Trying To Understand Why People Vote For A Fascist Strong Man And What Has To Be Done To Prevent That

As Donald Trump again exposes the sheer awfulness of his personality, his total amorality in attacks against the father and mother of a soldier killed in service to his country, you have to wonder how anyone could possibly stick with him in this election.   Yet the polls are reported give him a chance of becoming "commander in chief" of the military with the very real ability to get more soldiers killed.  And, since practically no one in the media can be counted on to mention it, even more of an ability to kill people who a president will not be held responsible for getting killed.

You can blame the ignorance of some of Trump's supporters, their continued support makes you wonder what percentage of them will have heard of the incident that is all over the news.  But any who have heard of his massive and grotesque disrespect of a Gold Star Mother or any of the myriad of other self-disqualifying things he has said in any given week of this campaign and who still intend to vote for him are clearly not only ignorant but as morally deficient as he has so massively shown himself to be.

How did the United States fail in the moral education of so many of its voters that they could have selected Donald Trump to be a presidential nominee?    Certainly his selection as a candidate isn't merely a matter of ignorance - a lot of his supporters, many of the most vehement supporters of Donald Trump are not ignorant of the catalog of moral depravity that constitutes his public utterances, his history in the civil and divorce courts, his crass self-indulgence and massive egotism.  Many of those who have supported him do so while claiming moral superiority, the often cited "evangelical" Trump supporters some of them excusing his obvious sins against their own morality, the sex scandals (you have to ask why his infidelities count as nothing as compared with the ones of Bill Clinton) the serial polygamy of trading in wives for younger models, the profiteering from gambling and other vices, the open and blatant theft of conning and cheating robbing even quite vulnerable people?

I do think that in the over-reaction to things like the Supreme Court rulings banning prayer in public schools has led to a near complete reluctance to enforce any moral absolutes or even to instruct and enforce morality among children, and certainly not among adults.  The Supreme Court has made even the consideration that children could be damaged by what adults find entertaining an insufficient reason to deprive adults of even the most morally depraved content.  

When I was growing up, back in the days of bible readings in public schools and production codes on TV,  at least those moral messages important to civic good were absolute, you didn't cheat, you didn't attack the vulnerable, you didn't disrespect other people, especially those in mourning, and most of all, you would never think to attack a Gold Star Mother for personal gain. And, most of all, you were to do to other people what you would have done to you, equality was actually considered the common morality that everyone was expected to abide by.   Of course few of us achieved a 100% grade in following that moral ideal but we were taught that it was, in fact, what we were expected to do.  The extent to which you did practice them was the measure of your entitlement to respect and public trust.  Those are, in fact, the very basis of democracy so that any assertion of the equality of both rights and the moral obligation to observe those equal rights were the ABCs of civic education. Replacing them with even the First Amendment of the Constitution as if it could substitute for it may have been the beginning of the descent.

Ultimately, democracy depends on equality of rights and moral obligations, not merely on freedom to say whatever you want to to advocate or promote whatever you find most profitable to you.   You can't short that circuit or make a substitution and expect that democracy will be achieved or endure. You won't have democracy without moral restraints on behavior, it can't be done.   Liberty, in the absence of equality and moral restraint, produces fascism where the least moral and most able crush the rights of those weaker than they are, the losers of libertarianism. 

There has always been a strain of amorality, of cynical use and enjoyment of inequality as a means of getting ahead taught and promoted by libertarians, "right and left".   Quite often the fans of cruel comedy, of what they will insist on calling "satire" when it's just cynical and cruel and an expression of amorality are, in fact, expressing the amorality of Donald Trump.   Think of how many times you've seen a person expressing his style of cynical self-centered greed, either mildly or quite over the top,  presented as comic and as a character for emulation.

Since Donald Trump, The Public Persona, is a product of entertainment TV, it is important to understand how it fits into the very limited range of stock personality types that American TV is filled with.   Which are, in turn, constructed out of a crude pallet of tones and hues and forms.  And, it is as important to see how the part of the public so trained by what it sees on TV so they would buy Donald Trump as they would any other poisonous or dangerous product they see advertised was sold that substitute for equal moral obligations without which the United States will not achieve or maintain democracy.   It was through the same amorality which the most appalling of current capitalist economics has become the real religion of the United States, even among those who insist on calling it by the name of its exact opposite,  "Christianity".    Such people not only claim they are serving both GOD and Mammon, they are calling the service of Mammon, serving GOD*.

This perversion of the civic morality which is, in fact, the basis of democracy into the ammorality of personal gain and indifference to morality and other people and living beings is the basic danger we live under.   Until it is understood how the amorality of the media, its cynical profit-driven substitutions of the components of Donald Trump's persona as a desirable goal - his wealth at all cost to others - is seen to be, in fact, as dangerous as fascism or Stalinism or Maoism or the perverted morality of ISIS or Vladimir Putin we will be in danger from a Trump or someone like him being the choice for president expressed in the votes of morally degraded voters.   And being a domestic product sold to them by the same media that created the Donald Trump they bought, being the creation of the same media that is the thing that informs and eats up their attention, it is far more dangerous.  And it is certainly nothing that the alleged "left" can preen in superiority about, it had a strong role in both permitting and insisting on "moral neutrality" in public life through its hostility to religion or religious expression just at the time when what religion has, moral instruction in that morality was the only real hope of countering the broadcast morals of Mammonism.

Any ACLU style liberal who bought that their government would become more Democratic. more equal by giving equal time or, in fact, all of the time, to commercial greed over the Golden Rule, were as much chumps for them as anyone.   There is no law of nature that means that, treated equally, with judicial disinterest, the moral basis of democracy will win out over the amoral basis of fascism.  It doesn't happen automatically like balancing a scientific formula.  It has to struggle against the fact of selfishness and self-satisfaction served by inequality.   The moral basis of democracy has to be promoted, to be given every possible advantage, every benefit even of any doubt in order to overcome the attractions of selfishness and the self-aggrandizement that cruelty affords.   That the morality that is essential for the foundation of democracy is contained in the scriptures of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other forms of religion, makes it no surprise that democracy arose where it has.  The idea that you can abandon its promotion in the name of non-establishment of religion without the kind of adverse consequences we've seen in the past fifty years is undergoing a particularly dangerous test of time.

You cannot have Democracy without that moral absolute being the agreed to and enforced ideal we are taught along with the counting numbers and the alphabet and the bottom line of mass media.  And that won't happen without them being forced to do it.   There is no accident that it was when TV, radio and the movies in the United States were under production codes and rules of content that we were able to have the Civil Rights Movement resulting in the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.    It is also no accident that it was when those codes didn't exist that Birth of a Nation spawned a resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan and lynching.   In the muddle of thinking that is the mind of the Trump Voter, you will hear the echoing slogans of the "free speech-free press" industry and the moral positions of the entertainment industry.

It's no accident, it's the product of American entertainment media, brought to you by those who allowed the media to lie and promote what they think is most profitable to them.  If you think they're intellectually incoherent, it's no more incoherent than denying that they are influenced by what they see and hear on TV, the radio and in the movies.  Their intellects are no more sharpened by their viewing than their sense of doing to others what they would have done to them.  Their moral ideal is to be able to express their angry hatred in a libertarian outburst of uninhibited free speech, free press, not checked by that competing morality.   The Trump campaign is what American media has sown because it was allowed to.

*  An Atheist got fussy with me about capitalizing the G in GOD so I have decided to capitalize all the letters, when I'm talking about GOD.