Adaptation Issue

Whether a Republican, Democrat, full-bore capitalist or new-age socialist, a person cannot watch “The Big Short” without coming to its ultimate question. Emerging from the theatre, jittery with soda and indignation and smacking the last morsels of Charleston Chew from her molars, a person wonders how so many financiers could have missed the signs of an impending crisis in the housing market. How could people who are paid to assess risk miss such a catastrophic doom about to tear through the world economy? As we all know, the housing market crashed on the verge of a presidential election. Similarly, as the last presidential cycle ramped up, a new catastrophe was befalling our nation: not a terrorist attack, not a rise in student-loan debt, not the persecution of religious liberty or a threat to safe and convenient access to women’s healthcare. No, the news shows had sounded the alarm about those calamities for the past seven years. However, like the bankers before, none of us saw this new tragedy coming: the sound-bite driven emergence of Donald Trump’s politics of hate.

While all the indicators of a financial crises hid in spreadsheets, so too did the foreshadowing of Trumpian politics burrow into the events of the past years. The most telling of these occurred around the fourth and fifth of June 2014. While not a single pundit has linked these days to the coming of Trump, the national conversation surrounding them sounded disturbing enough to mark a shift in the political landscape. A great fissure of hate and unreasonableness, which had simmered below—and occasionally bubbled over—the hearts of Republicans during the Obama Administration, had erupted fully, igniting not only the crazies, bigots, birthers and racists, but also the most practical and sensible minded in the party. At this time the Obama administration had announced its prisoner swap. Soldier Bowe Bergdahl, a deserter held in Afghanistan by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network, returned to his homeland. In exchange, the administration released five members of the Taliban held in Guantanamo. The soldier’s homecoming was commemorated in the Rose Garden where the President received the soldier’s father, Robert Bergdahl, along with his mother, Jani.

Later, Chuck Todd appeared on Morning Joe to discuss the swap of Sgt. Bergdahl and the prisoners of war. While the panel discussed whether the swap represented a public relations move designed to rally sentiment around eventually closing Gitmo, Joe Scarborough held a photograph up for the camera. In the photo, the president has his arm around Bowe’s father as the two walk away from the camera. Robert had dressed for the ceremony, in khaki pants and a white, button-down shirt. He’d groomed his long hair into a ponytail. Consequentially, though, he also sported a long and bushy beard. As Scarborough displayed the photograph, he began to criticize the father. He referred to Robert, whose son had been missing for 5 years, as “a man who is reaching out to pro-Taliban forces.” While Chuck Todd, realizing that Scarborough meant to make insensitive comments, said, “Wait,” Scarborough, mad that anyone would interrupt him, responded, “Who would wait me here?” But Todd, who understood that none of us can fully know the grief and desperation of a parent whose son is held captive, continued, “Don’t criticize the parents.”

Even in our private homes, in conversations with loved ones, lulled by the comforts of ginger tea and a blanket shawled over our knees, the condemnation of this swap should be reserved for the government. Even if one believes that Mr. Bergdahl should have encouraged his son to remain with his platoon, this was hardly the moment to say so. These parents, after all, could finally let go of one of the greater heartaches possible for a father and mother to endure. But these aren’t ordinary times and even the most sensible of us can breathe in the swarms of hate emerging in our country.

Here are parts of the emails that Bowe sent to his father before deserting: “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live… We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks… We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them.”

Sensitive to his son’s conflicted morals, Robert wrote in reply: “Dear Bowe, In matters of life and death, and especially at war, it is never safe to ignore ones’ conscience. Ethics demands obedience to our conscience.” This is a line more likely to be written by Thoreau than applied to the modern American political landscape. Scarborough would have advised, presumably, “Stay with your troops. Continue to wage a war you think is unjust. Continue to enable a practice you think is reprehensible.” As Scarborough explained his superior parenting style to a man who had lost his son to a hostile enemy, he leaned forward, towards the camera, and raised his voice. His skin boiled red.

While Scarborough despised the Bergdahls, their actions weren’t the most loathsome to him. It took a more common act of kindness to incite Scarborough’s complete anger. While the rest of the show’s panel, ignoring Scarborough’s hateful tone, discussed Robert’s parenting style, Scarborough’s voice became more venomous. He began to describe, referencing the photo, how President Obama “put his arm around” Robert, as if consoling a grieving parent constitutes a detestable action. While other segments of Morning Joe had admittedly been devoted to criticizing the administration’s decision to release the prisoners of war, a good fifteen-minute chunk railed against two acts of love: A parent consoling his son and a president embracing a grieving father.

The day before, on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly carried this nonsense even further. After seeing photographs of Robert sporting his beard, which he grew to mark the time his son remained missing, O’Reilly said that his beard made him look like a Muslim. O’Reilly didn’t mean Muslim in a good way. He didn’t mean Muslim in an objective way. He meant it in a racially-charged, us-vs-them, stay-out-of-our-country way. Responding to criticism he faced for his comments, O’Reilly said that looking like a Muslim was “inappropriate” when visiting the White House. While talking with Howard Kurtz, O’Reilly pulled back a finger for each point saying, “A: He absolutely looked like a Muslim; B: he talked Pashto, the language of the Taliban; and C: he thanked Allah. I thought the appearance was totally inappropriate.” Disgustingly, O’Reilly found it offensive that someone would speak the language of a Middle Eastern country, keep an unshaven face, and thank a god other than O’Reilly’s personal Christian savior while meeting members of the government in the Rose Garden. He might as well have yelled “White!” while saying the word White House.

Of course, racism, bigotry, and extreme nationalism have permeated politics for the entirety of American history. However, the extremist talk-show hosts or most radical elements of the Republican Party aren’t the only ones spouting out spite-filled hate. Joe Scarborough is a sensible commentator and (at the time was) a republican who works for MSNBC, a leftwing network. When shows on Fox News and MSNBC directed the same forms of anger at a grieving father and a consoling president, we should have been able to see that the country had begun to foster an ugliness that would replicate into the upcoming elections.

 A little over a year later, a study by Sherry Towers and her colleagues would illuminate this sudden rupture of decency in American journalism. In July 2015, the journal Plos ONE released, “Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings.” According to Towers et al, massacres at colleges and other schools can be infectious for at-risk individuals and can incite similar incidents for up to 13 days after the tragedy. The article states that the media’s coverage of these events can temporarily infect our minds and cause copycat killings. Essentially, the media’s coverage of the event become a meme, a term coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene and defined by Pascal Boyer as “units of culture: notions, values, stories, etc. that get people to speak or act in certain ways that make other people store a replicated version” of the meme. Traditionally, scholars have criticized memetics, a school of thought that recognizes agency in ideas. Critics argue that the theories proposed by memetics and similar schools of thought are not validated by scientific data. However, more published studies like the one mentioned above are treating cultural phenomenon like a virus. For instance, mass media coverage of suicides can incite suicide in teens. While this is a relatively recent way of hypothesizing the interactions between culture and the brain, these findings reinforce Trump’s rise in the polls, as he manipulates the media by saying some of the most disgusting phrases in recent political memory. In turn, the media can’t help but share these phrases with its audience.

In the same way that the media’s coverage of mass shootings can replicate more shootings, the presence of hate at a Trump rally can incite more hate. The violence at Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies, where protesters were punched, kicked, abused, and called “sluts” and racist names, is self-perpetuating. The best example of this happened to Rose Hamid. Responding to Trump’s calls to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S. 56-year-old flight attendant Rose Hamid staged a silent protest as Trump spoke to his followers. She wore a shirt reading, “Salam, I come in peace” and a star of David that resembled the symbol forced on the clothing of Jews during the Holocaust. Rose wanted to show that if people came “…to know each other, one on one, that they’ll stop being afraid of each other and we’ll be able to get rid of this hate in the world.” She was wrong.

Some of the supporters at the rally did get to know her and it didn’t matter. Briefly, they were nice. Hamid noted that those near her initially shared popcorn and talked with her. In the middle of the rally, though, she rose from her seat in silent protest. She didn’t shout. She didn’t interrupt. She remained quiet, respectful, displaying a tee-shirt with a Hebrew word on it. As a result, the crowd, giving in to what she would later describe as the “hateful crowd mentality,” became, frankly, Trump-like. The welcoming behavior of some, when confronted with the virus of hate, mutated into anger, disgust, and base fears. As security escorted her away, some apologized for the crowd’s treatment of her. Others, though, yelled “You have a bomb.” Many cheered. Hamid’s own explanation of it is fitting (click through to video): “It was really quite telling and a vivid example of what happens when you start using this hateful rhetoric and how it can incite a crowd where moments ago were being kind to me.” The contagious nature of the crowd’s hate infected those who moments ago were pleasant. Admittedly, it didn’t infect everyone. But not all viruses do.

Many commentators have and will argue that the anger we are witnessing is a result of Republicans enduring two terms of the Obama Administration and a congress so ideologically gridlocked that even the most optimistic citizens admit that barely anything is getting done. Other’s claim that a shift in demographics and the global economy have stranded working-class, white voters who are now terrified of their uncertain role in the U.S. Pundits will cite racially-charged violence and the protests from both sides, such as the chaos that ignited from the Michael Brown and Freddy Grey murders. They will tell of the suddenness by which Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Ted Cruz rose to prominence and they will tell of the frequency by which those politicians boast of being an “outsider.” They will mention the collapse of the housing market and the failure of the past and present Administrations to prosecute any of those responsible. For sure, all of those observations are true.

After the Republican Primary debate in Vegas, Lindsey Graham said on CNN’s New Day, “To those people who think Obama’s a Muslim who was born in Kenya, I lost you a long time ago. There’s a dislike of Obama in my party that’s unhealthy, there was a dislike for President Bush in the Democratic party that was unhealthy. He is my President.” After Sarah Palin endorsed Trump, Rush Limbaugh described her speech and the grass-roots conservative movement as a “virulent opposition to the left and the Democrat Party and Barack Obama. And I, for the life of me, don’t know what’s so hard to understand about that.” In a piece in The Atlantic, conservative writer David Frum stated that Palin’s endorsement of Trump represented an “alliance of the aggrieved.” Similarly, while speaking in Iowa, Jeb Bush, a cordial and thoughtful man, admitted that he misjudged the Republican electorate. Speaking to the AP, he said,  “This is dramatically different, because the country is dramatically different, and people are reflecting their anger and angst in a way that is very different than any time that I can recall.” Frequently belittled by Trump, Bush also misjudged something else. In the CNN Republican debates, speaking to Trump, he said, “You can’t insult your way to the presidency.” Given the current political climate paired with the contagious nature of hate, Jeb Bush was so, so wrong.

Of course, the events mentioned above factor into this reprehensible political moment we live in. Of course they do. But they are merely the environment from which the virus is allowed to spread. For example, if a group of people living together never washes their hands, shares food and uses each other’s unwashed spoons, one person getting sick will, more than likely, make most of them sick. But the acts of not washing their hands and not cleaning their silverware aren’t the virus; they are the virus’s accelerant. The analogy applies to our current political moment. Hate is the virus. Congressional ineptitude, demographic shifts, an exclusive economy (other than for a select few) and racial uprisings are just the grimy surfaces from which the virus spawns. As a result, we are missing a factor that could well be the main result of the spread of hate, which is that with the emergence of “click-bait” journalism, memes, shortened attention spans, and the networks’ need for ratings, the brain might be better wired to absorb and pass on anger than it does the complex inclusiveness of love.

Trump recognized this reality before anybody else. It’s no accident that he’s better than any of the other politicians at using Twitter, a program built of short, easily digestible phrases that spread rapidly. It’s also no surprise that he barely spent any money on television ads when all he had to do was say something hateful in order to rack up shares, retweets, and likes online. Similarly, it’s not hard to believe that the people who come to his rallies would become easily incited by his speeches. They’ve never washed their hands of the comforts of white privilege and they keep sharing the same spoon of ideological purity. Sadly, if this is the case, this Trump and the next one (because we will see many more “Trumps” in the future), represents the new norm in our political landscape. While this version of Trump will surely die out, as all memes eventually do, he will still mutate, take a new form, shape into a different candidate and politician. Hate as a common political commodity is here to stay.