- Reconsidering how to characterize what I’ve been calling the “fringe”;
- Taylor Swift and MAGA;
- Bobby Azarian on why Trump’s supporters don’t believe evidence;
- Applying the Jack Smith rule to statements from the National Prayer Breakfast.
Here’s the thing: I shouldn’t be referring to the “fringe” as if the people I’ve described being there are outliers. Their sheer numbers indicate they are not outliers, though they are likely still in the minority. (Trump never won a majority of the vote.) What’s changed in the past decade or two isn’t that the number of ignorant, irresponsible, amoral people has ballooned; it’s that we’re hearing more about them, via social media, and see their exacerbating effect on public consciousness and politics.
Still, there should be a term to differentiate the kind of people who vote for Trump, the kind of people who reject modern science and morality (not necessarily the same of course), the racists and misogynists, the believers in woo, and so on, from the relatively more sophisticated, worldly people, including the philosophers and scientists and engineers who have built our modern world, and the artists including musicians and writers and painters who try to honestly interpret our modern world.
Tribalists versus free-thinkers? Maybe… Or maybe not, since those are accurate yet loaded terms. Be nicer and call them Traditionalists? (Of course that implies that progressives disavow tradition, which is hardly the case.) Whatever the first group might be called, here are several items about them today. As I’ve said, I’m fascinated by them not to rag on Republicans or conservatives, but in genuine curiosity about the limitations of human intelligence, and thus the potential of the human race. (In my standard science fiction perspective.) (I noted a few days ago a distinction on some TV show between “stalwarts” and progressives; that word stalwart has a nice flavor to connote the dedication of conservatives to what they feel are immutable truths. Though it has an unfortunate historical connotation…)
NY Times, David French, 4 Feb 2024: Taylor Swift and the Profound Weirdness of MAGA
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