Views from Crestmont Drive

This is the week Trump is being impeached for inciting a riot and invasion of the Capitol, and Republicans, supposedly the party of personal responsibility, are going to let him get away with it. Nothing to see here, they say. They are showing themselves to be not a party of principle, but an authoritarian cult (perhaps because they realize they cannot win on issues). They will live in infamy.

I repeat that I compile links like these not because I am a partisan hack. It’s because I aspire to be a student of history, and of human psychology. It’s because recent events in American history are examples of patterns in history, and of inclinations in human nature, that are always present. The authoritarian tendencies of Trump and his followers, and the mob violence of recent events, are continuing patterns throughout human history, and will never go away. At best they can be marshaled through education, the lessons of history, an awareness of human psychology, an awareness of the errors in how we perceive the world. But education is work and has to be redone with every generation; the default human nature is authoritarian tribalism, which sometimes resists education (or at best, filtered “home education.”) In deference to tribalism of one sort or another, especially religious, many people in the world avoid education that would challenge it.

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