Friday, June 10, 2022

How do you persuade somebody that they've been brainwashed?

I have been spending much of the day trying to reconcile last night's hearing with this long opinion piece from the NY Times, particularly this paragraph.  

The right’s new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called “Middle American radicals,” or M.A.Rs. This demographic, which makes up the heart of Mr. Trump’s electoral base, is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people, and it is characterized by a populist hostility to elite pieties that often converges with the old social conservatism. But M.A.Rs do not share the same religious moral commitments as their devoutly Christian counterparts, both in their political views and in their lifestyles. As Ross Douthat noted, nonchurchgoing Trump voters are “less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced” than those who regularly attend religious services. No coincidence, then, that a 2021 Gallup poll showed 55 percent of Republicans now support gay marriage — up from just 28 percent in 2011.

The core question is this: how will the M.A.Rs react to the House Committee investigation of the events on January 6, 2021.  Will they treat it as a witch hunt and nothing more? They surely will be getting a filtered version of the hearings and what was said and shown there.  Somewhere, I can't remember the source now, I heard that Fox Business aired the hearings but Fox News did not.  Do M.A.Rs rely primarily and perhaps exclusively on Fox News for staying up to date?  If you presume that's true and you presume as well that Fox News will treat the investigation as part of the new culture war, then there would seem to be no way for the American people as a whole to reach the same conclusion about the events on January 6, 2021.  What would be the consequences of that?

It seems to me then the election in November can't work with the vast majority of people accepting the results, but now we're talking about elections on a state level and a Congressional district level.  There will be chaos.  Can such chaos resolve itself in short order?  I don't see how it can.  

If the election is left unresolved, the instability will lead to violence.  Indeed, there may be threatened violence to intimidate voters on Election Day.  There could very well be a tit-for-tat that would then escalate.  That's my fear. 

Those who are trusting of the normal electoral process, more Democrats then Republicans at this point, probably expect that the police and possibly the military would be brought in to squelch the violence.  So, part of what I've been scratching my head about is this.  If you did a political polling of the police and the military, what fraction of them are M.A.Rs?  Would those who are take sides in the aftermath of the election rather than perform their duty?

There is too much I don't know here to think this through fully.  But it certainly has me worried. 

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