What Defines & Motivates America’s Right Is Intolerance

By JIM SMITH

In the past, I have joined other analysts in characterizing Trumpers and those Republicans who have fallen under his spell as driven by racism.

While racism is clearly a dominant theme, the larger theme motivating Trump Republicans, as I see it, is intolerance. (Note: Not all Republicans are alike in their opinions, just as not all Democrats are alike. Consider the following as reasoned generalizations.)

Republicans are intolerant of immigration, often railing against “white replacement” by people of color and the culture of diversity. Democrats see America as the “melting pot” and see immigrants as the people who built America from the beginning. Most of us are children of immigrants. My observation from studying first generation immigrants such as Jacob Riis, Nikola Tesla, Andrew Carnegie, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger and others, is that they are more driven to succeed and live the American dream and more appreciative of our freedoms and our free enterprise system than those of us who are, happily, in the position to take America’s freedom for granted.

Republicans are intolerant of government and taxation, whereas Democrats recognize the need for government and for taxes to fund government services. That doesn’t mean that Democrats accept corruption, malfeasance and waste in government, although Republicans often portray them that way. Democrats would like to minimize taxation, but not at the expense of important social services.

Republicans are intolerant of progressive taxation and “income redistribution,” whereas Democrats support higher tax rates for the wealthy and consider addressing poverty a matter of “social justice.” Republicans opposed Social Security until it was too popular.  They opposed Medicare and Medicaid until they were too popular. They opposed the Affordable Care Act, but that, too, is fading now that “Obamacare” is gaining in popularity. Democrats would move faster toward such things as universal healthcare, higher minimum wages, and other social justice issues, but Republicans still get political mileage (for now) by labeling such efforts “a radical socialist agenda.” If voters understood and appreciated how such policies would benefit them and have made the Scandinavian countries the happiest populations on earth because of their socialist policies (and high taxes to support them), then that Republican strategy would not be as successful as it is, but Americans who would benefit from such programs are, sadly, underinformed and easily manipulated by politicians who appeal to their other intolerances such as of people of color.

My biggest fear is that social media and right-wing “news” networks such as Fox have allowed 30-40% of Americans to be protected from real news and voices that don’t play to their insecurities and intolerances.

I think it was in the book How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley, himself the son of immigrants from Nazi Germany, that the author noted that democracy, because of its freedom of speech, contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, and we are definitely seeing that play out, thanks to Trumpism. (Please read that book!)

Other intolerances exhibited by Republicans include universal voter registration and easy ballot access. Our diversifying population is terrifying to white males, who see easy ballot access as a death sentence for white supremacy. Democrats don’t fear a universal franchise, they welcome it.

Republicans are intolerant of non-Christian religions and voters, while ignoring Jesus’ teachings about serving the poor and needy. They are intolerant of diverse sexual orientations and preferences and of a woman’s right to choose. The list goes on. As I said, the dominant theme is intolerance.

I’m not a psychologist, but I’m of the belief that intolerance is built on insecurity. Republicans are made insecure by the growing presence of diverse races and religions in our “melting pot.” Insecurity is a close cousin of fear. Republicans build their intolerant base by playing to their fears, whether economic, social, or other. My fear is that they’ll succeed.

My thanks to the readers who support this column through my GoFundMe campaign at www.FundTalkingTurkey.com.

 

Remember the Concern About ‘Low-Information Voters’? It’s So Much Worse.

Yes, a growing percentage of Americans could be described as “low-information” voters, thanks in part to the loss of so many newspapers around our country. This was put forth as an explanation for the rise of Trumpism, and that explanation still rings true.

But that was just the beginning. Factor in the creation of “news” networks which filter out news and facts that don’t support conservative beliefs, and you have a class of voters who believe themselves to be well informed. Then add in a demagogue like Donald Trump, eager to play on the fears which those voters are being fed, and you have a powerful rightward swing in the nation’s politics.

So, here we are in 2021. Enough voters recognized the lies and distortions of Donald Trump, handing him a resounding defeat, which shouldn’t be surprising given that never once in his presidency did Donald Trump attain a 50% approval rating. President Biden has, on the other hand, never had less than a 50% approval rating since replacing Donald Trump on Jan. 20th.

Voters recognized Trump’s lies and distortions because they still read the newspapers and listen to the network newscasts. They watch 60 Minutes and CNN, which have been diligent in fact-checking the former president and his right-wing enablers.

Like Rita and me, they also watch The Daily Show and the monologues of the late night talk shows which uniformly ridiculed the former president and his administration night after night, always based on a factual reporting of the day’s events.

Here’s the bottom line of our on-going crisis in America: The less informed that voters are, the more susceptible they are to manipulation.

Must reading in this regard is a book I reviewed last year titled How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, by Jason Stanley, author of How Propaganda Works. Fascism be-gins, he writes, by creating a mythic past. Trump did that with his “Make America Great Again” slogan. Those of us who don’t buy into that mythic past have come to learn and accept, for example, the history of racism in America, while Republicans like Mitch McConnell claim that systemic racism does not exist.

Attacks on journalists and college professors is central to the cultivation of fascism. But these people are the opposites of low-information voters. They are voracious consumers of news and factual information. Trump supporters, by contrast, are voracious consumers of memes and opinion shows.

Another book which Rita and I are both reading is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson. In it, the author draws a compelling comparison of how caste (what we’re used to calling racism) operated in both the rise of Nazism and the rise of what we recognize as Trumpism. Her earlier book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, is equally compelling.

It was Winston Churchill who wrote “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  The low-information voter — rapidly becoming the disinformed voter — is fertile ground for cultivating fascism, because without knowing, for example, the history of racism in America, they are unable to experience compassion for those afflicted by it, whether African American or Native American. 

Fear is such a powerful tool, and we see Americans manipulated daily by playing to their fears: whether it is fear of immigrants raping our women (two fears for the price of one!), of socialism destroying free enterprise, of taxation taking your money, of “antifa” (which, ironically is short for anti-fascism), or of an American election being “stolen.”

Here’s another irony: the people yielding to these fears hold most of the 5-10 million AR-15s in this country, making us liberals afraid to speak up when we should. Death threats by Trump supporters against election officials have caused many of them to quit.

If the majority of voters continue to read and listen, and aren’t kept from the polls, we may just be able to halt the downward spiral into fascism.

 [The following paragraphs didn't fit into the published advertisement.]

My first realization that some Republicans were comfortable with willfully lying was in the early days of the Affordable Care Act. That was before social media took off, and intentional misinformation — what we now know as disinformation — was spread via emails which were forwarded again and again, accomplishing the same effect as the viral retweets of today.

The lie back then was related to real estate. It said that Obamacare included a 3.8% Medicare tax on every real estate transaction. If it passed, you’d pay $7,600 Obamacare tax on the sale of your $200,000 home, over $15,000 tax on the sale of your $400,000 home. It was a total misinterpretation of the Affordable Care Act intended to inflame opposition to it.

When one of my broker associates got an email with that claim, she asked me about it and I explained that the 3.8% tax did not apply at all to the sale of one’s home and only applied to high-income taxpayers selling investment properties. I thought it was the perfect opportunity to display real estate expertise, so I “Replied All” to that email since she had forwarded it to me. I also wrote about it more than once in my page 3 “Real Estate Today” column.

Naively, I thought that if I showed the information was wrong, that the lie would be nipped in the bud. What I learned to my dismay was that the big lie about Obamacare served a political purpose, so it didn’t matter to the senders if it was untrue. I was shocked that anyone would intentionally spread a lie for political purposes. What we see today goes so much further.

Mitch McConnell says he will fight all Biden initiatives in order to frustrate his “radical socialist agenda.” What is socialist about Biden’s infrastructure proposals? What is radical or socialist about mitigating climate change? What is radical or socialist about addressing childhood poverty and hunger with a $300-per-month benefit per child?

It may be true that the people being manipulated by Trump and his cronies are “low-information voters,” but those cronies are themselves not uninformed. They do read the Washington Post and watch 60 Minutes and CNN, not just Fox News, and they know the truth. But they willfully distort the truth for political reasons, manipulating the uninformed and misinformed and disinformed Republican base. Shame on them!

It is popular to dismiss mainstream media and the university crowd as liberals. But we journalists and those professors are the opposite of low information voters. We are voracious consumers of straight news, not talk shows. We listen to NPR in our cars, we watch the 6 o’clock and 10 o’clock news, and the Daily Show and the late show monologues. We are mostly liberals because we are mostly well-informed about the facts of the world around us. We do not respond easily to politicians who would manipulate us by playing to our fears of this or that.

As Winston Churchill famously said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to gets its pants on.” As Maria Konnikova warned us in a January 2017 article on politico.com about Donald Trump’s coming term, “Sheer repetition of the same lie can eventually mark it as true in our heads. It’s an effect known as illusory truth, first discovered in the ’70s and most recently demonstrated with the rise of fake news.” Trump is employing this proven technique with his Big Lie about the 2020 election and 30% of Americans are willing dupes.

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What is Fascism, and Why Has It Become a Topic of Interest in This Election?

   As Americans, we have long held ourselves to be immune from the terrible trauma experienced in Italy under Mussolini and in Germany under Hitler.  Our free press and educated population would surely prevent the rise of a fascist government. It could never happen here. Or could it?

Well, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s best selling book, Fascism: A Warning, got America (and me) thinking about the topic.

So I ordered a second book on the topic, which I just finished reading and strongly recommend to those who want an understanding of how fascism can indeed take root in our free and democratic society.

The book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, by Jason Stanley, a scholar of philosophy and propaganda who had written a prior book with the title How Propaganda Works.

This book was written in September 2018 but has been reissued in paperback this year with a new preface, containing this comment:

   “I wrote this book as a warning about fascist politics, essentially the danger of rhetoric that encourages fear and anger as a means to foment ethnic and religious division, seeping into public discourse. Today, the effects of such talk seem clear, as that rhetoric now shapes the outcome of elections and makes its way into policies.”

    I find it hard to believe that our current president would knowingly choose to follow the path of fascism, but it’s definitely worth noting that his formula for success aligns perfectly with that pursued by European fascists.  Here are just a few of those elements that you’ll read about in this essential book:

Chapter One is titled “The Mythic Past.” Fascist politics begin with invoking a past that exists only in the minds of those who are frightened by changes in society. From the beginning, “Make American Great Again” triggered for me the question of when that was. Was America great in the era of slavery, civil war and failed reconstruction? Was it great before women won the right to vote? Was it great before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts? Was it great before the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act began to reverse the degradation of our environment.  (Remember Los Angeles' air pollution, our "brown cloud" and Love Canal?)  What America do the folks wearing MAGA hats want to return to?

The answer is made clear by what they fear. They fear the dilution of their white bloodline by black and brown populations. They have heard statisticians tell us that the United States is moving toward a “majority minority” population, and that frightens them.  This, you'll read, is central to the rise of fascism. In Germany it was the Jews; in American it's hispanic immigrants and blacks. 

People fear the unknown. Rural voters are most susceptible to fearing an “invasion” of black and brown men because they have only the experience of watching news reports of crime and rioting, which their favored news sources are happy to feed them, even using archival footage when no current footage is available.  (An African-American colleague of mine is the father of an infant daughter, and he's glad she's a girl instead of a boy because of how much worse and more dangerous is the experience of an African-American boy growing up in America.) 

Patriarchy is a key element. Fascist politics play on feminism as destructive of the mythic past which its proponents emphasize. And fear by men of their women and children being molested by those black and brown immigrants is most powerful. Echoes ring in our head of Trump’s announcement in 2015 choosing to focus on Mexican immigrants being rapists. The author calls this “the politics of sexual anxiety.”

The threat of communism/socialism is a common element in the growth of fascism.  Portraying progressive democratic programs as "socialist" or "communist" can suffice to fill people who already feel insecure financially with fear and anger.  Sound familiar?

Fascist politics always involves discrediting of media and scientists. At its heart, fascism is anti-intellectual. If the reality doesn’t serve your purpose, demean it as being elitist and fake.

As I read Stanley’s excellent text, I came to the realization that the fascist politics we are witnessing now, which found a useful idiot in our current president, is truly the result of the success of liberal democracy. Fascism wasn’t a threat in the 1950s of segregation and homophobia. Today, with same sex marriage legalized, the #MeToo movement supercharging feminism, the Black Lives Matter movement acquiring greater power due to its more popular white following, all this makes it quite easy for someone like Trump, a former pro-choice Democrat, to discover right-wing beliefs to be more effective for his personal advancement. And it should be noted that Qanon’s bizarre conspiracies feed right into that role.

Here's the table of contents of Stanley's book: