And on and on it goes. Anytime one side sees itself as unambiguously on the side of light and righteousness, it calls up something dark and unrighteous. It's not in the people that the outrage is directed toward, but rather in the social system that binds the two in a kind of dyad.
From the NYT this morning:
From Ms. Hicks’s perspective, the president simply pointed out a fact: Leftists bore some responsibility for the violence, too. Of course, Nazis and white supremacists are bad, she said. But she does not believe Mr. Trump has any affinity for them. He said so himself. But she is exasperated that a significant part of the country seems to think otherwise. The week’s frenzied headlines read to her like bulletins from another planet.
“I feel like I am in a bizarro universe where no one but me is thinking logically,” she said. “We have gone so off the rails of what this conversation is about.”
Ms. Hicks, who is black and grew up in Charlotte, N.C., welcomes the public soul-searching on the meaning of Confederate monuments. She believes that the statues were erected to intimidate black people and that they should be taken down. But instead of focusing on that, she sees opponents of Mr. Trump focusing on Mr. Trump.
“This is not about me as a black person, and my history,” she said. “This is about this president and wanting to take him down because you don’t like him.”
Mr. Bannon’s departure was more noise that didn’t mean much, she said. “The show is going to go on.”
Much of what powers the love for Mr. Trump among his core supporters is his boxer’s approach to the political class in Washington and to the news media, a group that in their eyes has approached them with a double standard and a sneering sense of superiority for years.
Larry Laughlin, a retired businessman from a Minneapolis suburb, compares Mr. Trump to a high school senior who could “walk up to the table with the jocks and the cheerleaders and put them in their place.” That is something that the “nerds and the losers, whose dads are unemployed and moms are working in the cafeteria,” could never do. Mr. Trump may be rich, he said, but actually belonged at the nerd table.
“The guys who wouldn’t like me wouldn’t like Trump,” he said. “The guys who were condescending to him were condescending to me.
“I feel like I’m watching my uncle up there. Where me and Chuck Schumer — that’s like going to the dentist,” he added, referring to the Democratic leader in the Senate.
Gregory Kline, 46, a lawyer in Severna Park, Md., who is a Republican, said he did not vote for Mr. Trump but understands that part of the president’s support comes from fury at the left, particularly the media. When there is an attack by Muslim terrorists, for example, the media reaches for pundits who say most Muslims are good. But when it is a white supremacist, “every conservative is lumped in with him,” he said.
The whole article is worth reading.
Look, I think that Trump is crazy and unfit to be president. I hope someone figures a way to get him out by the end of the year. The country (and the world) cannot live another four years with this kind of chaos and instability. But I see his presidency as an extreme symptom of what is really sick in the country right now, and Liberals are delusional if they think they are uninfected. The symptoms just manifest differently in them.
If you want to know whether or not you're infected, that anger and resentment you feel when you get morally outraged–that's it, that's the sickness. It's there in all of us, even if only in remission. And it flares up to the degree that you find your anger so intense that you can only see the people who have provoked this anger as morally inferior to you–yes, even Neo-Nazis. I know this from my own experience because I struggle with it every day. I'm sure you could find many posts on this blog where its symptoms are quite evident.
There is no side in any conflict where the bad are unambiguously bad and the good unambiguously good. Nazi Germany cannot be blamed only on the Germans; its blame should be lain on a sickness that infected all of Europe, with an etiology that can be trace back to late 19th century imperialism and nationalism and beyond, but flared into a virulent manifestation in WWI. And then rather than finding a way to heal after it, Britain and France let the disease get hold of them at Versailles, and the infection deepened, and then erupted again with an unprecedented virulence in Germany that contaminated the whole world.
When these symptoms break out, they must be contained. Virulent race hatred and white resentment must be contained by people who are level headed and relatively sane. But moral outrage is not an effective containment strategy; it just makes things worse. It just fights the crazy with more crazy.
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