York Times article.

Starting fights

Legal actions for political purposes can worsen polarization. In May 2018, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe said: "It's important that we not exacerbate the dysfunction and the polarization in the society that helped Donald Trump rise to power in the first place." He explained that impeachment needs to be an action taken to rectify a specific abuse. "If we were to use the impeachment power simply as a substitute for buyer's remorse, saying 'We thought this guy was terrible, but he's even worse,' if we were going to use it against ambient badness, rather than clear abuse of power — we would really use the impeachment power to undermine, rather than save, our democracy."

Being guided by polarization

Leaf Van Boven and David Sherman conducted studies in 2014 and 2016 showing that Republicans and Democrats agree that climate change exist but they tend to support whatever policies are backed by their own party.

YouGov opinion polls in August 2018 found dramatic differences between Republicans and Democrats regarding opinions toward the n-word slur against black people. 90% of those who voted for Hillary Clinton, but only 53% of those who voted for Trump, agreed that white people should never use this word. Trump voters were even less likely to use the word "racist" to describe this behavior; while 86% of Clinton voters agreed that "it's racist for whites to use" that word, only 33% of Trump voters thought so. And while 86% of Clinton voters "wouldn't vote for [a] candidate who said it," only 26% of Trump voters held themselves to the same standard. The Washington Post story points out that, only twelve years previously, this gap barely existed; then, "55 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans said that the n-word was offensive."

The United States is polarizing faster than other countries

In early 2020, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Jesse Shapiro, Levi Boxell and Matthew Gentzkow, showed research that (according to a news release from Brown University) "present[s] the first ever multi-nation evidence on long-term trends in 'affective polarization' — a phenomenon in which citizens feel more negatively toward other political parties than toward their own. They found that in the U.S., affective polarization has increased more dramatically since the late 1970s than in the eight other countries they examined — the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden." The study shows that "polarization had also risen in Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland in the last 40 years, but to a lesser extent. In the U.K., Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden, polarization decreased."

The US is polarizing asymmetrically

"Another related challenge stems from what social scientists call “asymmetric polarization.” The Republican Party has moved further to the right than Democrats have to the left. And much of the extremism in the GOP has been tactical, where some party leaders have embraced a form of smashmouth partisanship with no guardrails as to what is permissible." (Julian Zelizer, CNN, Dec. 20, 2022)

Local journalism matters

Marc Ambinder wrote for MSNBC on Nov. 5, 2020:

there is a direct correspondence between the closing of newspapers and the polarization of people formerly served by those newspapers. If you live in a town with a thriving local news ecosystem, you are more likely to vote.

Reporting

Norm Eisen discussed journalistic norms, telling Chauncey DeVega for Salon in May 2022:

"That [old] norm deems that if you're going to provide one side of the story then you have to provide the other side of the story. If something happens, you need to report it neutrally. Editorializing is for the editorial page. The inferences, the interpretation, that doesn't go in the news. But if you have a norm-transgressing figure like Donald Trump, then those journalistic norms have to adapt to that circumstance. We can't be static. That is why journalism in this country is stuck."

At first glance, reporting both sides might seem to reduce polarization. But maybe it's the opposite, since it keeps people stuck in a "debate" that perhaps they don't need to be in. If one side is clearly better (however "better" is defined), then what needs to be done is accept the recommendation of the side, take some action, and move forward, while continuing to listen to objections (if made in good faith) and maintaining nuanced awareness of the situation.

Please see The Conspicuous Absence of White Identity from Yascha Mounk’s “Trap”, Dannagal Young, 3Streams, Oct 20, 2023. Young refers to a

"well-documented process of partisan 'social sorting' following the parties’ racial realignment, as Americans from distinct socio-demographic groups came to identify more with one of the two major political parties, leaving us with a Democratic party that is racially and ethnically diverse, suburban and urban, secular and agnostic, and culturally liberal, and a Republican party that is more homogeneously white, Christian, rural, and culturally conservative.

And while the sorting has certainly happened on 'both sides' its outcome has been decidedly asymmetrical, resulting in a Republican party whose homogenous identity alignment gives them exceptional 'group fit.' And when people 'fit' nicely into their social identity category (they look the way most of their team looks, worship the way most of their team worships, live where most of their team lives, and live how most of their team lives), their social identity becomes salient. When an identity is salient, it is easy to leverage, activate, and mobilize through identity threats."

Responding to an October 2023 profile in the New York Times, here's A.R. Moxon talking about the meaning of safety (No Beliefs, Just Intentions, The Reframe (Substack), Dec 17, 2023): One family in the New York Times profile "needed safety. They left their home state because they were being eliminated by their state government." The other "wanted to feel safe. They left their state because of insufficient elimination of unwanted and deliberately abandoned people, and came to a state where the people they would rather not see—people who are in the greatest danger—are nowhere to be seen, almost as if they had been pre-cleared away ahead of time..." Moxon continues: "And I’m told the problem is that both sides are polarized, and both sides actually want the same thing, even though they can’t get over their disagreements over silly politics."

Sources

“The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities.” Jonathan Haidt. City Journal (Manhattan Institute). Dec. 17, 2017.

"Profiles in Cowardice." Nina L. Khrushcheva. Project Syndicate. Dec. 18, 2017.

"In Way Too Little We Trust." Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest. December 13, 2017.

lightning
Image by Oimheidi from Pixabay

Friday, December 15, 2017

Is 'Trumpism' a cult?

First, please note that I wrote: When will the Trump cult give up? (Medium, September 2022, 5-minute read)

For more, see below...


Barbara F. Walter wrote in How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them (2022):

"By the early twenty-first century, if you were Christian or evangelical, you had little choice but to vote Republican. Early partisan divides on abortion were followed by increasingly polarized positions on gay rights and eventually transgender rights. Wealthy Republicans used these issues to capture the white working-class vote, and they largely succeeded, even though voting Republican was often not in workers' economic interst. Moral imperatives and cultural identities were now, more than ever, driving voting patterns. White evangelicals now represent two-thirds of the Republican Party. By contrast, non-Christians — including agnostics, Jews, and Muslims — represent half of the Democratic Party."

"During the late eighties and throughout the nineties," Susie Meister wrote in early 2016 before the election, "evangelicalism hit its stride communicating and promoting a very specific message that amounted to a chorus of sound bites about “family values,” militarism, and the pro-life movement." Meister, someone who "attended church several times a week," realized:

"I could no longer reconcile Jesus’s calls for non-judgment, loving your enemies, and taking up your cross with many of the Religious Right’s positions on social services, women’s rights, and the LGBT community. Even though I felt alone in my theological shift, I was not. A recent Pew Research Center poll puts the evangelical retention rate at 65%...It isn’t just general education that can shift beliefs; indeed a recent study by Baylor University researcher Aaron Franzen found that increased reading of the Bible correlated with greater passion for social justice — a trait typically associated with liberalism."

She noted that Trump isn't the first example of Christians overlooking the personal history of their preferred candidate: "From Ronald Reagan’s divorce to Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, evangelical Christians give passes to those whose rhetoric is most in line with their philosophy and who they believe can win the election, even if that person’s biography isn’t in line with their religious doctrine."

Around the same time, in early 2016, an article on The Weekly Challenger began by calling Trump "a political cult leader" The article says that the "white working class" isn't seeing quite as much benefit from their historic white privilege anymore, as they "are killing themselves with pills and alcohol, committing suicide with guns, and dying of despair" and also just dying of old age which means that "the Republican Party’s base of voters is rapidly shrinking." Trump leverages what psychologists call "terror management theory," as, "when scared or under threat, conservative authoritarians are more likely to become tribal, bigoted, racist and generally more hostile to those they identify as some type of Other."

Given that the demographic base is shrinking, can the Republican Party just become...less racist, sexist, homophobic, and isolationist to expand their appeal to wider demographics? No, they can't, because that will explode what is left of their core base right now. Since the 1960s, "racism has been fundamental to American conservatism, and the GOP in particular," writes Zak Cheney-Rice in 2019, "even as its purportedly defining tenets have proven to be negotiable, from small government to antagonism toward autocrats to reduced deficit spending." Republican leaders (given how the party has defined itself for a half-century) will give up all other governing principles before they will give up their racism. This is not a matter of party "infiltration by a few bad eggs. On the contrary, it’s been apparent since the Nixon administration that the Republican Party would collapse without support from racists." They know they're in a losing battle and they're circling the wagons. The actual people who currently support the Republican Party will not be injured if the party gives up its racism or its power, but the Party itself as an institution may fall apart. What they have to do is radically transform the party to be anti-racist so that it no longer resembles what it's been saying and doing for the past half-century and reorganizes what remains of its core supporters. The leaders won't go through this effort. Unfortunately, "the movement’s racism problem is not the result of a hijacking or a coup, but of popular will. There are no innocents among today’s Republicans. There’s only the ugliness they’ve unleashed, and whether they’ve the courage to risk political ruin in order to eradicate it."

Before the 2018 mid-term election, Trump said of evangelicals: “They’re going to show up for me [i.e. the Republican Party] because nobody’s done more for Christians or evangelicals or, frankly, religion than I have."

A January 2018 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that:

"The vast majority of black Protestants (80 percent), religiously unaffiliated Americans (75 percent), Hispanic Catholics (74 percent) and non-Christian religious Americans (73 percent) surveyed said they have negative opinions about Trump. Slim majorities of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics (both 52 percent) also said they are not fans of the president.

In fact, the only religious group that had a majority of respondents voicing a favorable opinion of Trump was white evangelical Protestants, with 68 percent of them saying they have a favorable view of Trump, including 28 percent with a very favorable opinion of the president." (Carol Kuruvilla, Huffington Post)

Apart from the clear pro-Trump majority among white evangelicals, writes Diana Butler Bass, "white Christianity right now is a dumpster of discord; internecine warfare has not been this bad since the 1920s when controversy ripped American churches apart on whether human beings evolved from monkeys." As a personal example, although Bass and her brother "grew up in the same Methodist Sunday school," they stopped speaking after the Charlottesville incident "when we argued about white nationalism and racism," as she reports two years after that incident.

My brother, as an adult, traded that God for a tougher, stricter one who exercises judgment against all who refuse to bend the knee, a kind of Emperor-God, enthroned in glory. This God has often shown up in Christian history; including in American fundamentalism. But from 1980 onward, he underwent a revival in several strands of American religion including Pentecostalism, neo-Calvinism, traditionalist Roman Catholicism, and some Orthodox communities. He is a masculine Sovereign, and a winner-God for people feeling displaced in a pluralistic world. And after 9/11, this militaristic God became more real.

A Dungeons & Dragons manual, Villain Design Handbook, informally uses a simpler definition: “for the purpose of this book a cult is defined as any exclusive group that uses fear and intimidation to control its members.”

Adam Garfinkle, editor of The American Interest, wrote in May 2017:

"[Mark] Lilla and others have suggested that political cults tend to fill religious vacuums; that is, they tend to arise when people lose faith in the efficacy of the religious status quo to manage their problems. In other words, in times of confusion and fear, people will vouchsafe unto symbols of the nation, the state, the race, the leader, and so on what they used to reserve for God and related religious symbols. Political religion therefore always competes in some form with preexisting religious organizations and beliefs, giving rise to a range of outcomes that include cooptation, intimidation, repression, and other possibilities as well. This precisely is what led Voegelin to insist on similarities between authoritarian and totalitarian systems and religious systems..."

Using an 11-point list of cultic structure and belief, Garfinkle finds that Trumpism is cultic only to a "middling extent," and moreover its cultiness has been decreasing since the election was won. He warns that, nevertheless, "[t]o the extent it is more cult-like than its recent predecessors, the 'excitement' may be just ahead of us as the movement circles the wagons."

It's not true — Shannon Ashley wrote in 2018, identifying herself as someone who once emerged from a cult — that cults are "always religious," that only a few people are at risk for joining cults, that cults "prey on the weak and are easy to identify," and that most people who join are lost causes and can never emerge. A real cult, she says, uses "thought reform to challenge reality."

Reza Aslan, author of God: A Human History, points out in an interview on Nov. 20, 2017 that "to this day, still, three-quarters of white evangelicals strongly support him," and "support for him is highest among those who go to church at least once a week." He asks why churchgoing makes one more likely to support a

"lying, lecherous, greedy, sexist, racist, narcissistic sociopath whose entire worldview makes a mockery of Christianity, makes a mockery of basic Christian tenets like humility, and empathy, and care for the poor. And scholars like myself have been just wracking our brains trying to figure this out, 'cause it makes no sense."

He observes that this is limited to white evangelicals (as two-thirds of evangelicals of color supported Hillary Clinton). He also observes that white evangelicals (who called themselves "Values Voters") used to say that public morality was important for politicians, but today, atheists are more likely to say that. Aslan concludes that Trump has "transformed a large swath of white evangelicals into his own personal cult." Aslan is using "cult" in a "pejorative sense...it's a 'value judgment' word." He believes Trumpism is a cult insofar it is "an insulated group of individuals in thrall to a charismatic leader to whom they have given divine status, prophetic status, and that is definitively what has happened among a large swath of white evangelicals when it comes to Trump."

On June 19, 2019, TV pastor (and "End Times prepper") Jim Bakker said on his show that Trump was elected "because God's people voted and the world knows it, the enemies of the gospel know it." He warned that "if we keep losing, you’re going to see the leaders of the church and the leaders of the gospel and the political conservative leaders that are powerful, you are going to see them suddenly die, suddenly killed—suddenly as they were driving, suddenly as they were in a boat, suddenly in an airplane—you’re going to see it one after another.” He knows this because "God spoke this to me years ago what would happen near the end and I believe we’re in that time." In August 2018, Bakker warned that "the evil in this country is so bad, if I was a Republican — which I have been my whole life — I couldn’t wear a hat with my candidate on it without concern about being murdered in the street." However, Bakker is aware that Trump does not fit the image of a typical Christian leader. In January 2020, Right Wing Watch shared a video of Bakker apparently joking that, because Trump is so difficult to love or even to forgive, only true Christians are prepared to love and accept Trump.

Evangelicals aside, most Americans are displeased with the president, and therefore his approach to campaigning and governing may not survive in American politics. Ezra Klein's Nov. 7 article in Vox:

"Trumpism without Trump was possible before Trump was president. It might be possible after he’s president. It’s not possible while he’s president.

In 2016, Trump had the advantage of being a true outsider: He had no record to answer for, no unemployment rate to explain, no votes to justify. For all his oddities and eccentricities, he was a blank slate — a businessman to those who wanted a businessman, a culture warrior to those who wanted a culture warrior, a pragmatist to those who wanted a pragmatist, a conservative to those who wanted a conservative, and so on. He was theory severed from practice; “ism” without the reality check of is.

But now we have Trumpism with Trump, and the American people don’t much like it. Trump is no longer an abstraction, Trumpism no longer an idea. Instead, we are watching the real thing: a White House in chaos, a legislative agenda in shambles, a world in which nuclear war is likelier and America’s global leadership is diminished. Trump isn’t merely unpopular; he is less popular than any president at this point in their term since the advent of modern polling, and he is that unpopular even though the economy is growing and Americans are not dying in large numbers overseas."

At least a couple scandals centered around Liberty University.

First, in 2015, Liberty's chief information officer John Gauger accepted an offer of $50,000 from the Trump campaign to manipulate the polls on two news websites. Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen gave him a Walmart bag containing roughly $12,000 in cash and a collectible MMA boxing glove; he never delivered the rest of the money.

Secondly, the following year, there was a politicized Christian battle. Going into the 2016 Republican caucuses, Sen. Ted Cruz (whose father is an evangelical pastor) had expected the support of Liberty's president Jerry Falwell Jr., but shortly before the causes, Falwell (a businessman, not a pastor like his father) suddenly announced his support for Trump.

When the Access Hollywood tape was released in October 2016 before the election, Newsweek reports, "student journalists accused [Liberty's president Jerry] Falwell Jr. of censorship for axing an opinion piece in the student newspaper that blasted the then-Republican nominee." Liberty, the largest employer in Lynchburg, Va., had hosted Trump as a commencement speaker in 2017. In March 2018, Falwell appeared on CNN, defending Trump's character in the wake of sex scandals. Some Liberty students criticized Falwell for this:

A new organization called Red Letter Christians planned a revival event in Lynchburg for April 2018, intended to be somewhat of a political protest against Falwell. Professional evangelicals were afraid of damaging their ties to Liberty, so Red Letter Christians had a difficult time recruiting speakers for the event. Shortly before the event, Falwell banned the Red Letter Christians from campus and said the student newspaper couldn't cover the event. Red Letter exec director Don Golden said he wasn't inclined to ask permission to do what he does, since "we weren’t asked permission for evangelical leaders to say that Donald Trump is the president for evangelicals." In the end, the hall they rented for the revival was filled to less than one-fifth capacity, though many people watched online.

When asked at the end of 2018, "Is there anything President Trump could do that would endanger that support from you or other evangelical leaders?" Falwell answered, "No." A long investigative article published in the New York Times in June 2019, based on information gathered "from a lawsuit filed against the Falwells in Florida; the investigation into Mr. [Michael] Cohen by federal prosecutors in New York; and the gonzo-style tactics of the comedian and actor Tom Arnold," found that Michael Cohen, then Trump's lawyer, had been willing to help the Falwells with 2015 lawsuit over ownership of the gay-friendly Miami Hostel. As a favor to Jerry and Becki Falwell, who were being threatened with the revelation of compromising photographs of them, Cohen was thinking of buying and burying the photographs. The photos may have conveniently disappeared on their own without Cohen's involvement, however, and, since then, "no photos have surfaced."

A New York Times editorial on June 7, 2018 suggested that "the cult of Trump" really is just about the man:

"Mr. Trump’s favorability rating among Republicans is at 87 percent — the second-highest rating within a president’s party at an administration’s 500-day mark since World War II. (George W. Bush was slightly higher following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.) The absence of Republican criticism of Mr. Trump, in turn, serves to reinforce his popularity, creating a cycle cravenness that has now made it risky for even the staunchest of conservatives to question Mr. Trump. * * * Former House speaker John Boehner addressed the crowd at a policy conference in May 2018: 'There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.'"

Scot Lehigh satirized in the Boston Globe on June 21: "The Great Trumpkin had hoped to rally the entire cult to his side. Just follow Corey’s lead and offer a sneering 'womp womp' to stories of traumatized kids. Why, the Thugwomps, with its nice 19th century ring, could even become the new nickname of the Grand Old Cult!"

In June 2018, Michael Gerson wrote in the Washington Post:

The ultimate cause of this situation, however, is Trump himself. His followers are not asked to follow the contours of an ideology. They are asked to embrace his impulses and instincts. Those instincts move in a clear direction: toward feeding racial and ethnic divisions, salting national wounds, undermining rival institutions and violating restrictive precedents. But the unifying principle is Trump himself.

G.K. Chesterton argued that the egotist is the exact opposite of the dogmatist. The dogmatist believes there is an objective truth that he wants everyone to see. The egotist believes that all his views are interesting because they are related to him.

By October 2019, Gerson wrote more pointedly:

When it comes to President Trump, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between a political strategy and a nervous breakdown. His tweeted trash talk, his meandering stream of consciousness media availabilities and his shameless embrace of sleaziness are not the signs of a healthy mind. Trump’s followers might eventually look up to find they were actors in someone else’s delusion.

* * *

Trump is effectively setting a new standard of political morality and requiring his supporters to defend it. He is asking elected Republicans, in particular, to agree with his claim that a practice uniformly viewed as corruption in the past is actually an example of fighting corruption now. That is the little thing, the small thing, which Trump demands of his followers: To call hot cold. To call black white. To call wrong right.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s idea of “incommensurability” strikes me as relevant here. If all moral claims are merely “emotive” — statements about ourselves rather than the nature of reality — then there is no way to argue between them.

* * *

Trump is the emotivist par excellence. He holds no objective, abstract beliefs about the meaning of justice or duty. He approves of things that help him and disapproves of things that hurt him. There is no other moral grounding.

And in another column later that month, Gerson again:

Rather than shaping President Trump’s agenda in Christian ways, they [white evangelical Protestants] have been reshaped into the image of Trump himself. Or, more accurately, they have become involved in a political throuple with Trump and Fox News, in which each feeds the grievances and conspiracy thinking of the others.

The result has properly been called cultlike. For many followers, Trump has defined an alternative, insular universe of facts and values that only marginally resembles our own.

* * *

Thirty-one percent say there is almost nothing that Trump could do to forfeit their approval. This is preemptive permission for any violation of the moral law or the constitutional order. It is not support; it is obeisance.

In January 2022, Democratic strategist Paul Begala pointed out that Republicans no longer have a political ideology apart from Trump. In 2006, "16 G.O.P. senators...voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act," yet now in 2022, those same senators are blocking that same legislation, because now they see that, if USAmericans vote, then Trump cannot win. They no longer have political beliefs (if they ever did); more obviously, they have Trumpism.

But what are the aims?

If Trumpism is a cult, what is its ideology and what are its goals?

Perhaps none. In June 2018, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker said: "It's becoming a cultish thing, isn't it?" He elaborated that this is "an administration that wakes up every day on an ad hoc basis just making stuff up as they go along with no coherency to it".

"You just can’t," Charles M. Blow wrote in the New York Times on June 20, 2018, "construct prisons for babies. You can’t rip children from mothers and fathers. You can’t use the power of the American government to institute and oversee a program of state-sponsored child abuse. You can’t have a system where the process and possibility of reunification is murky and maybe futile." Complaining that "although two-thirds of Americans overall opposed the policy, a majority of Republicans supported it," he offered this diagnosis: "That to me goes beyond standard political tribalism. That ventures into the territory that the Tennessee Republican senator Bob Corker described last week: This is cultlike." Indeed: "Not even the sight of devastated families could move the party that once called itself the party of family values. Not even the idea of 'tender age' internment camps for babies could move the party built on the protection of 'unborn babies.'"

Andrew Sullivan wrote in May 2020:

Tribalism is now not just one force in American politics, it’s the overwhelming one, and tribalism abhors reality if it impugns the tribe. But you can’t have both tribalism and public health...What we are seeing is whether this tribalism can be sustained even when it costs tens of thousands of lives, even when it means exposing yourself to a deadly virus, even when it is literally more important than your own life. We are entering the Jonestown phase of the Trump cult this summer.

What is a cult?

"The concept of cult was implicit in the work of Howard Becker on spiritualism, who described cult in terms of an ‘amorphous, loose-textured, uncondensed type of social structure ... is that of purely personal ecstatic experience, salvation, comfort and mental or physical healing’ (Von Wiese & Becker cited in Nelson, 1968). Becker’s interpretation formed the basis of the definition provided by J. Milton Yinger (1957, cited in Nelson, 1968), who maintained that a cult is normally a small, short-lived group, developed around the personality of a charismatic leader."
— Lisa Sugiura, The Incel Rebellion: The Rise of the Manosphere and the Virtual War Against Women (2021), open access.

Aside: According to a 2023 CNN story, "an unincorporated area of Volusia County, [Florida,] Cassadaga is home to the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp, a community founded around the religious movement Spiritualism that is 'based upon the principle of continuous life demonstrated through Mediumship,' according to the camp’s official press kit."

Mary Midgley wrote in the early 1980s that Nazism lacked any consistent ideology except for hatred of Jews.

"In general, then, there are strong objections to viewing all wrongdoers as mad, as well as strong temptations to do it, and for many cases people do not find this explanation plausible. In these cases, however, another strategy often comes into play to make the offence look intelligible. This is to credit the offenders with having a complete morality of their own, which, for them, justifies their actions. This idea leads people to suppose that (for instance) the Nazis must have been original reasoners, with an independent, consistent and well-thought-out ethical theory — a view which their careers and writings do not support at all. As Hannah Arendt points out, at the Nuremburg trials the lack of this much-advertised commodity became painfully obvious. 'The defendants accused and betrayed each other and assured the world that they 'had always been against it'....Although most of them must have known that they were doomed, not a single one of them had the guts to defend the Nazi ideology.' This was not just from a failure of nerve, though that in itself would be significant in a movement apparently devoted to the military virtues. It was also because there was not really much coherent ideology that could be defended. The only part of it which carried real passionate conviction was emotional and destructive; it was the hatred of the Jews. This always remained constant, but almost every other element varied according to the audience addressed and the political possibilities of the moment. The enemy might be Communism or capitalism, the elite or the rabble, France or Russia or the Weimar government, just as interest dictated at the time. It was therefore hard to say much that was positive and constructive about the aims of the regime. Germany was to expand, but why it would be a good thing that it should do so remained obscure." (Mary Midgley. Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay. (First published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.) Kindle edition: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.)

The inevitable observation is that Nazism did not need a complex ideology to be very dangerous, not only to Jews, but to other identity groups and vulnerable people and to foreign and domestic government institutions.

Political cults may be prone to fail ultimately since, as Cheeseman and Klaas write, "the electorate is often deeply cynical about politicians. For all the capacity of presidents to build personality cults, citizens are generally skeptical about the motivations of political leaders and their ability and determination to deliver on their promises." (Nicholas Cheeseman and Brian Klaas. How to Rig an Election. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2018.)

Jeremy W. Peters interviewed several Trump supporters for the New York Times in a June 23, 2018 article. One woman said that “overblown” criticism from the left “makes me angry at them, which causes me to want to defend him [Trump] to them more." A man said: "He’s not a perfect guy; he does some stupid stuff. But when they’re hounding him all the time it just gets old. Give the guy a little.” Another woman said: "It bothers me that he doesn’t tell the truth, but I guess I kind of expect that, and I expect that from the media, too — not to always tell the truth or to slant it one way." And another man described hearing criticism more as a visceral rather than intellectual experience: "It’s kind of like when you experience a sensation over and over and over again. A sensation is no longer a sensation. It’s just, 'Oh, here we are again.'" Other people emphasized the responsibility of immigrants for their own fate — "I think it’s terrible about the kids getting split up from their parents. But the parents shouldn’t have been here" — or of the left for their comments and activism — “It’s just incredible what the nation is trying to do to disrupt this president and his agenda." A high school student said: "I have a fair bit of skepticism toward him [Trump]. But I feel like he is trying his best."

The next morning, Tom Nichols threaded his tweets: "The NYT piece on Trump supporters digging in is why I said, well over a year ago, that there was no way to reason with them. There is no level of moral collapse or political incompetence they will not defend. The question is why. ... They double-down because they know that even if they win, they lose. They're desperately trying to recapture a world that doesn't exist, and never did. That old lady crying for Trump?" — here, Nichols referred to a June 21 MSNBC interview — "She knows it's over. The world she once loved - or thought she did - isn't coming back. ... This explains a lot of the fury, I think, and why Trumpers are the angriest winners in American political history. They won, but they know it doesn't mean anything, and they double down out of shame and fear. What choice is there? ... when people are ashamed of themselves, they double down. The people in the NYT story *know*. They *know*. But once you defend the indefensible, there's no climb-down. That's why there's no point in trying to reason with them." (tweets 1, 3, 5, 7) In response to a comment, Nichols added: "We are no longer a virtuous country. The rest is just the endgame." Cesar Falson commented: "It’s like being lost when you’re driving and never wanting to admit being lost so you double down and make things worse. But then again, the easy answer is this is just cultish behavior." Another commenter said: "They tend to be authoritarians. They believe they are right because they are in a position of authority, i.e., white, esp. white male. Being right can be largely unrelated to facts to them. It's the evangelical way which is why his infidelities don't bother them, authority wins."

The Cult of Trump by Steven Hassan is a book about "the persuasiveness, not cultishness, of Trump, written by a cult expert," according to an interview with the author. Hassan said:

My definition of a destructive cult is an authoritarian pyramid-structured group, with a section in recruitment and mind control on the people it recruits and indoctrinates to be dependent and obedient. So, for me, the designation of “cult” includes Trump being a malignant narcissist, which is the stereotypical profile of cult leaders. I parallel his behaviors with people like Jim Jones, L. Ron Hubbard, and other cult leaders.

The overall formula of a cult is that the members are indoctrinated into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil version of reality, where they are not thinking for themselves, they’re not thinking with their consciences, they’re cut off from other forms of information that question their indoctrination. In fact, they’re explicitly punished if they listen to the other side.

He added: "A lot of people are going to wake up one day from what they were supporting with Trump and realize how they have been taken. At that point, there’s going to be a lot of upset, angry, ashamed, and embarrassed people."

In April 2020, Chauncey Devega interviewed Hassan for "The Truth Report." Hassan explained that "Trump was trained to be a magical thinker as a child" because of his association with the church of Norman Vincent Peale. "It’s been described as a type of solipsistic reality where Trump defines his own world and what is real or not...In this way of thinking, if Trump says the coronavirus pandemic is just going to somehow get better then it is going to happen. And when that does not happen, then Trump can deny ever saying such a thing, blame the Chinese, the Democrats or anyone else, instead of just saying he was wrong." Although "right now it is premature to say that Donald Trump leads a death cult," Hassan said, as in that type of cult the president would be "telling the followers to kill themselves" or saying "it does not matter if those people who are not in the death cult die," his cult would be a death cult when "the coronavirus pandemic overwhelms the health care system." But even confronting the death of family members and friends may not prompt people to leave the death cult, as "the cult part of their psyche is going to say it was their time [to die]. If Trump’s followers are religious, they will simply rationalize it as the dead are going to a better place in heaven."

In June 2022, Hassan was interviewed by Chauncey DeVega. He said: "My thesis was completely confirmed after Jan. 6 [2021] and all the efforts by the GOP to avoid being held accountable for their role in Trump's coup attempt." He reflected:

"As I began to do the research for my book, it became very clear to me that he would not have been elected president if not for the thousands of new apostolic reformation ministers supporting him and then telling their millions of followers to believe in Trump as someone doing the work of God. They represent a right-wing Christian religious movement that does not believe in equality under the law, or in civil rights for women and those not of their faith. These right-wing Christian leaders want to destroy any type of organized effort to advance liberty and freedom and knowledge. Trump as a cult leader and authoritarian is a perfect fit for their beliefs."

Regarding Trump's power over Christians, Hassan said:

"The biggest single bloc of true believers are the members of right-wing Christian fundamentalist churches and other groups. These are authoritarian religions where the members believe that their pastor is an apostle who is directly connected to God and getting direct revelations.

If the pastor says, "God wants Trump," you're going to believe in Trump. If the pastor says, "God gave me a revelation where we are now following Ron DeSantis. God's taken the blessing away from Donald Trump," then those people are going to blindly follow DeSantis. Why? Because they're already in a mind-control cult."

Ashley Smith is the cofounder of the "Reopen NC" movement. Her husband, Adam Smith, posted Facebook Live videos on May 22, 2020 that threatened: "But are we willing to kill people? Are we willing to lay down our lives? We have to say, ‘Yes.’ We have to say, ‘Yes.’ Is that violence? Is that terrorism? No, it’s not terrorism. I’m not trying to strike fear in people by saying, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ I’m gonna say, ‘If you bring guns, I’m gonna bring guns. If you’re armed with this, we’re going to be armed with this.’" He added, as Raw Story put it, "that he feels called by God and by his understanding of the Constitution to prepare for a violent showdown." He calls himself a "constitutionalist" and said that the lockdown situation "is a test. This is seeing if we are ready to accept the mark of the beast, if we are ready to accept this New World Order system they want to implement over humanity."

Selected tweets from a 5 June 2019 thread:

On August 21, 2019, the "King of Israel" tweets happened.

This interpretation:

If you want to learn more about QAnon, try this episode from Patrick Farnsworth's "Last Born in the Wilderness." It's the August 12, 2020 episode: "Jared Yates Sexton: QAnon — A License to Fascistic Impulses." If you only have one minute, listen especially to 10:30 – 11:30. "QAnon is an interactive supernatural New World Order," Jared Yates Sexton says, which "gives people who are powerless the sensation of having power, which is part of a cult."