Friar it sounds like you need a spa day at the Place of Holy Perpetual Venting. But I’m with you. The closest I’m coming to politics since the election is Josh Johnson a stand up comedian. Although I occasionally slip and listen to a pod cast like the Bridge.
MAGA supporters have given their heart and soul to the man. To them he is ‘the second advent’. I will never understand the appeal at all…
Reasonable, good, decent people are handicapped in this regard. The mind of a narcissist, sociopath, or narcissistic sociopath has an “alien” feel, particularly with respect to its empathy deficits and lack of self-awareness / self-reflection. There’s a tendency to keep waiting for them to fit known patterns, even tenuously. And some of them may seem to sporadically, but in the main, they’re just “off”.
And that’s just the leader. What of the followers?
I have never found a better way to understand it than that such a leader channels the fears, resentments, grudges and repressed bigotries of the follower. It is not so much right vs left, rural vs urban, as it is “us” vs “them” and a leader that clearly articulates a vision and a solution – however dysfunctional and self-defeating and unsustainable that may be.
In broader terms, it is not that illiberal thinking is a better way, it is just that liberals all over the world have way too often committed the unforced error of abandoning the common man and embracing the wealthy. Eventually the common man senses they are being led on and thrown crumbs and pandered to, and they become receptive to Trumpian “only I can fix it” rhetoric and talk of shaking things up. And what they want fixed, while nominally about them having better prospects and a better life, is REALLY about them feeling self respect, no longer being overlooked, looked down on, ignored, “less than”. Hence all the rhetoric about the “coastal elites”, all the anti-education, anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-secular pushback. Hence the cruel vindictiveness and power for power’s sake. Any time a society develops a significant underclass, it opens the door to autocracy.