Noelle Cook has spent a lot of time over the past two years interviewing the middle aged women who were at the Capitol on January 6. In a thread on X (and Threadreader), she summarizes what she has discovered:
The women I talk to have a lifetime of trauma. Sexual abuse, family violence, and addiction are common. Mental health care is hard to find and often too costly. In many cases the result has been dissociation and delusion.
Their alternative realities have moved far beyond Donald Trump, QAnon, and the long-debunked myth of a "stolen election." Most have found "Conspirituality," a set of new-age-apocalyptic conspiracy theories based on ETs and "love and light."
Some believe they are advanced beings sent to Earth to help "awaken" humanity. Two of the women I talk to identify as "starseeds." Another says she may be a "ascended master." Two more believe they are angels.
They spend most of their time combing social media for videos to post and messages to share. Their social networks are made up of virtual friends who share the same beliefs.
They find comfort in authoritarian figures and conspiracy theories that make them feel like heroes and give them hope that things will magically be ok.
For the women I talk to, participation in online communities has become their identity. In these spaces they find the acceptance, belonging, and purpose that the real world no longer provides.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are sane people who support Donald Trump because they like the kind of tough-guy nationalism he projects. But the people who showed up on January 6 and otherwise dominate the hard core of his support are a strange and motley crew. I wrote here before about how many had suffered bankruptcy. Based on Cooke's research and some other stuff I have seen, quite a few have a weak grasp on reality. The people who ran the Michigan focus group I mentioned while back, featuring people who had voted for Obama and then for Trump, described them as "people who had led rough lives." Half knew someone who had died of an opiate overdose.
The operating assumption in any democracy has to be that the sane people will outweigh the crazies, or maybe that the crazies will not have a coherent enough political position to move the needle much. Looking around America right now, I wonder if maybe the biggest danger to our system is in our massive mental health problems. Will some combination of anti-vaxx, vitamin guzzling, wifi-phobic paranoids, non-binary communists, and angels who think Donald Trump is our alien savior/divine prophet come together to wreck the country? Will some evil genius (n.b.: not Donald Trump) use them to seize power in the name of a purer, holier America?
I still tend to doubt it, but I do think that there may be real danger lurking in the places where rough lives, insane conspiracy theories, and the internet come together.
The group you describe is a major reason why I'm skeptical of analyses that tend to equate the right with "conservatism," and then define the latter as something like the beliefs and culture of the small-town ruling class of the 1950s or 1890s or whatever date one prefers, or that say rightists tend to be steady and well-adjusted while liberals have psychological troubles. That kind of stuff doesn't describe today's GOP.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I fear and despise the tough-guy nationalists a lot more than I do the crazies. I don't fear the crazies at all. The tough-guy nationalists may use the crazies to come to power and then try to turn our country into something I dread.
One name (fictional): Nehemiah Scudder
ReplyDelete@David
ReplyDeleteThat said, I fear and despise the tough-guy nationalists a lot more than I do the crazies. I don't fear the crazies at all. The tough-guy nationalists may use the crazies to come to power and then try to turn our country into something I dread.
I'm not sure there's actually a distinction as you see it - I think many (or even most) of the crazies are ALSO tough-guy nationalists.
Moreover, my mind immediately draws parallels to the Nazis - the more mainstream "tough-guy nationalists" of Germany (the Monarchists, the Capitalists, the Militarists, etc) all sought to use "the crazies" of the Nazi party to claw back their own political dominance from the relatively flourishing liberalism of Weimar Germany.
But then something everyone discounted as ludicrous happened - "the crazies" who everyone wrote off as pawns turned the tables on their would-be exploiters, and made THEM into the pawns instead. And all the "tough-guy nationalists" went along with it for fear of losing relevance, until they were too became "the crazies" as they compromised more and more of their own values to preserve their own power, steadily drifting further and further into Fascist thought.
Men who had previously been relatively moderate conservatives that simply wanted a strong Germany started to buy into the insane delusions of Nazis. Previously rational men began to buy into "Aryan" racial supremacy, the fabricated pseudo-sciences that "justified" it, and even Hitler's obsession with the occult. Certainly some were merely making a show of genuine belief, but many others truly believed in these things - and in the end, what difference does it actually make whether belief was genuine or merely performative, if it still produced the same behaviors?