This post was written on December 6, 2024
Why is our Country in Chaos?
Long before the 2024 election, I wondered why the American psyche was experiencing a dumpster fire. Friends and relatives stopped talking to each other. Some Americans seemed so foreign to me that I thought either they or I had entered an alternative universe, as in a science fiction movie. After reading many articles and books, I have gained some insight into what is happening. One book that aided me was Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide by Keith Payne. His book explores how Americans with different points of view arrive at their positions and how most doggedly stick to their guns. Growing up in rural Kentucky, Dr. Payne is familiar with both sides of the American cultural divide.
My main takeaway from Dr. Payne’s book was that people on both sides of the major divide consider themselves good and reasonable. It is easy for either side to fall into the trap of thinking the other side is crazy or evil. There are crazy and evil people in America, but the majority of us, regardless of our tribe, are not crazy or evil. Dr. Payne details the psychological and sociological crutches we all use to prop up our essentially flimsy assumptions about both sides of the divide. His book studies the growing chasm between the new MAGA Party and the traditional “American Way” since World War II. He suggests we may bridge this unnatural chasm before it is too late.
A few Americans may disagree with this alleged division. They may counter and say we are becoming more united. They will say that collectively, we are still the proud red, white, and blue patriots of the United States of America. However, when asked if they mean ALL the states, some will say that Alabama, Florida, and Texas should be excluded because they are hellbent on a radical disunion. Others will say that New York, Illinois, and California should no longer be considered “united” because of their “wokeness.” Since so many believe one of these two statements, the premise that we are no longer a united country must be true. We can no longer fool ourselves that we are headed toward a more perfect union. We definitely are not.
Who caused this national fracture? The answer is all of us through action or, more likely, inaction. We might not be the instigators of our demise, but we are complicit. Those who hate the existing state of America believe the Deep State or similar cabal is undermining their pursuit of happiness and freedom; therefore, the destruction or reconstruction of the existing United States of America is their only hope or way to get even. Those who accept the existing state of America tend to be blind to the losers and dissatisfied members of our society. Those losing are diminished not only economically but also psychologically because they are living in pain and shame. However, blaming these folks for living in the wrong place or calling them deplorable deepens the divide and increases mutual hostility.
Peace and harmony characterized the Democratic Party in the recent election; however, their message was bland, like a plate of peas and hominy. The hesitant President Biden wanted to stay behind his desk after 2024, but surely everyone behind the scenes knew his mental acuity was a disqualifier. Despite Biden’s age, he steadied the ship after the four turbulent Trump years but never found ways to win over significant numbers from the MAGA world. Vice President Harris fought valiantly to save the bacon from the fire, but the flagging energy of the Biden administration fatally tarred her. Democratic supporters were hoodwinked into believing that the strategy of trusting an old war horse administration and getting out the minority and female vote would be enough. Being on the right side of history and winning a debate gives someone a gold star or a trophy. However, like it or not, the man dancing to the Village People’s YMCA song with a quarter-billion-dollar campaign contribution from Elon Musk won in a “free and fair” democratic election.
How did we achieve this chaos? Are we all in an alternative reality? I submit that most of us are.
The Key Demographic: Those Left Behind
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right discusses two economic and psychological well-being measures. She uses the concepts of financial deficits and surpluses to the parallels in psychology. She describes how those experiencing hard economic times have psychological deficits and shame, while those experiencing good times tend to be overexuberant and arrogant. Her book provides compelling explanations for why the working poor, young people whose opportunities are falling behind their parents, and even minority groups are leaving or would never consider joining the Democratic camp.
To put this in a broader historical context, many Americans have subconsciously felt the shame of slavery. Those who involuntarily immigrated to America experienced slavery directly. However, perversely, there is a subconscious guilt and shame by those who enslaved them. This stain on American culture has been called our original sin. This sin has been so all-encompassing and has been with us so long that we overlook the degradation of all subservient Americans, including poor whites. Poor whites have been mistreated for centuries, first in their original homelands but more recently in the USA. However mistreated they were, they could find comfort in the knowledge that at least they were not treated like Africans or Mexicans. However, since World War II, the status of African Americans and immigrants has markedly improved. After World War II, the USA entered a period of economic vitality that lifted the economic boats of virtually all Americans.
America began to change in the 1960s. There was less incentive to attend college because factory jobs were still plentiful. Why spend four years paying to attend a college when good-paying factory employment was available to high school graduates? The national unemployment rate in 1968 was 3.6%, and there were pressures on employers to raise salaries. However, companies such as General Electric began to relocate Midwestern factories to lower-cost countries during the late 1960s and 1970s. American corporations seeking to lower costs and improve profits eliminated millions of American jobs. To add insult to injury, corporate raiders and thieves stole pension funds from the employees of many failing corporations. These and other negative trends have continued largely unabetted since then.
An excellent book about General Electric is The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles. Some will argue that Americans must submit to the unrelenting and cut-throat demands of capitalism, but if it produces millions of angry and shamed victims, what happens next? What happens when AI and robotic vehicles replace many more future jobs? We may be able to restrict the immigration of foreigners, but what does our nation do with millions of angry Americans whose families have been here for 200 years?
Corporate outsourcing of manufacturing has been profitable to corporations and stockholders but devastating to the communities dependent on domestic manufacturing. Vibrant areas such as Warren and Youngstown in Ohio shrank dramatically. The population of the Youngstown Metro Area was 434,000 in 1980, and today, it is 353,000. The population of neighboring Warren was 56,600 in 1980 and 39,200 in 2020. Like most former manufacturing centers, working-class neighborhoods in places like these are flattened by bulldozers and backhoes.
The gutting of American manufacturing did not go over well in the heartland. Likewise, the changes in office work in urban areas created soul-sucking resentment. The 1993 movie Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas, is a poignant example of urban resentment. Many early TEA Party organizers arose out of dissatisfaction with the perceived declines in the farming, manufacturing, and energy sections. Their anger was unfocused and ill-defined but lively. A more focused example is Roger Ailes from Warren, Ohio, who was a significant actor in reacting to the decline of his birthplace. He became the CEO of Fox News in 1996, and the rest is history. Google them if you have not heard of Roger Ailes and Fox News.
Betrayed by Both Parties
Democrats are now in a complacent fog or an agitated state of disappointment. Those Democrats who are well-educated and financially comfortable naively believed that it was illogical for most of the less well-educated working-class people to vote Republican. Didn’t they realize that the MAGA Party (formerly known as the Republican Party) worked against the interests of the working classes? The MAGA Party is the party of billionaires and working-class exploiters. Likewise, on issues such as women’s rights. Shouldn’t all women have voted to protect their rights? Since the days of Caesar Chavez, the Democratic Party has always portrayed itself as a champion for those seeking a better life south of the border. Shouldn’t all Mexican Americans vote for a Democratic ticket?
The logic of the Democratic elites assumed that the MAGA Party should be a footnote in history by now. However, most “smart” Democrats have not read or taken to heart the works of Nobel Prize-winning author Daniel Kahneman. He disproved the psychological and economic notion that people behave rationally in their best interests. He described two ways that humans make decisions. The first decision-making system was quick, instinctive, and emotional. The second was deliberative and logical. His research showed that many people, including the “smart” ones, used the first system to make many decisions.
The MAGA tagline “childless cat ladies” was designed to excite the masculine ego, while “They’re eating the dogs” was meant to scare those worried about immigration. These seemed to be gaffes that the Democrats could use to their advantage. However, these are examples of Democrats missing the point. MAGA messaging is emotional, not logical. MAGA routinely uses a cherry-picking approach to successfully convince its supporters that one Democratic misstep is equivalent to 1,000 MAGA crimes. For example, if Hunter Biden receives a pardon for his non-violent offense, so should the 1000+ January 6 criminals who broke into the Capitol. MAGA converts an illogical statement into acceptable “quick and dirty” logic with blinding speed and effectiveness.
One of Harris’ prominent slogans was “Kamala Harris is for the people.” This weak slogan fails at both the logical and emotional levels for voters in red and purple states. The dull slogan is logically complicated. How does Kamala benefit the people of North Dakota? Likewise, from the emotional perspective, voters ask, “How is Kamala for me? I don’t think she has done anything for me.” The recent Democratic campaign strategy has primarily appealed to logic, while the MAGA approach has targeted the more crucial emotional keystone.
The Democratic Party prided itself on the fact that there have been no recent circular firing squads within their ranks. Instead of shooting each other in a circle, they all struck yoga poses in a safe and supportive meditation circle. They were relaxed and united, secure in knowing that their policies were sound and progressive. However, instead of convincing Independent and Republican voters to vote Democratic, the Democratic message of logic and progressive happiness repelled them.
Millions of Americans do not live near a coast. Millions live in once vibrant and progressive areas but now exist in crumbling ruins. The industrial Midwest was once a Democratic bastion; today, it is a regressive, Republican Rust Belt. Individual families once independently owned progressive farms in rural areas; today, farms are owned mainly by agribusiness corporations. Rural farmers are now dependent employees in the industrial-agricultural complex. Bill Clinton won the non-college-educated vote by 14 percent. A clear indication of the Democratic Party’s deafness to the same group was Kamala Harris’s 14 percent loss. Democrats appreciated John Fetterman’s Senate seat but did not listen to his no-nonsense, common-man pleas to focus on the forgotten people.
A more ominous trend for Democrats showed that 56% of young men voted for Trump in 2024, while Biden won 56% in 2020. Sexism might have something to do with this shift toward Trump, but Trump’s appeal to high-tech leaders (e.g., Musk, Zuckerberg, etc.) and Bitcoin supporters undoubtedly moved many young tech “progressives” toward MAGA.
Instead of genuinely reaching out to those left behind in red and purple states, Democrats enforce an ideology similar to religious orthodoxy amongst Evangelicals. If a Democrat uses the wrong pronoun in a discussion, a more enlightened Democrat will sharply correct him, her, or them. An apt description of this Democratic arrogance is:
These cultural problems have to do with how dilettante, rich, urbanites with a very narrow experience of the world dominate the party’s intellectual and fundraising apparatus. The other is the sneering arrogance and how the party now talks down to any competing view that deviates even slightly from orthodoxy… Jacob Waalk, November 12, 2024, Medium
The Democratic Party failed to reach out to those Americans left behind. Instead of investing the time to understand the problems in the heartland, they fretted over the issues of microscopic minorities. Every time the MAGA Party baited the Democrats to respond to a silly attack on some minority, the Democrats took the bait and lost another media skirmish. Unfortunately, there are not enough transgender Americans to offset the votes of angry, forgotten Americans. It is essential to fight for the rights of minorities, but democracies operate based on numbers, and parties should not get caught up in debates about the number of angels on a pinhead. Ironically, the Democratic Party, the great defender of democracy, seems to ignore the fundamental numerical power of people in a democracy. Are Democrats now thinking dogmatically in a non-democratic way? Being ideologically pure does not automatically translate into winning elections. One of America’s most transformational leaders, Lincoln was neither ideologically pure nor consistent, but he won two elections during one of the most turbulent periods in American history.
The MAGA Party, formerly known as the Republican Party, stretches the construct of an alternative reality. It is more like an opposite reality in which the poles of logic, honesty, and civilization are reversed. Lies, when repeated enough, become truth. Cultured behavior is transformed into a brutal, masculine assault patterned after two pit bulls fighting in a cage.
There is no need to list all the MAGA transgressions against the American people, traditions, and our civilization. Any honest, non-delusional person should acknowledge the extreme reality of MAGA. I know countless Trump supporters who say the same thing, “I do not like what he says, but he fights for my interests better than the Democrats.” Trump is full of populist sound and fury, but it is evident that he only cares about himself. His supporters are so compromised by his con that they are willing to overlook the blatant MAGA criminality and bad behavior. Even the old-line country club Republican leaders swallowed their principles, lest they got primaried. MAGA voters eventually become fully invested, and as Mark Twain said, “It is hard to convince them they have been fooled.” They have been converted into MAGA foot soldiers whose emotions compel them to follow one man.
I remember when Republicans said they wanted to reduce the federal deficit, restrain bad foreign actors like Russia, ensure the personal integrity of leadership, and support free market principles. The MAGA party has compromised the Grand ‘Ole Party and no longer supports those formerly bedrock Republican principles. The Republican Party has been infected with the MAGA cancer and is going the way of the Whig Party.
Toward Unity and the Future: How to Leave Chaos Junction?
As Arlie Hochschild suggests, millions of Americans suffer from a pride deficit and shame, while others are complacently proud and have a faux humble sense of superiority. Those with a pride deficit are desperate to catch up, while those complacent are strangely oblivious to the big picture.
Pretend that you are a foreigner visiting the USA. Watch American mainstream television for a day. See how success is glorified in our consumer-oriented advertisements. See how our culture glorifies those conspicuously displaying their wealth. See how our movies and television shows focus on urban life, usually on one of the coasts. In 2024, our culture pays more attention to urban minority groups than rural whites. In the 1960s, many uplifting, usually humorous shows were set in rural areas. Examples include The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Hee-Haw, and The Andy Griffith Show. If there is a rural media connection in 2024, it is usually set in the mythical past, like Yellowstone. Rural television programs were coincidentally phased out in a rural cultural purge when corporations began outsourcing American manufacturing. Our foreigner will ask, “Why don’t you have any television programs about your rural folks?” It is no wonder that almost every rural county in America voted MAGA in 2024. MAGA media are their only trusted sources of cultural entertainment and information.
Democrats, non-MAGA Republicans, and Independents need to address those suffering from a pride deficit. They need to reform America with a future-oriented plan that does not repeat past mistakes. They need to reject division and find win-win scenarios for those in rural, suburban, and urban areas. They must create pathways to success for the younger generations and all Americans. Our left-leaning media and entertainment industries must focus on understanding and representing life in rural areas.
On the other hand, acceding to MAGA’s drive to take America back to the 18th and 19th centuries is absurd. Americans have never needed a king or Fuhrer to tuck us in at night, and the 18th century was not as great as the movies depict. Does America really want to take human rights away from women, minorities, and those on the wrong side of a culture war? To cite a straightforward example, the MAGA Vice President has proposed that childless women should pay higher taxes and have fewer voting rights. While perhaps rhetorical, such out-loud thinking reveals the worst in MAGA America.
All good and reasonable people should avoid unsubstantiated, emotional propaganda, particularly from St. Petersburg, Russia, or Wuhan, China. Good, reasonable Americans should avoid simplistic extremism. America was founded nearly 250 years ago as the world’s first large-scale inclusive democracy. We became the United States of America through practicality and compromise, not extremism. However, what Americans should do and what they actually do are two separate things. As discussed earlier, Daniel Kahneman reminds us that humans are more apt to act based on emotions than logic. Extremism becomes incendiary when enough Americans operate primarily out of emotion, logic and deliberation be damned, and become alienated from their society.
Arlie Hochschild provides one tool to better understand those whose politics are dominated by emotion. She says that our country’s responsible leaders should become “emotionally bilingual” to understand and interpret the actions of those who feel they can no longer participate in America’s Dream. At the heart of the problem for the white working-class population is what Hochschild calls the pride paradox. This results from the clash between a strict culture of individual responsibility and the reality of a regional economic collapse. Paradoxically, their pride often prevents them from accepting opportunities from institutions trying to help them. Those who work hard but cannot get ahead suffer a painful shame that is hard to take. Trump and the MAGA coalition have been able to harvest their blue-collar shame and convert it into blame. They successfully blame bogeymen like corporations, liberals, Mexican rapists, the Deep State, and satanic cults at pizza parlors for their shame. MAGA translates their blame and rage directly into political action and votes.
Interestingly, Trump is surrounded by and influenced by the same corporations that victimize his working-class base. However, because Trump’s shame and blame propaganda manipulates his supporters so effectively, they do not see or care about the corporate strings and greed that hang above everything Trump does. They are so enamored with Trump’s engaging performance acting that they trust him to avenge their grievances and settle the score with their phantom Deep State. However, his supporters routinely overlook his actual Presidential performance. He told all the West Virginia miners in 2015 that “he dug coal” and would increase coal production. In the real world, American coal production fell 31% during Trump’s presidency. He told everyone he would build a great big, beautiful wall to keep the Mexican rapists out and that Mexico would pay for it. MAGA’s emotionally charged shame and blame propaganda overcame all his colossal failures to deliver on his promises. The only substantive change Trump made while president was to dramatically lower the taxes for his wealthy friends in the one percent club. As he said in the beginning, his supporters will continue to follow him even if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Although most of us were incredulous when he said this in 2016, most of us now believe his statement to be true.
It will be interesting to see if gas prices will be $1.50 a gallon, eggs will cost $1.30 a dozen, the federal budget has been reduced by 30%, and 20 million illegal immigrants will be deported in time for the 2026 mid-term election. Likewise, if Trump keeps his word and imposes tariffs on our closest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, the cost of goods will increase dramatically. Like falling dominos, an increase in inflation triggers increases in mortgage rates. What happens when only wealthy people can afford a mortgage? Let’s see what happens when MAGA goes after Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare to achieve a federal budget reduction of $2 trillion to satisfy the DOGE honcho, the South African immigrant Elon Musk.
This might sound implausible, but it has been reported that Trump wants to convert America’s dollar currency into a cryptocurrency based on his family’s TruthFi Bitcoin. Sadly, although this would probably harm 99% of all Americans, it would probably ruin MAGA true believers living crypto deposit to crypto deposit. Will the hardcore MAGA supporters then blame Trump when the economy tanks? Probably not. This is proven daily as con artists from all over the world siphon the savings of gullible victims. It was reported that scam victims lost $1 trillion worldwide in 2024. Unsurprisingly, as Twain said, most victims cannot admit they have been conned.
Moderate Americans (i.e., Independents, Democrats, and traditional Republicans) must come together to address the economic and emotional needs of places like the Midwestern Rust Belt. Moving too far to the left or right to address these problems only makes matters worse. It is foolish for any group to try to out-extreme the MAGA Party. Extremism is what got us into this mess, and the MAGAs are much better at it than the rest of us. Finally, if moderates do nothing, the MAGA cult will lead us into a populist death march of chaos and dissolution.