And I thought the Religious Right was a problem.
I've felt from the beginning, since that day Trump adolescently bullied Jeb Bush during a debate and the crowd approved, that support for Trump was, for many, a neophyte religion. It was always as the president said in January, 2016 -- he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would still be supporters.
The religious nature of Trump support seems to both highlight and explain the dichotomy between Trumpism and science. Trumpism, like communism and other belief systems, cannot really be disconfirmed. If you ask Trump supporters what Trump behavior or piece of evidence would cause them to reject Trump as leader, you'll get a long, long pause.
Any belief system that immediately diverts disconfirming information into categories of "fake news" or conspiracies is basically impervious to evidence from outside the belief system and extremely intolerant of modification from within. Trumpism serves as a religion, with Donald Trump the only arbiter of truth and what's best for all. Trump's rallies take place in a sacred space. Much of his energy during those rallies is devoted to drawing the inside/outside distinction. Inside the rally is sacred space. Outside is profane corruption. Trump himself occupies a sacred position. Criticism from profane outside forces simply misses the mark because, by definition, a sacred leader cannot be evaluated by profane means or profane outsiders.
Trump and Trumpism have demonstrated a complete inability or unwillingness to self-correct. Self-correction is viewed as a weakness and, more importantly, as unnecessary because sacred leadership does not require self-correction. Trumpian leadership is both gnostic in nature and divinely inspired. Outsiders simply have no access to the gnosis or the content of the divine inspiration. The profane outsiders are always viewed as trying to decipher and bring down something they not only don't understand, but are unqualified to judge. The devil, whether fake news or the deep state, lacks the pureness to critique the sacred.
Trumpism as Antithetical to Science
During my lifetime (I'm 63), acknowledgement in the political arena of having been wrong or changing one's mind has evolved from evidence of increased information and debate to a complete and utter sin. The evolution has been fast and unidirectional. Policy positions have taken on a religious veneer in that they are almost a kind of permanent commitment requiring a future evasion of rethinking and a radical avoidance of disconfirmation.
In a sense, political positions have been evolving into religious positions requiring fealty and an absolute lack of positional compromise. Trumpism as a religion is a natural outcome of this ongoing American political evolution.
Science, meanwhile, is anathema both to religion and the direction of American politics precisely because science is self-correcting. Self-correction is an indelibly permanent feature of science. Unfortunately for policy-making, this means that self-correcting scientists are viewed as something less, and science is seen by Trumpsters as unstructured and unmoored because it subordinates policy decisions to ongoing analyses of data.
The self-corrective nature of the scientific endeavor places science directly in the cross-hairs of political religiosity. Since self-correction has become so stigmatized in Trumpworld, respect for science literally has no place in it. Fealty to data is not fealty to the sacred. Science finds itself defined as a kind of natural enemy of the Trump religion.
None of this is terribly startling, as policy guided by personalities is always going to generate friction against policy directed by data. In 2020, this friction has become a veritable firestorm. Although lip service is tangentially being paid to data, as when Rand Paul cobbles together some oblique, far-fetched information and tries to jam it into a coherent argument, the fact is that you can almost feel the underlying disdain for appealing to logic or numbers or establishing cause-and-effect. The Trump religion is straining at the bit to just suspend the entire logic charade and impose what they want with minimal concern regarding whether suspension of disbelief becomes a requirement.
The sidestepping, ignoring, and outright lying regarding data during this pandemic has led Scientific American, after 175 years of political neutrality, to endorse Joe Biden for president.
Perhaps the 2020 electoral battle should be framed with somewhat different language. It's not so much red versus blue as it is theocracy versus democracy. And the theocracy has a very human, very Un-Christian leader.
Bob Dietz
September 25, 2020
