Two Realities

It's not just politics, but how politics had intentionally sown not just division but undermined trust and truth to achieve its own ends, including coopting "religion" as a weapon of fragmentation and even language so communication becomes impossible. I am not the first one to recognize this, but I have observed for a while (and even wrote about it) that what we are experiencing is not just disagreements on competing philosophies. We are living in such disconnected and discontinuous realities that dialog and debate are no longer possible. From within the construct of each reality, the political stances make sense, but since the realities are so different they leave no way to address what is or is not true. I suspect that this infection has intentionally been foisted on the Church to the point that the Gospel (good new of Jesus) is obscured.

My hypothesis is that the Obama presidency represented a significant segment of the US population who have felt their voices were not heard, and not just Obama himself, but the movement surrounding him articulated that long suppressed voice. That fueled the MAGA movement that also felt their voice had been dismissed for a long time and felt threatened by the likes of Obama (from the 60s: the peace, civil rights, environmental, and women's movements). Trump and others around him spoke for that voice. The MAGA movement harked back to the 1950s as though that was a normative golden age when "America was great," which of course the people whose voices were heard in the Obama years viewed as an era of oppression and darkness. Ordinarily, when the spokesperson for a movement is defeated in an election the movement fades away, but that is clearly not happening. The refusal to acknowledge that lost election is a cue to just how incongruous these two realities are. Those differing realities are not just liberal vs. conservative debates (conservatives such as George Will and David Brooks have pointedly distanced themselves from MAGA). This discontinuity is evident in a variety of ways besides the 2020 election, including response to Covid-19 and climate change.