The high cost of being a sheep
He called his base mindless robots, and they cheered the observation. Somehow it never occurred to most of his original and most faithful followers that he'd insulted them.
The past four years have been a depressing confirmation of his claim. By no means do I believe that every supporter of Mr. Trump is a mindless robot, especially since he actually became the Republican nominee four years ago. I am dismayed by the degree to which Republicans generally have joined the club, and while I don't understand it I draw no equation between the majority of the GOP who supports Mr. Trump and the man's original, ultra low-information base back when he made his comment about shooting people on Fifth Avenue.
But that base has always been rather cultlike. His most devoted followers- his base- continue to accept proven falsehood ever proven falsehood from the man and insist no matter what the evidence that it is the truth. Mr. Trump can insult our allies, expose a Mossad asset just so that he can brag about his knowledge to Russian diplomats, claim with open disregard for American economic history that trade wars are "easy to win" and ruining Midwestern farmers wholesale through his ill-advised trade war with China, openly side with our nation's strategic enemies against it, gratuitously libel people on Twitter, misquote opponents and even people he has simply misunderstood after the misunderstanding has been corrected, display a lack of knowledge when it comes to American history, economics, geopolitics, and virtually every subject his job requires him to be acquainted with that would cause a junior high school student to flunk, speak in a lush, green, nonstop verbal salad whose gist is often hard to follow even while accusing Joe Biden of being inarticulate, generally embarrass himself and lie with total abandon (often contradicting himself moments later), and his supporters will blame the media will insisting that he, himself, is right.
The disconnect between reality and TrumpWorld is generally startling, and inexplicable to the rest of us. The base believes whatever the man says, and disbelieves anything critical of him regardless of the evidence; the mainstream Republicans who support him might admit that something he says or does or even is could be less than ideal, but they'll find some way to excuse or at least minimize it.
As a Christian, I can understand the support of Mr. Trump by evangelicals and those concerned with the cultural direction of our civilization, at least at one level. Ethical mores that have prevailed for centuries are suddenly undergoing radical change, often seemingly without anything remotely resembling adequate conversation and reflection, and seem to be imposed on the rest of us by cultural elites. The increasing disregard for religious freedom on the cultural left is alarming. Personal beliefs regarding sexual ethics are somehow transmuted into outright bigotry toward those biologically inclined to certain behaviors (they are obviously not the same thing) while a failure to embrace radical and highly controversial approaches to matters like gender and sexual identity is enough to cause people to be culturally "canceled," with catastrophic economic and personal consequences. A disturbing tendency to reduce our Constitution's guarantee of freedom of religion to mere "freedom of worship," effectively confining it to the space between the walls of our places of worship, characterized the apparent attitude of the previous administration, and the prevailing failure of those on the left to comprehend the historical relationship between the religious convictions of Christians and others and social reforms such as the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement and the institution of child labor laws and even opposition to the war in Vietnam has resulted in the emergence of the strange and dangerous notion that the very religious origin of an idea or the religious motivation of some of its adherents rules it out of place in a pluralistic society. It's as if there was a general failure among those who consider themselves "progressives" to understand that all of those movements had succeeded precisely because their appeal went beyond sectarian religious convictions to enlist the support of large numbers of Americans who did not share those religious beliefs. Oddly, the point that no political idea based solely on the religious beliefs of a minority has any chance of adoption in a society most of whose members do not share them seems not to occur to those who seem absolutely convinced that the "religious right" is somehow trying to impose its sectarian beliefs on the rest of us!
Such motivations do, in fact, exist in a small and aberrant faction of the religious right. But the ascription of them to all or even most of those whose religious convictions find political expression bespeaks a strange and profoundly illiberal bigotry on the cultural left, as well as an embarrassing lack of thoughtfulness. It shouldn't be hard to understand how falsely blaming so many Americans of attempting to impose their beliefs on others merely by advocating them can be understood by those Americans as actually an attempt to suppress their beliefs by secularists intent on imposing their own, with no opportunity for debate or discussion.
American Christians are not persecuted, and any suggestion to that effect is absurd. But a strange kind of unreflective prejudice on the left does treat ideas and beliefs that are religious in origin but not necessarily in inherent substance in a profoundly prejudicial and authoritarian way, seeking to defeat them not by presenting counter-arguments but by silencing them and denying them the legitimacy they deserve and the right to be debated on their secular merits.
I became a Republican when the Iowa Democratic Party denied its gubernatorial nomination in 1990 to Tom Miller, the state's popular attorney general and the only Democrat with a chance of winning the election solely because Miller, a Catholic, is pro-life. It didn't matter that Miller has impeccable liberal credentials otherwise; a single departure from orthodoxy was enough for Iowa's Democrats to essentially throw the election to Terry Branstad.
But now, Mr. Trump's consistent determination to put the economy ahead of human lives and re-open the economy full-bore regardless of the risk to the health of the four in ten Americans above the age of 18 who are at increased risk of death from COVID due to age or pre-existing health conditions has deprived him of any claim to be "pro-life," and the embrace of his position by the Republican Party and his base have deprived them of the ethical high ground on this issue. However loudly Mr. Trump's supporters may criticize the Democrats' position on abortion, the Republican Party now has no more claim to being pro-life than the Democrats do.
I can easily understand why Mr. Trump's vocal commitment to religious liberty, his opposition to abortion, and his general cultural conservatism appeal to Christians. Yet Mr. Trump's Christian supporters seem oblivious not only to the ethical implications of his consistently dishonest and life-endangering approach to the pandemic but to the fact that in embracing Mr. Trump they have expressed the unmistakable belief that constant lying, slander, bullying, self-centeredness, cruelty, a lack of compassion or empathy, vulgarity, hypocrisy, mistreatment of women, ethnic and religious bigotry, what must at the very least be described as insensitivity to racism and the treatment of minorities generally, personal corruption, and a political identity rooted firmly in creating and exploiting animosity and division among us are all compatible with the following of Jesus Christ. They appear to have little if any comprehension of the damage their reflexive and seemingly automatic support of Mr. Trump has done to their witness to the Gospel or the degree to which it has brought Jesus into disrepute.
His mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic has been possibly the most damaging arena for Mr. Trump's nonstop mendacity. He confirmed to Bob Woodward what we already knew from those familiar with the content and timing of is briefings: that he was made aware in a timely fashion of the seriousness of the novel coronavirus, its mode of transmission, the threat posed by its outbreak, and the advice of our best epidemiologists, yet continued during the critical early stages of the pandemic to minimize its danger, comparing it to the flu and suggesting that it would simply and suddenly vanish of its own accord before it could do much damage. His failure to plan for and administer a coordinated national response to the emergency is the single glaring difference between the American experience of COVID-19 and that of the rest of the developed world, amply explaining why it has been such an unprecedented disaster in the one country on the planet perhaps best suited to deal with it. And at the same time, he has continually disseminated misinformation and downright lies about the pandemic which may have cost as many lives as his maladministration of the nation's response to the virus.
That social distancing and the wearing of masks in public greatly reduce the transmission of the virus is simply not in dispute among doctors and epidemiologists. Yet he flaunts social distancing, wears a mask in public only occasionally, and has made contempt for social distancing and mask-wearing virtually synonymous with supporting him. A large percentage of the American people refuse to take common-sense precautions against the spread of COVID-19 because he has discouraged them both in his rhetoric and by example. He has called their effectiveness into question and highlighted the position of a tiny number of quacks and medical crackpots who claim, contrary to the preponderance of the evidence and the overwhelming consensus of the medical community that such measures are not effective to the point at which an incredible and disturbing percentage of the American people are under the mistaken impression that there is any serious controversy about their effectiveness!
Masks are less effective than some think at protecting the wearer from contracting the virus from others. But there is no doubt about their effectiveness in preventing the transmission of the virus to others. And in a pandemic in which a huge percentage of those who carry the virus and perhaps most of those who transmit it have no symptoms and are unaware of the fact that they have it, the result cannot help but be catastrophic.
Matters of settled science upon which the very lives of large numbers of people depend are treated by social and religious organizations and to a shocking degree by the public generally as matters of opinion upon which reasonable people may differ. My own church body, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, is doubtless justified in cautioning its members against judging one another concerning people's attitudes toward the wearing of masks. But there seems among us a dangerous corollary: the assumption that it is or can be permissible to risk the lives of others even if it's done without malice, simply because one is dangerously misinformed.
The Fifth Commandment (the Sixth, for most Protestants) is not an adiaphoron, a matter of moral indifference! Once again, the witness of the Church is being compromised. People's lives are being endangered and even lost by treating the wearing of masks as a mere matter of personal taste.
It's the farmers who in many cases have been hurt financially and even put out of business by the trade war with China. It's the workers, no matter what color the collar they wear, who have lost their jobs because the American economy has taken a bigger and likely more long-lasting hit than those of other industrialized nations because Mr. Trump has not only failed to lead us in a coordinated response to the virus but has contributed to our failure to contain it by actively working against efforts to contain it who have been injured. Many of them voted for Mr. Trump last time out because they thought they had a champion in him, a leader who would look out for their interests. They were wrong.
It's American conservatives who somehow find themselves enthusiastically supporting a spendthrift administration on whose watch the national debt is on the brink of exceeding our GNP and whose vaunted commitment to the Constitution has somehow permitted them to remain in uncritical support of a president who not only seeks to intimidate journalists and individuals who oppose his policies but who has repeatedly called for blatantly unconstitutional measures censuring the press and restricting free speech, who admires and embraces foreign dictators and authoritarian leaders, and whose alleged commitment to the rule of law, to personal ethics, and to customary standards of personal behavior is belied by their adamant support of a president who flaunts them. They have been transformed in undeniable reality into the very stereotypes their political opponents portray them as being.
It's American Christians who have so closely identified their faith with the support of Mr. Trump that they have not only given credence to the stereotypes of the Faith by secularists but have turned the defense of the very opposite of the attitudes and characteristics demanded by Jesus into virtual matters of confession.
It is Americans who love our country who have seen it become the laughingstock of the world and be exploited by the very other nations from whose exploitation Mr. Trump promised to protect us because of his naive ignorance and unwillingness to listen to the advice of those better informed.
It is a nation desperately in need of healing that instead is being torn further apart by an administration whose entire strategy for maintaining power is to make us afraid of each other, to exploit our divisions, and to make them worse.
It is a people who deserve so much better who have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by an incompetent con man who has no idea what he's doing, says whatever comes into his head, and who has openly boasted that he could commit murder in broad daylight without losing any votes.
Some 200,000 of us have already died as a result of COVID-19. It would be going much too far to blame Mr. Trump for all of those deaths. But his incompetence and his cynical policies and pronouncements against his own knowledge and better judgments have without any possibility of doubt resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands who otherwise would have lived.
The problem with being a sheep is that sheep get slaughtered. It's time for us to start refusing to be sheep anymore and refuse to re-elect the butcher. Edward Purcell has some thoughts on the matter today in The Hill. I commend them to you.
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