Trusting authority

"Yes, Jesus loves me!

Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me!
The Bible tells me so."

                            Christian song for children 

How do we know what we know? Faith or observation?

Trump is unique in modern America for his ability to create an alternative universe within his political base. People believe him.

Everyone "knows" the country is polarized. MSNBC is different from FOX. MSNBC has stories about Trump and January 6. Fox has stories about immigrants at Texas border, about inflation, and about Biden's age. There is observable evidence of the divide. Democrats think Trump's effort to overthrow the election was significant. A majority of Republican minimize it or justify it. Besides, Biden is terrible. Look at gasoline prices!

This blog examines the various reasons for red and blue America. There are media silos and silos of party-affiliation inertia, similar to being a Yankee or Red Sox fan. There are divides based on gender, on ethnic and racial identity, on church attendance, on urban/rural residential density, on educational attainment. Income levels, which used to matter a lot, now matter less. Demography predicts political orientation, so it makes sense that it somehow must determine it. A non-religious female history professor of mixed race, living in a college town on the West Coast is a good bet to be a Democrat. She probably cares about the environment, too. She likely drives a hybrid.  A White male Christian church-attending mechanic working on oil rigs in West Texas is likely a Republican. He likely drives a pickup truck.

Hilliard

There is yet another school of thought. Maybe red and blue America is determined by ways of knowing. College classmate Constance Hilliard suggests this in an email she sent me. Connie is an historian with a focus on African and Middle Eastern History. She wrote:

The difference between Dems and the GOP is not the process, but rather their different epistemologies. It has taken me a lifetime to understand at a soul-level what this hifalutin word even means, which in Anglo-Saxon is translated as "ways of knowing." A democratic society validates what is real through evidence and scientific fact. But as much as we pretend otherwise, America has always been half democratic/half patriarchal. Slavery, fundamentalist Christianity, Jim Crow, discrimination, voter suppression are based on a knowledge system defined by power. The real and the true is what those in power say it is. So long as you're conveying the patriarch's message with loyalty and conviction, that epistemological system will never accuse you of lying or immoral behavior. 

That had a ring of truth to me. Traditional-values people cite traditional authorities and practices. For many evangelical Christians, the Bible is inerrant and is meant to be understood literally. Rituals, too, must be performed perfectly. The Roman Catholic Church, even under this liberalizing Pope, declared that thousands of baptisms performed over decades by a priest were now null and void. In baptismal ceremonies he had used the word "we" in saying "we baptize you" instead of "I baptize you." We implies that a Catholic community of the faithful consecrates the baptism. The word "I" means that the priest, and only the priest, acting as the official agent of Christ with authority passed down from St. Peter, delivers the only true baptism. It matters. The mis-baptized need new ceremonies.

Americans understand themselves to be innovators, empowered by freedom of thought and action. We contrast ourselves with Europe in that way. We are the new and improved brand. The Enlightenment Era was in full flower at the time the USA's founding documents were written. Enlightenment thinkers replaced religious authority with reason and human observation. We were the go-getters. The country expanded westward and developed new technologies. America considered itself modern. The Civil War was the triumph of the modern, industrialized urban North over the traditional.

Change faces resistance. People like the familiar, especially if they are inconvenienced or  disadvantaged by change. "Don't fix it if it ain't broke." Trump represented the desire to circle back to an imagined American Golden Age prior to the modern disruptions of Black Civil Rights, second wave feminism, and the modern era of immigration from Latin America and Asia. Trump is is a cultural counter-revolutionary in that change--but he isn't a prude. Trump exemplified the Hugh Hefner Playboy philosophy of the 1950s and early 1960s. The great-again America prior to 1963 was a traditional America. 

Trump sells an alternative universe to his political base. People believe him, or they suspend belief and accept him on faith. He represents delivered truth. Kellyanne Conway famously cited "alternative facts," but she wasn't presenting new facts. She and Trump supporters have an ample way to confront observations that dispute the Trump-truth. They have the distraction of "whatabouts." What about inflation, gasoline prices, Afghanistan, gaffes, low poll numbers. They have faith. 

The Big Lie is true. Trump told them so.