Trump (and the GOP) May Have Surrendered
But America Isn’t Trump.
Trump sucks. But he is not America.
And, make no mistake, he is no Idiot. Nor are his followers. Trump is something else. Something far scarier. He is a Hateful God. He has found a pitch that resonates with the worst reptilian instincts of his most fervent followers.
In my November 2015 article, The Selective Dissonance of Hateful Gods, I described why it sometimes appears so baffling for certain individuals to behave in such a hateful, self-defeating way while still claiming moral superiority. The issue here is not a matter of intelligence or denial, it is a matter of ideology and perspective.
In the hearts and minds of his followers, Trump is actualizing a reality that resonates so deeply with their world view that it dwarfs all other dangers and concerns including viruses and the death of our Democracy.
It wasn’t Trump’s fallacies but his frequencies, dog whistles and all, that made his siren song so transfixing.
That is how we got here, that is why certain GOP leaders and followers are still acting counter to their own human interests.
But what now?
In Chinese, the word for “crisis” is a combination of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity”. This single idea captures the duality of all events. Even when things seem the absolute sh*ttiest they’ve ever been, there’s always another face to the crisis, however hard it may be to identify at first.
We need to find the opportunity in this crisis right now. We need to find the opportunity on the other side of danger. We need to VOTE.
Trump will try to steal the election. The GOP has shown all their cards and they are in the end game now. No take backs, no mulligans. They are playing for keeps, or as Bill Barr said:
F*ck Bill Barr. First step to turn this around is to use what’s left of what made America special and vote his ass out of office. They will shut down polling sites. They will purge voters. They will distract and incite. We need to get out the vote and take back both the White House and our compromised Senate by such large margins that any GOP reindeer games will struggle to flip them.
We have to right this wrong and turn this crisis into an opportunity.
If we are able to get past this hurdle in November, we still have a hell of a lot of work to do. We have to close loopholes in our election rules (f*ck Citizens United and gerrymandering), we need to win back the EPA and other agencies that have been gutted and turned into bizarro film negatives of their former selves, we need to put additional guardrails on future elected officials including term limits on Congress. We need to rejoin the Paris Treaty. We need to release detained migrants and their families. We need to pass legislation on the use of deadly force by police officers and ban chokeholds. We need to make sure that, if RBG retires, a partisan hack does not replace her.
This is just the starter list. Obviously, this is far more than four years of work, each of these is the work of a generation, but that is what we have before us.
We have now laid bare the underbelly of America. It is perhaps far uglier than we had ever imagined, but at least we know it now. What we know, we can fight.
We must fight for our opportunity to turn this around. Take this crisis and the real danger that it will inflict upon your family and loved ones, whether they are on the front lines in a hospital or Afghanistan, and use that energy to fight. To canvas, to register to vote, to talk to your neighbors.
We need to take this negative energy all around us and channel it into a motivation as many have already done, to march in the streets and make our voices heard.
Don’t just succumb to the idea that it is Idiocy at the root of all of this. It’s not. The root of this is the resonance of a terrifying world view. That’s what we have to fight against with tooth and claw. Idiocy can be laughed at. We can blame schooling or a state of denial on Idiocy. This is not about schooling but about a battle of ideas and world views.
This battle starts not in the streets but first in your own heart and mind. Will you surrender as well?
A.H. Chu is a technologist, entrepreneur and author. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia Business School and has been featured on MSNBC. Quality Works is a collection of works that explore philosophy, business, education and society at large.
