There have been several diaries up in the past few days about the already infamous NYT poll showing Trump ahead in most of the battleground states. Most of the stories are about how we shouldn’t get upset, it’s way too early, polls aren’t so reliable, let’s not freak out (while some comments are doing exactly that). My concern is different.
Regardless of how accurate this particular poll may or may not be, regardless of how things may change, what this poll tells me is that a significant portion of the American citizenry, and especially the electorate (those citizens who show up to vote) has gone off the deep end. And they like it there.
Some of them want things to get worse, because that is another sign that Jesus is coming back (the premillennialists). Some may want things to get worse because it will pwn™ the “libs.” Many, far too many, actually think things were great under Trump and want him back for more. Some hate Biden and any and all Democrats. (These are not mutually exclusive categories.)
The common thread in all of these categories is that they ignore, even reject, reality.
This is enormously dangerous for the country and the planet. The United States remains (for now) the most powerful and influential nation on earth, and that kind of power means a responsibility to understand the world as it really is. We cannot afford the luxury of seeing the world according to a fantasy, whether that fantasy be political, economic, or religious (a point I’ll get back to shortly).
One major reason for how we got into this mess is the destruction, a deliberate one I believe, of public education. It was never all that great (I went through it in the ‘50s and ‘60s), but it was far better than it is now. Students sometimes learned how to think, to think critically, to question assumptions. That posed a danger to the powers that be (and those that wanted to be) who wanted obedient and unquestioning workers, not free and skeptical citizens.
Another factor, partially combined with the first one, is the rise of fundamentalist religion, mainly but not entirely a Christian one. (This is not to be confused with evangelicalism. Evangelicals, while generally conservative, are by no means monolithic; fundamentalists are a subset of evangelicals and they often clash. Both terms are also not all that precise.) Fundamentalists pose many dangers to our society, but the point I want to touch on here is their insistence that their religion, as they interpret it, trumps reality.
[Edit: Joe Burns in his comment below pointed out that racism is also a factor. That’s too complicated for a diary that’s already a bit long, but I realized it is important, and fits my theme, to point out that racism — the argument that a person is inherently superior or inferior to another simply by virtue of being of a certain race — is itself a fantasy. As is “race” itself; it’s an artificial and superficial designation. Oh yeah — sexism and misogyny too. Feel free to add to the list.]
I spent the last several years in full-time research on the growth and influence of Christianity (and Judaism), and one thing that stood out to me was religion’s resistance to reality. It took the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the grudging admission of the necessity of pluralism to break that resistance, and yet even now forces have gathered and grown to reject reality once again.
This is where that NYT poll scares me. It tells me that far too many Americans have agreed to follow a fantasy rather than deal with reality. It’s tempting: reality is messy, complex, has no easy or neat solutions, and sometimes no solution at all that will last for very long.
On one level, it doesn’t much matter whether we get Trump, whose fantasies are personal, or we get the likes of DeSantis or Mike Johnson, whose fantasies are truly religious ones of the sort that caused so much trouble and pain for the world in ages past. What this poll really tells me is that far too many Americans simply do not accept the real world.
We’ve always had people like that in the US. But never before have we had them in this number this close to power.