America is as divided today as ever according to my memory. In fact, some say that our nation hasn't been so divided since 1860--which is a bit before my time. And though some of the wounds that were suffered from the war that followed 1860 have never fully healed, that isn't the cause of our current division.
The real cause of our division started with the advent of conservative talk radio. It stared with Rush Limbaugh and then continued under Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. Why did it start there? It was because that is when the demonization of non-conservative started.
Limbaugh was definitely the most skilled of all conservative talk radio hosts. And though that sounds like a compliment, it is more like saying that leaders like Napolean and Hitler were skilled at conquering other nations.
What Limbaugh, Hannity, and Levin did was to persuade conservatives that non-conservatives had nothing to contribute to either the national dialog or the government. To an extent, they demonized non-conservatives but not to the same extent that is being done now. What is happening now is the morphing of the past demonization into full-fledged group character assassinations.
Today's conservative descriptions of non-conservatives go beyond claiming that non-conservatives are intellectually and otherwise impotent; it labels them as evil and enemies of the people. It describes them as people who not only must be opposed, but must be attacked in self-defense because they are evil.
Thus not only are non-conservatives attacked, their sources of news and information are shunned to say the least. Trump conservatives now only pay attention to Trump conservative sources of news. If a source of news or institution disagrees with Trump, then they are demonized.
There is a fringe benfit to the current process of demonization. It is that of insularity. Trump conservatives have withdrawn from the world and have retreated into a place where they only trust themselves. And in doing so, they have made themselves into a cult. The reaction to the 2020 Presidential election easily demonstrates the dark path from demonization to insularity.
It isn't that we don't have non-conservative political cults; we do. But they are not large enough to threaten the nation as today's conservative cult does. It doesn't matter to these cult members that they cannot go outside their own echo chamber to verify their claims. They are sure of what they "know" and have no need to consult outside sources.
What we should note here is that this wave of Trumpism consists of more than one cult. Certainly there is the Trump's personality cult. But other people caught up in Trumpism are doing so not because of Trump himself, but because of some his allies, especially the set of spiritual teachers who happen to support him. People in this latter group aren't so enamored by Trump's personality. Rather, they are simply submitting to their spiritual leaders and what these leaders have told them about why they should support Trump. And it is all motivated by a pathological response to, what is to them, traumatic change. The last straw of that traumatic change was the Obergefell decision.
Without knowing history, many of the Trump supporters make an exclusive claim to being true patriots and real Americans. They believe that they are the only ones who are faithful to the founding fathers. It is if they had reduced the Bill Of Rights down to the right to conform.
In the end, they ignore history. They don't realize that their exclusive claim is a very short walk from declaring their leader(s) and/or themselves as dictators. That is what the Tsars as well as the Bolsheviks did in Russia.
But they are not just making arrogant claims, they have become dangerous. That is because they want to impose their beliefs about themselves on the rest of us. They not only want to impose their beliefs on us, they feel it is their duty to do so.
How should we respond? Though we are treated as an enemy, we need to realize that we are not obligated to respond by imitating how they treat us. In other words, we don't have to view these supporters of Trump as our teachers.
We cannot afford to become insular ourselves by first demonizing those who see things differently. Here we should note that every group has the potential to become that way. James Comey correctly described Donald Trump as having 'no external reference points.' And in terms of information resources, that is the state of Trumpublicans, especially my fellow evangelicals who have remained loyal to Trump.
We can't afford to imitate Trump's loyalists who have become insular and hostile. Thus, we cannot afford to treat Trumpublicans as enemies. Rather, we need to see them as fellow Americans and fellow Christians where that applies who need help. Why? Because their insularity will last way after Trump leaves office and our nation can't afford that. And we can't afford to treat them as enemies because we should remember that we all need help at various times in our lives. Plus, because they are people, these Trump loyalists deserve help.
America's current great divide came about by one group demonizing those who disagreed to the extent that it lost all external reference points. Thus it became a cult. And the only way to approach the cult is to try to invite people to come out of the cult.
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