Many have struggled with trying to understand Trump's allure in the face of his moral degeneracy, his abject idiocy, and his anti-democratic impulses. It creates a degree of cognitive dissonance I can say personally I've never experienced. Here is one man's opinion I found compelling. My deepest apologies for the limited amount of the article I can paste due to board copywrite rules. It doesn't due the piece justice. Hopefully the theme comes through.
It was written by the NYT resident op-ed board conservative, David Brooks. For context, he begins by making reference to the notion NY will be a competitive state in the presidential race.
The Deep Source of Trump’s Appeal
The proximate answer of course is that many voters think Biden is too old. But that doesn’t explain why Trump was ahead even before the debate. It doesn’t explain why Trump’s candidacy is still standing after Jan. 6. It doesn’t explain why America is on the verge of turning in an authoritarian direction.
I’ve been trying to think through the deeper roots of our current dysfunction with the help of a new book by James Davison Hunter titled “Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis.” Hunter, a scholar at the University of Virginia, is (in my opinion) the nation’s leading cultural historian.
At the same time, science and reason failed to produce a substitute moral order that could hold the nation together. By 1981, in the famous first passage of his book “After Virtue,” the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued that we had inherited fragments of moral ideas, not a coherent moral system to give form to a communal life, not a solid set of moral foundations to use to settle disputes. Moral reasoning, he wrote, had been reduced to “emotivism.” If it feels right, do it. In 1987, Allan Bloom released his megaselling “The Closing of the American Mind,” arguing that moral relativism had become the dominant ethos of the era.
He goes on to say identity politics has filled the void of a lack of a cohesive moral order.
Was there anything that would fill this void of meaning? Was there anything that could give people a shared sense of right and wrong, a sense of purpose?
It turns out there was: identity politics. People on the right and the left began to identify themselves within a particular kind of moral story. This is the story in which my political group is the victim of oppression and other groups are the oppressors.
The problem with this form of all-explaining identity politics is that it undermines democracy. If others are evil and out to get us, then persuasion is for suckers.
In this climate, Hunter argues, “the authoritarian impulse becomes impossible to restrain.” Authoritarianism imposes a social vision by force. If you can’t have social solidarity organically from the ground up, then you can impose it from top down using the power of the state. This is the menace of Trumpism. If you read my recent interview with Steve Bannon, you’ll see that he talks like a character straight out of Hunter’s book.
The problem with identity politics becoming our moral system is that it undermines democracy.
www.nytimes.com
I have felt for a very long time Trump's popularity transcends politics. That Trumpery must have an appeal on a psychological level. Because nothing else I can think of could allow his supporters to ignore his glaring shortcomings as a person and a politician. And not just ignore his shortcomings, but deny objective truths like his direction of the conspiracy to block Biden's certification as prez and install himself as an un-elected leader.
There being a psychological component to his supporter's devotion explains its unshakable nature. An unique feature of his base never seen before in US history.
The vast majority of whom can not be persuaded the efforts to hold him accountable for his actions are not corrupt because they reject the idea he has ever done anything wrong. There is no way to deal with that.
