I think everyone I know personally and in real life is a MAGA. Many of them are friends, some of them very good friends.
When my partner had a stroke a neighbor lady helped us get through it, including driving us up to the hospital on a Sunday, dressed in her Sunday best, when he had a relapse. But she is an extreme fundamentalist Christian, a total anti-vaxxer, and (among other things) brags about her favorite vacations when she travels down to see the Ark exhibit.
But she is a good, solid friend and I do owe her my life.
Most of the people here are honestly good people. Some better than others, some maybe not much good at all, but they are not rabid, core evil. And yet they support a man an a political movement that is evil evil, evil. I have no explanation for it.
I am not an expert, but I believe in Buddhism the soul, whatever it is- the thing that reincarnates- is not a single entity as such but a mass of desires, fears, and emotions that pass on from body to body. The goal is not to save that single, pure immortal entity but to unravel all of those emotions so that the Pure Self of the Universal Mind of God can be the only thing left (I am sure I am mutilating this and any Buddhist reading this is probably cringing right now.)
By this theory it would be relatively easy to say that these good persons who have become Trump supporters just have a new emotion in the mix, something nasty and dangerous has become stuck to their random ball of seeming identity.
But in the West we generally have the idea of spirit entities, souls, and immortal nonphysical beings. Each of these persons is not just a jumbled mix of impulses all stuck together almost at random, they are the Thing in Itself, their own irreducible unique image of God that will live forever.
Something I find interesting in the Gospels and in Acts is the possession and casting out of devils theme. Modern Christians don’t talk about it much (in my Methodist Sunday school lessons it wasn’t mentioned once, that I recall.) The idea of demons and demon possession are sort of shifted to the background in modern, mainstream Protestantism.
I am not suggesting that possession is real or true so anyone who is preparing to jump on for my primitivism can calm down.
I just find it interesting that the early Christians considered possession such a casual thing. Not only common, but often temporary and transient.
When Judas was offended by Jesus and, apparently, became committed in his mind to betray him, it is said that the devil entered into him. Not that he was constantly possessed by the devil or anyone else, but that the devil possessed him at that moment to do a certain, single deed.
And when Jesus’ detractors spoke against him they said he had a devil as if that were a common explanation for specific acts.
The parable of the person who has their devil driven out and do not replace it with something else gets re-possessed, and by more than one devil.
What I am trying to get at, here, is not the supernaturalistic theory of demons wandering the world in spirit form, crawling into unwary, relatively empty physical bodies, but of the openness of many to demonic thoughts, impulses, and desires. Much like the Buddhist idea of the apparent unitary self as a mix of different mental, emotional, or spirit impulses.
I think to some extent this is what is happening with my friends who are overwhelmed by Trump. I am not trying to minimize it or to excuse these people, They have much good in them but they have opened themselves to something dark, dangerous, and malevolent. It is as if their original, good selves have been attacked by a sort of parasite (I am speaking metaphorically; of course I am not speaking of spirit forces, unless one believes that a thought is a thing.)
What deeply concerns me is where this will lead. We are headed into dark and dangerous waters and frankly I believe that there is an increasing chance that we will be able to defeat Trump and the forces allied with him only by violence. I wish I did not believe that but I do.
The question is, if it calls for it, what do we do with the people who are good and decent at heart but have been brainwashed by this horrible doctrine?
Of course this comes up in every struggle, in every war and in every battle. The enemy opposed to us has been indoctrinated and in many cases forced to take up arms against us by a villain who hides in the background.
But these are our friends, neighbors, and relatives. They are being possessed by this dark and evil force.
Do we harm the hostages? Will we have to in order to save our democracy?
Dark times ahead. I fear for our democracy, and our humanity.
-
I should add here, in case anyone might misunderstand, that I am not advocating violence AT ALL. In fact very much the opposite. This is simply an intellectual exercise using our current situation as an example.