Whose Truth is True? Political Ideology as the New Religion.

Convicted felon Donald Trump has replaced President Joe Biden’s face with a portrait of an autopen. As a ‘student of history’, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt (how did she say that without laughing?), Trump has labelled President Biden ‘sleepy’, President Obama ‘divisive’ and President Reagan a ‘fan of young Trump.’

This is pathetic.

It’s almost as pathetic as drooling over a ‘peace trophy’ (cough bribe cough) from a sports organisation. You know, the one Trump’s aides insisted on making as big as possible to compensate for his little mushroom problem. When is the Nobel Committee going to start awarding ‘best and fairest’ on the football field? That would be the next logical cultural moment.

Obviously, Trump has plenty of reasons to distract the public, with the photographs of late financier and paedophile Jeffery Epstein clearly incriminating the POTUS further, but are we really at the point where he gets to rewrite reality?

Perhaps…

Perhaps everyone is doing that. Political ideology is the new religion. Hear me out.

Are we all fascists now? Do we all march to the beat of our community leader’s drum? I’ve been asking this question of the contemporary US for some time, always mindful that if the biggest—or, at least, the loudest—democracy falls then others become vulnerable.

Contrary to Republican propaganda, the Founding Fathers were clear that their new nation would not be linked to religion at all.

It’s a curiosity of confirmation bias that right-wing pundits conveniently forget that the separation of church and state was enshrined in the American constitution to prevent blinkered religious dogma from infecting political decisions, while the right to bear arms only emerged in specific response to the War of Independence. To put it simply, the last thing General Washington and his friends wanted was a bunch of brainwashed, bible-thumping rednecks running around with AK-47s.

The Founding Fathers broke away from the UK to build a modern and free country. They weren’t interested in dictatorships…they’d just fought a king. I reference it a lot, but David Bowie’s ‘This is Not America’ is the song that encapsulates the current decade. As the US loses its way, so follows the Western world.

Yes, the Puritans mucked up the waters in America’s early days by pushing an extreme religious agenda, but the Puritans believed in witchcraft, and I don’t think we want to go back to their sense of ‘community’ anytime soon, do we?

To trace the beginning of our current ‘culture war’ I’d look at Pat Buchanan and the way he mobilised conservative anxiety in the mid-nineties. By ‘conservative anxiety’, what we’re really talking about is white Christian anxiety. He weaponised people’s irrationality and sent the US into political freefall. Crucially, Buchanan and others like him—I think we let the Bush family off the hook far too kindly, and don’t get me started on Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney—fundamentally distorted what America is. They disrespected the land of the free and pretended it was the land of the converted.

Enter Trump…

The Make America Great Again movement is a ‘community’ that preys on the anxieties Buchanan flamed. A truly great America is an America consistent with the secular values of the Founding Fathers. What Trump has been dog whistling since 2016 is, obviously, Make America White Again or Make America Christian Again. Such nonsense has nothing whatsoever to do with America and everything to do with the insecurities of his target base. The bigotry is stark, but so too is the absurdity. Anyone who thinks they can neatly package individuals according to broad categorisations has a very childish concept of the human experience. No human being can be boxed and labelled. We’re not crockery.

I don’t believe for a microsecond that Trump is religious. Everything about his hedonistic (cough criminal cough) lifestyle is an explicit rejection of Christian teachings…and, let’s be honest, the guy knows nothing about the Bible and hilariously flounders every time he is asked to pick his favourite verse. His knowledge of the New Testament is up there with my knowledge of calculus. I failed business maths in high school.

What Trump is doing—and props to you, Donnie, you’re doing it very, very well—is parroting the language of the Christian right to fleece his flock of their life savings. He’s building a ‘community’.

As cons go, this is much better than his crooked university, his no doubt salmonella-ridden steaks, and his, ahem, mortgage company… (God, imagine having a Trump as your mortgage broker. Oops, I took the Lord’s name in vain.) The grift works because, like any good capitalist model, it identifies a gap in the market and exploits that gap for financial reward.

The gap in the market, in this case, is working class people, disenfranchised people and downright poor people who are being told they’re in positions of power by middle- and upper-class people who actually are in positions of power. That’s not a lie of Trump’s creation…for a change. It is, tragically, a lie that the left has conjured and promoted within our own echo chamber. Our own ‘community’.

Trump has his masters, of course. The far-right doesn’t really care about their barely housetrained buffoon. The goal has always been the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade, keeping the poor uneducated and the flock in check. The powers behind Trump are less The Apprentice and more The Handmaid’s Tale.

As idiotic ‘influencers’ in the US degenerate from parroting misinformation to eating their own, Australia’s response to political polarisation has been to consider legislating against the spread of incendiary lies online. That’s a debate we should have.

The tragedy of the antisemitic Bondi massacre, a week ago as I write this, has forced Prime Minister Albanese to confront the concrete consequence of cruel words in cyberspace. We are also seeing deep fakes targeting female police officers in misogynistic hate campaigns alongside wild conspiracy theories blaming Israeli intelligence for the horrific shooting. Everyone has their own version of reality now.

The fundamentalists.

The incels.

Political activists of every extreme.

There are dozens of competing ‘truths’ in play and hundreds of raised voices. Everyone is telling their opponent to ‘educate yourself’. What they mean is: ‘Accept my truth as universal. Or else.’

If we are indeed stewing in a post-truth malaise, then it’s no wonder Trump is writing a series of spiteful presidential blurbs and calling them ‘history’. He can get away with it because everyone else is doing it too. After all, tearing at the norms of polite American society and imposing a new ‘truth’ is precisely why Trump was elected.

Those suffering economic and social deprivation put the bad businessman back in the White House—what’s left of it—because they were tired of being ignored. They were tired of other people’s ‘truth’ winning. What else is the demolition of the East Wing about if not to tear down democratic symbols and build a new ‘truth’? Why else would Trump slap his name on the Kennedy Centre if not to strike a blow into the hearts of the ‘cultural elites’ who shunned him in New York as they shunned those from the ‘flyover’ and ‘Rust Belt’ states in 2016 and before?

Look at the language everyone is using and it’s obvious that reality is now seen as malleable…Trump constantly boasts of his White House ‘legacy’ while John F. Kennedy’s niece, Kerry Kennedy, prepares to reestablish her ‘truth’ as soon as Trump is out of office. Kennedy posted the following on Twitter:

Three years and one month from today, I’m going to grab a pickax *[sic]*and pull those letters off that building, but I’m going to need help holding the ladder. Are you in?

Much of this phenomenon comes down to social anxiety. People are no longer comfortable sitting with disparate perspectives. They need their ‘truth’ to triumph. Recent years have seen riots and murders over statues. What all of this symbolism represents is the mark of different realities, often a proxy for deep personal grievance. In the US, many of the grievances that have been so potently weaponised by Trump and others concern the contrasting experiences of people belonging to different economic and social classes.

We live in the shadow of Australia’s own systemic mistreatment of those who are struggling financially, including the callous legacy of Robodebt and bipartisan apathy towards the ongoing housing crisis that disproportionately impacts the young. When this long shadow is met by a lack of pragmatic action from a supposedly ‘empathetic’ federal government—‘empathy’ is a hollow word if it remains blind or indifferent to class—it becomes plain that we have the same recipe for social anxiety here that has flourished to Trump’s benefit in the US.

In the absence of opportunity and meaningful connection, people retreat back into cloistered enclaves where bigotry, closed-mindedness and the intolerant side of religion become convenient tools for conmen and fanatics.

Globally, the swing to both the extreme right and the extreme left is indicative of this anxiety. While the former is certainly the most dangerous, the latter is drifting further and further away from reasoned debate. We call this a ‘culture war’, but it’s a religious war, it’s an ego war, and, to people like Buchanan, it’s a war to return to a status quo that never existed.

It’s also—or, perhaps, essentially—a class war. Neither side wants to wrestle with that. Conservatives seek to exacerbate the unhappiness around class division by fuelling the fire. The progressive community, meanwhile, isn’t big on self-reflection. We’d have to look at economic privilege and that shakes our own apple cart.

The thing about anxiety, though, is that it can be alleviated. It can be deconstructed. It can be solved through sound policy that reunites rather than divides. We all agree that we want to live in a better world…

But do we have to tear each other down in order to build it?