Maintaining Respect

The last four and more years of the Trump presidency and, even before that, the McConnell Congress have often brought to my mind the image of some sniveling monster saying to us, “Go on: Hit me right here – right on the kisser.” I mean, not in the sense of its being a dare and he’s really going to demolish us if we so much as blink, but in the straightforward sense of begging us to smack him because he’s just so revolting. This is also the case with their diehard fans; for example, when someone aggressively asserts that he’s not going to wear a mask, how can you not be struggling to constrain yourself from saying, “You are not merely stupid but utterly selfish”? It’s like somebody taped a target on their behind that says, “Kick me here.” It seems like a cartoon. It can’t be real. How can anyone be so seriously wicked as to be like a silent movie villain twirling his mustache while he cackles? No redeeming features. No pretense at cogency or humanity. Simply blatant nonsense and evil. 

I have speculated previously (in “The Joke’s on Us”), and only half humorously, that it must be intentional … for the very purpose of eliciting hatred, of getting a rise out of us (“us” being those who loathe rather than love Trumpism), perhaps to make us over-react and hence lose the war in the very act of winning the battle (though we might lose that too – think of the Judge Kavanaugh hearing). 

But I do want to reiterate what I said in that earlier post, or put it in a new way: It’s not about Trump (et al.). It’s about us (Democrats and other anti-Trumpers). The challenge, it seems to me, is to maintain respect – to “love thine enemy” if only in a formal sense. Whether Trump and the Trumpers (Republicans and the like) appear to be a basket of deplorables or cartoon characters or evil manipulators or whatever … it seems to me very likely they are not that in fact … or at least no more (quantitatively and qualitatively) than we are. After all, we surely appear to be so to the true believers among them. Yet we know we are not, or not wholly so. 

Yes, matters of degree matter. But from my personal acquaintance and interactions with Trumpers, I know that many of them are perfectly fine people – maybe “finer” than me in some cases or respects. And I also have to acknowledge some of their grievances against “us.” The social psychologist Jonathan Haight has famously argued that different folks simply have different values rather than being competing claimants to truth. This seems right to me in the main. And I think realizing it would make more likely our all being able to “get along” (TOTH to Rodney King). It does not mean that there would never be deep disagreements in society (or between societies), even leading unto literal war, since common ground will always be limited. But I do think it would strengthen the prospects for reasoned and compassionate solutions to society’s problems.

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