All of us know the sting of failure.
Maybe we came up short in the big game, or got passed over for that promotion, or just sucked at trivia night after too many drinks.
But consider the tenacity of Cha Sa-soon, an elderly woman who failed the South Korean drivers’ test 960 times. She spent over $10,000 taking and retaking the test until she finally passed. The woman now holds the world’s record for most failed attempts.
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It’s enough to make you feel bad for William Jennings Bryan.
Of course, you may fuzzily recall this guy’s name from your high school history class. Today, Bryan is remembered for three things:
Giving the Cross of Gold speech, whatever that was.
Looking like a buffoon during the Scopes Monkey Trail.
Becoming the only nominee of a major political party to lose the popular vote three times.
But that last shred of infamy is in serious jeopardy, because the homunculus of racism—Donald Trump—recently announced that he is back, baby, and running for president once more.
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The most disturbing statistic I have seen recently is the following: Trump voters are 50% more likely than Biden voters to be sperm donors.
This creeps me out on a political, cultural, and even biological level.
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Yes, our favorite wacky ex-president is shouting, dodging, delaying, and obstructing his way back into our hearts. He’s hoping to once again avoid consequences for his repulsive and potentially lethal behavior.
And there are plenty of Americans who are happy to help him do so. Now, I’m not talking about the usual co-conspirators, enablers, sycophants, rabid followers, and nutjobs. We know that those guys are all in, all the time.
No, I’m talking about the well-meaning Americans who are advocating for Biden to pardon Trump. This misguided plea usually rests on one of four arguments. And they are all bad.
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“He says, ‘Call it a fatwa if you wish,’ and I say, ‘Well, fuck you and fuck your fatwa.’”
Mark Leyner—The Tetherballs of Bougainville
You know when two unrelated events happen simultaneously, and then it later turns out that those desperate things are actually highly related? OK, that usually happens in twisty-turny Hollywood thrillers, but sometimes it transpires in real life.
For example, the FBI recently executed a search warrant at the residence of a disgraced ex-president who had been hording classified documents—and maybe nuclear secrets—for some unknown reason that must be perfectly legit and not all criminal, corrupt, or terrifying. Soon after this, a lunatic stabbed acclaimed writer Salman Rushdie in the neck.
So what do these two events have to do with one another?
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There’s a lot that progressives don’t understand about conservatives.
Why the screaming rage? Why the celebration of ignorance? Why the disdain for all non-fetal life? Why the virulent racism, misogyny, and homophobia? Why the hypocrisy, corruption, and… ok, this list is getting way too long.
In contrast, conservatives seem to have just one aspect of liberalism that perplexes them.
Why don’t progressives wave huge Biden flags and paint their trucks with images of the president’s face?
After all, if you don’t fly a massive MAGA banner and drive a pick-up adorned with images of Trump and Jesus playing golf, are you really a Republican?
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We all want think that we are bad asses, the kind of people who would smirk at death and shout, “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.”
But no, most of us would not do that. In fact, one of the humanity’s chief problems is our willingness to acquiesce so easily. As a wise man once said, “It’s the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation… you were made to be ruled.”
This unpleasant fact has manifested itself in every culture at every time in human history. Some of the wisest minds of the ancient world thought it was perfectly natural to instill tiny children or drooling morons or insatiable murderers as rulers because their great-grandfathers had seized power and passed it down. Hey, somebody had to be in charge. Why not Caligula?
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As we all know, hot-tempered lovers of authoritarianism recently held a rally that was supposed to attract thousands of like-minded neo-fascists. But the rally brought in just a handful of sad racists who looked pathetic standing around, preaching right-wing gospel and reminiscing about their glory days, when they could drive over protesters and march around with torches and smash heads open whenever they damn well felt like it.
However, this fizzled assembly should not convince us that Trumpism is dead.
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Jesus Christ was racist.
OK, I’m not saying that the actual historical Jesus — who may have been black — was racist. He seemed to be a pretty chill guy.
But certainly the European Christian concept of Jesus — all blonde and blue-eyed and ready to do some smiting — was crazy bigoted.
Of course, the link between racism and Christianity has been strong for centuries. Think of the forced conversions of indigenous people in the Americas, or the zealotry of missionaries in Africa.
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They either stopped right away or they kept going to the end.
Most of them ignored the screaming, and the pleas to stop, and the obvious indications that they were causing enormous pain and needless suffering.
They just kept cranking it up.
I’m talking, of course, about the participants in one of the most infamous psychological studies of all time: The Milgram shock experiment.
In 1961, Dr. Stanley Milgram set up a test in which participants administered electrical shocks to people. The participants were put in front of control panel that had increments of voltage marked — from 15 volts (“slight shock”) to 450 volts (“danger, severe shock”). The test subjects were told to increase the voltage gradually, delivering stronger and stronger jolts to a person hooked up to the machine in another room.
Now, it was an elaborate ruse, in that nobody actually got shocked, but the participants didn’t know that. They couldn’t see the person in the other room, but they heard him yelling and telling them to stop (again, the yelling was fake).
What Milgram found was that despite the screaming, most participants obeyed the researcher’s insistence to keep administering the shocks, and to keep increasing the voltage. Most people just kept inflicting pain, going all the way to the top level (450 volts) simply because they were told to.
Milgram’s experiment is regarded as a milestone in the study of human obedience. His findings — replicated many times in numerous other studies — proved that “people tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based.” The disturbing conclusion is that it’s pretty easy to talk individuals into doing horrible things, and “ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being.
These findings apply to such well-known atrocities such as Nazi Germany, the Rwandan genocide, and the killing fields of Cambodia.
But they also apply to, for example, a wannabe despot who exhorts his followers to attack the US capitol in a deranged bid to overthrow the government. As many of those rioters later admitted, they rampaged through the capitol because Trump told them to. They were “just following orders.”
And where have we heard that excuse before?
In any case, in the aftermath of the riot, 43 Republican Senators continued to just follow orders — continued to display abject obedience — by acquitting a man whom the vast majority of Americans want punished.
The GOP’s compliance is, of course, sadly predictable.
But there is another angle to Milgram’s experiment that is not often discussed, and it has direct relevance to the Republican Party.
You see, not everyone in Milgram’s experiment kept shocking the hell out of people just because they were told to.
About 18% of participants stopped when the indicator reached 150 volts, and the first yelps of pain came from the other room. Of those who went past 150 volts, the vast majority kept going to the end (450 volts).
Basically, people either stop at the first sign of trouble, or they never stop at all.
Similarly, many Republicans who begrudgingly voted for Trump in 2016 bailed on him circa Charlottesville (i.e., when he said there were “very fine people on both sides”), which was arguably the point when his racism could no longer be denied.
But if they stuck with Trump after he insisted that Nazis weren’t so bad? Well, at that point, they were in it to win it (if by “win it” you mean “excuse storming the capitol”).
There is a psychological condition in which we refuse to alter our behavior — even if it is harmful or irrational — if we have emotionally invested in a course of action. In such cases, we go deeper and deeper, because to stop would be admitting that we have wasted our time and been wrong all along. And that’s just too psychologically distressing.
So those conservatives who stuck by Trump past Charlottesville, past the caging of babies, past the botched response to coronavirus, and past the myriad outrages and failures are now at the point that they will justify any abhorrent behavior to rationalize supporting Trump to this point. To disavow him now would be to admit that they have spent the last four years cheering for a corrupt lunatic. And they just can’t have that.
So instead of conservatives coming to their senses, we have the Oregon Republican Party suggesting that the January 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation by Democrats to discredit Trump. We have the Texas Republican Party openly supporting the QAnonconspiracy theory. We have GOP lawmakers in Ohio proposing an annual state holiday in Trump’s honor. We have Republicans giving a standing ovation to “a woman who trafficked in anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy theories, and questioned whether 9/11 and mass shootings were real events.”
To be sure, many right-wingers feel no distress at supporting Trump and his minions. They adore the man and crave more of his special brand of chaos and madness and hatred.
But for those conservatives who know, on some level, that all this hero worship of an obvious sociopathic incompetent was a severe mistake, but who didn’t get out while they could, well, they can’t stop now. They have to keep twisting the dial to deliver more shocks to the system.
And they will continue to just follow orders.
