What if the election fails?
Not admitting what we are facing may destroy us
by Mike Meyer
The slide into insanity is frightening to watch at any level but particularly at the level of a nation state. Historical examples are tied to terrible actions and disastrous results for large chunks of humanity. With luck this means suffering and the ruin of lives for some extended period of time. Without luck it means brutality, death and destruction.
I think it is generally recognized that a major sequence of cultural and political system failures created the Trump presidency. That is understood by a majority of Americans has been repeatedly confirmed by polling over the last two years. The exact nature and sequence of errors will be debated historically for a long time.
While that majority has wrestled with amazement, fear, depression, and frustration at the presence of a clearly incompetent, mentally impaired, and morally disgusting individual in the presidency, most of that energy has been taken up by Trump himself. We’ve all learned a lot about pathological narcissists and their insatiable demand for attention and praise regardless of reality. If adequate praise and recognition is missing they simply invent it and force a small coterie of accomplices to support their delusion.
None of this is new. It is very well known. We still have some large part of that majority who maintain the hope that the election process this year and, ultimately in 2020, will begin to correct this error. Trump is only a symptom. Those counting on the past are about to hit the wall of reality.
That reality is a nation state in which something approaching 40% of the voting population has lost its grip on sanity. We are not ready for this realization. This cannot be. These are people like you and me. No. How can they be in this condition?
This reaction, and failure to admit what is happening in full public view, is very much a product of cultural errors that also created this situation. We do not accept most forms of mental illness as anything but just reward for morally failed individuals. We know that is not valid and we work to deal with it in our families and immediate communities but without a direct personal connection these people become the dreaded ‘others’.
Culturally we have maintained the mistaken, sometimes hidden, belief that these ‘others’ are the cause of social problems. Intellectually we work against that but the cultural definitions and assumptions have never been dealt with except as abstractions removed from us as people. The social pathology of a chosen people, American exceptionalism in this case, is historically tied to ethnicity and race as the default setting. The chosen people must always exclude the ‘others’.
This default setting can only be changed with conscious, focused effort socially and individually. That requires generations to change and retain the culture. Alternatively the culture is eliminated. Broad cultural thought on change has never been allowed in America. Rejection of that comes quickly as we are seeing. But only for a plurality.
Irony is a bitch. We know that what we are seeing among the problem Americans is the result of games being played on fear and ‘otherness’. The lowest form of politics that transfers blame on the ‘others’ on which we project our anger and blame for the failings that are affecting us. That has been a fundamental foundation of America since it’s long, slow, brutal European conquest and creation. That reality has never been accepted as what we are.
This ancestral, cultural, and political failure is now destroying America. The irony is that the majority know that the Trump minority has fallen prey to this old game but, yet, we can’t act because we cannot make white Americans an ‘other’ even though they have made themselves a major national problem that must be dealt with as a threat.
Yes, that would be falling into the same ancient trap that has caught the Trump supporters that have chosen to deny reality. Horribly this is linked to the historical memory of Nazi Germany. They were ordinary people, most of them. But they supported and did horrible things. And, maybe, many really didn’t see what was happening but looking away was a conscious act.
That required a profoundly difficult and continuing struggle with self awareness by the people of Germany after 1945 that continues to this day.
No, we are not yet at organized mass murder. But we are on the edge. We are still allowing our media to normalize a clearly illegitimate government that is dedicated to racism and criminal acts. There are only a few thousand deaths so far. How do we count? When does the count become too high?
When do we decide we must deal with the people organized to scream hatred at Trump’s “rallies” as a mental health problem that threatens the basic idea of America?
When an election becomes entangled in insanity and social pathology can we expect that to correct problems and restore national health? One of the two political parties has abandoned everything but racism and corruption. The people in power have abandoned truth and humanity for power and personal gain at any cost. The people who are supporting that are expecting to be rewarded. We know what that reward will include.
There is no future there.
