Trump Gives Isolated Americans the Chance to Hate Alone Together

[babylonsister]

Trump Gives Isolated Americans the Chance to Hate Alone Together
by Andrea Mazzarino | May 19, 2024 - 5:38am

— from TomDispatch

snip//

As Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender also noted, Trump rallies build a sense of community among “mostly older white men and women who lived paycheck to paycheck… retired or close to it, estranged from their families or otherwise without children… Trump had… made their lives richer.” He noted how Trump supporters came to share homes and transportation, form relationships, and chant the same slogans (like “Build the wall”) in unison. I would add that those slogans can get so much uglier: “Fuck those dirty beaners” and “Fuck Islam” are anything but unheard of.

Writing in the wake of the Nazi movement that murdered more than 6 million European Jews, the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that those people most likely to align themselves with totalitarian movements lack a sense of their own usefulness to society and feel excluded. In my own world, Arendt’s insight feels true when it comes to the Trump supporters I know in my family and community and know about in this country at large.

What Donald Trump and other MAGA leaders have done is take emotions like loneliness and channel them into a social movement. Key evangelical Christian figures like Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, or the Reverend Franklin Graham, provided the initial ideological scaffolding by selling Trump as someone who could deliver policy wins on issues like abortion and prayer in schools.

Later, when Trump’s extramarital affairs and crude sexual remarks made it clear to such figures that he was not exactly a shining example of Christian morality, they needed a different tack. As journalist Tim Alberta has pointed out, evangelical leaders then began selling Trump as one of a line of unlikely Biblical figures (if not Jesus himself) who led the Israelites out of peril. In other words, they saw him as powerful exactly because he was an outsider.

Donald Trump, in short, has provided a world in which isolated Americans can be—yes!—alone together, while embracing hate in an unabashed and distinctly public fashion. In doing so, he’s made the experience of being a resentful outcast a transcendent one in 21st-century America. Trump’s rallies are invariably both loud and distinctly angry, like the motorcycle gangs with Confederate flags that roar past me on the rural highway I often take, or church services with MAGA preachers. These sorts of gatherings seem to reflect what French sociologist Emile Durkheim once called collective effervescence, or shared emotional experiences that transform isolated people into something larger (if also in this case angrier) than life.


more...

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/andrea-mazzarino/110433/trump-gives-isolated-americans-the-chance-to-hate-alone-together

[marble falls]

1. Hate almost has to fester for a period in an armchair straring at an electronic device first. The longer it goes ...

... the more committed they become when they finally meet others of the ilk.

[SWBTATTReg]

2. All I can say is 'get a life' and stop complaining to everyone about your sad life, you dug your hole and leapt into it.

No one else pushed you into it. You just like hearing some moron (tRUMP) tell you that's okay to be a jerk or worse, to everybody else, which if somebody has to tell you, that NO, it's not okay to be a jerk. You're an idiot if you believe this crock. Figures that tRUMP does this, it's his belief too, that everything is screwed up...perhaps it was screwed up around him (and always was), but its fine for the most part around Pres. Biden and his cohorts. They seem to be doing a great job of running things.

[Boomerproud]

4. They believe themselves to be victims.

That's the bond they share.

[SWBTATTReg]

5. I know. And you know what gets me? That they seem to think that only they have issues w/ life and crap,

but we all do, we all have a life, we all have things occur in our lives. Why in the hell do they think they're 'special'?

That's why I say Get a life and Get over it, your whining.

Have a nice rest of the Sunday...

[BoRaGard]

6. Victimy and whiney - that's the core GOP soul state

so regressive, so unmanly.

No wonder people see them as self-loathing, reality-denying deplorables,

[NanaCat]

3. Except the J6 insurrection showed that it's not

People suffering from isolation and economic anxiety. The overwhelming majority of them were business owners, cops, even government workers, and so on. The kind of people who could not only afford to take off work in the middle of the week, but afford to travel to DC.

People suffering financially can't afford to do that.

No, the vast majority of them live in communities growing more ethnically diverse. Even their precious suburbs aren't safe from having brown neighbours anymore, and that sends these wastes of oxygen into a tizzy about the threats to their delusions of superiority.