This is a response to Kos’s article, “Why men are a problem for Democrats—and what we can do about it”, wherein he discusses the problem we have where men are less and less interested in what we offer as Democrats and are instead focusing on the more and more overt racism and other bigotry offered by Trump and his Republicans.
I read over a number of the comments, and saw a lot of the usual responses, both those that make excuses and those that refuse to accept those excuses. And I couldn’t help but wonder how people arguing with each other in the comments does anything about the actual problem we face. That got me to thinking about why men are becoming more likely to support Trump’s authoritarianism, and that led me to a seemingly obvious conclusion that I still somehow missed all this time — one I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of other people have missed as well — that racism is an addiction.
All the signs are there: People get hooked on it, it changes the way they think, and they’ll overlook just about anything as long as they get to ‘indulge’ in it. And they will ruin themselves and anyone in reach as they keep feeding their addiction.
I say this not to make excuses for racism addicts (and their close cousins, rage addicts), but to make the point that addiction isn’t a problem that can be solved by expecting addicts to be better people, or to figure out how much harm they’re doing to themselves and others, or to exercise sufficient willpower and determination to overcome it on their own. If those things were enough to do the trick we’d have no such thing as addiction in the first place.
Both my parents were smokers who successfully overcame their addictions, but they didn’t do it on their own; they had people and tools which helped them to be strong, and reasons (their children) to stay strong. My dad, for example, kept a closed jar with the last cigarette butts he ever smoked on the advice of others, so any time he was tempted to just light up one more cigarette, he took a sniff of that first. It disgusted him enough that he never relapsed. My mom had more trouble but after my youngest sibling was born she was able to finally overcome it for good. Neither of them ever smoked again after that point — but the dregs of their shared addiction were something they had to cope with ever since.
I’ve personally overcome a rage addiction caused by things that were done to me when I was very young (and exacerbated by how I responded to those things), but it was a struggle that took me decades and only started because I suddenly came face to face with the consequences of my continued indulgence in my own addiction when I was fairly young (think twelve). And, like my parents, it’s not something I could have overcome on my own. I had friends and counselors who helped me, and reasons to stop indulging. It’s still something I struggle with on occasion, thankfully one that is becoming less and less common.
As a country, we’ve never properly dealt with our racism addiction aside from pushing it underground and making it socially unacceptable to indulge in publicly. That didn’t stop people from doing so, but they were wrongly seen as aberrations rather than symptoms of an unaddressed problem. That status quo lasted until Trump walked down that escalator and tore away the curtain, giving the racism addicts permission to publicly indulge, and boy did they ever.
Ever since we’ve been struggling with how to respond to it. Too many of us thought we had become a better people, that we would side with our better angels, and so we lost the opportunity to put a stop to it before it got momentum behind it. Now it’s effectively rolling downhill, taking advantage of flaws in human nature to pick up speed, and even now too many of us aren’t willing to face facts. That’s not just the ones who buy into the rationalizations for why people support Trump, either; many of the ones who see that part clearly are still missing something critically important, which is:
People won’t stop indulging in their addiction to racism on their own. It doesn’t matter that their addiction is clearly harming them; their ‘need’ for more racism completely blinds them to the consequences they are setting themselves up to suffer from, just as surely as smokers don’t realize how much money they’re spending on their addiction or the health problems they’re setting themselves up to face down the line.
Especially not when Trump and the other right-wing grifters have every incentive to keep them addicted to racism and rage, because it gives them money and power. So we cannot afford to say that they can just figure it out on their own, because they almost certainly won’t, not unless something shocks them badly enough that they’re forced to reevaluate the direction they’re going in. That’s important enough to be worth repeating — most of them aren’t willing or able to fix this on their own.
Whether we like it or not — and I sure as hell don’t — our fates are tied to theirs. Most of us can’t just move to another country to get away from them, and even if we all could, that would just leave this country as a festering boil ready to pop and damage everything else. We can’t even hope to just ignore them and hope they go away, because that has not served us at all well ever since Trump was elected in the first place.
The “No Kings” protests were a good start, but it’s going to take more than just public protests to do something about this. Among other things, it’s going to take empathy for all the victims of Trump, including the ones addicted to what he’s selling them. Yes, that makes them part of the problem, but getting angry at and punishing people who are being controlled by their addictions won’t do a thing to prevent them from indulging in said addictions.
