Biden, Harris, and the return of grace

Nine days after Dylann Roof, a young, rabid, white racist, opened fire at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine worshippers, President Barack Obama delivered a eulogy that concluded with Obama singing a moving rendition of Amazing Grace.

It had been a cowardly attack. Before Roof began his murderous rampage, he had sat among the congregation without drawing a challenge despite not being a member of the church. By the time Obama delivered his speech, members of the church had said that they forgave Roof. Amazing grace.

Today, as I watch the departure of Donald Trump from the White House, I wonder how this country went from amazing grace to amazing disgrace in a historical eye-blink.

Trump leaves a country being devastated by a deadly disease he declined to combat instead adopting policies guaranteed to let it run wild. After four years of preaching bigotry and hatred, he leaves a country, always divided along the fault lines of race and ethnicity, radically more at odds with itself than ever. After three years of bragging about a mediocre and lop-sided economic recovery that his predecessor sparked, in the fourth year he chose to sacrifice lives on the altar of the economy, and that resulted in a horrific death toll and a terrible economy. He flies out of a capital in a virtual state of siege to prevent another insurrection of extremists like the one Trump incited to seize the presidency by force on December 6, 2020.

Trump is principally but not solely responsible for the disaster of the last four years. The Republican Party has been complicit in each and everyone of Trump’s outrages, apologists for all his crimes, echo chambers for all his lies.

You can boil down who the Republicans are and what they stand for with a single number: 87. That is the percentage of Republicans who in a recent poll approve of Donald Trump’s performance as president. After all that Donald Trump did to destroy lives, promote animosity, sow distrust in American institutions, and practice a politics devoid of empathy and decency.

That leads to the inevitable conclusion that the Republican Party that enabled Trump’s abyssal presidency—its leaders as well as its rank and file—is utterly irredeemable.

It is not just that the people who still support Donald Trump must identify with or look past an abundance of the most abhorrent of human qualities: cruelty, greed, vanity, dishonesty, arrogance, ignorance, bigotry, cowardice. It is that they must also support policies that embody those very qualities, not just the hateful words that wound souls but the reprehensible actions—the sticks and stones that break bones.

Breaking apart families by force, a Nazi practice, and to do it by cruelly tearing children from the arms of their parents, then caging both children and parents in separate, often distant facilities under deplorable facilities, resulting in deaths and lifetime psychological traumas.

Further enriching the already rich through ridiculously low taxes that rationalize cutting virtually every strand of a safety net already so rent that cancer patients, hungry children, the disabled, and the old can fall through it. The Robin Hood in reverse approach characteristic of Republican policies for decades that Donald Trump supercharged and expanded. Sacrificing the lives of more than 400,00 Americans to Covid-19 on the altar of profit, the stock market, the mirage of a great economy, the lust for continuing in power.

That is Donald Trump but not just Donald Trump. It is the Republican Party. Polls show that most Republicans believe the election was stolen through fraud. And that is after dozens and dozens of court cases that found no fraud; many reviews and recounts by electoral officials, Democrat and Republican; the refusal by a Republican-leaning Supreme Court to even hear the conspiracy theorists’ non-existent case; and the official certification of the Electoral College votes by Congress.

How can so many people disbelieve clear and overwhelming evidence and subscribe to an alternative reality considered bizarre and implausible by most everyone outside the Trump cult?

There are at least two interacting factors that contribute to this delusional mindset. One is what some psychologists call “motivated opinion.” People tend to believe what they want to believe. People not only root for the home team but believe it will win, giving it significantly better odds of victory than, for instance, disinterested Las Vegas oddsmakers.

A different example: What evidence is there for the existence of the thousands of deities worshipped by thousands of millions of people who have lived since humans evolved into their present form? In 1923, H.L. Mencken, a consummate cynic, asked what had happened to all the Gods that once were eminent, feared or revered and had gone “down the chute.”

What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of: Reseph, Astoreth, Astarte, El, Neho, Melek, Isis, Anubis, Shalem, Sharrab, Amon-Re, Schek, Anath, Baal, Hadad, Nergal. Ninih, Ahijah, Ptah, Addu, Dagon, Yau, Osiris, Molech…?

The second factor is social. People tend to interact with others like them. Among white American voters, 57 percent voted for Trump. The social circle of white Trump voters is more circumscribed than that of all white voters. Male white Protestant voters without a college degree were the group most likely to have voted for Trump. These people live in the same neighborhoods, hang out in the same bars, play softball or tinker with cars or hunt or fish together, attend barbecues or potluck dinners with their neighbors. They reinforce their common ideas and the prejudices. In such an environment, one can see how a strong sentiment can take hold that Trump must have won the election and the official result must have been a “steal.” Didn’t I and nearly all my friends and acquaintances vote for him? How could he lose?

These two forces interact and reinforce each other. Belief is bolstered by desire and confirmed by group agreement. This provides insight into the psychosocial dynamics of support for Trump. But what is the source of a given disposition or belief, e.g., favoring Trump or believing he did a good job as president? I will explore that in a later column.

Now, as I write this, as President Joe Biden delivers the inaugural address, it is a time for celebration for the hope of a return to that amazing grace.