The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

Aldous Huxley

As we enter the cornered-rat stage of “Trump 2.0; The Re-Deadening,” with his poll numbers tanking and the economy swirling down the drain, each day brings new outrages and tramplings of our republic. As the “Breaking News” emails continue to flood inboxes across the country, liberals have developed a Pavlovian wince reflex, as we exhaustedly click on each new shredding of our institutions, our constitution, and our common humanity.

It’s a very strange time, because while the damage being done to the United States and its citizens is as dire as could be imagined, it is being executed by profoundly unserious people. As an echo to John Kennedy Toole’s “Confederacy of Dunces,” we can describe our current situation as a Tyranny of Unserious Despots.

Now, by “unserious,” I don’t mean silly, or trivial, or ridiculous. No, what I’m getting at is that Trump and his Project 2025 goons are engaged in massive efforts to change the world in a way that is just completely untethered from reality. It’s as if they have looked out onto the world, and decided that whatever is obviously true or generally agreed-upon by most reasonable people, that is what they will make their life’s purpose to deny and attack, turning truth into its opposite — not to actually accomplish anything positive for people, but just to expand and preserve their own power and their own fortunes.

Let’s unpack this a little bit by looking at some of these starkly unserious ideas and policies, again remembering that unserious does not mean benign or harmless, but rather, untethered from the Real.

Currently, with the help of a feckless Supreme Court majority, the GOP and Trump are now breathlessly looking to quickly gerrymander as many non-white seats out of Congress as they are able, before the mid-terms. For good reason, this has gotten a lot of attention lately, and it is of course a gross violation of people’s right to equal representation (and let’s remember that after decades of fighting for voting rights, blacks are now only just proportionately represented in Congress in relation to their overall population share, and Latinos are still underrepresented). But at bottom, this is just a ridiculously unserious way to try to exist and thrive in a pluralistic democracy. It is literally saying that you have no desire to engage with people who are different than you are, on the playing field of ideas and public policy. It is a juvenile fear that all difference is scary and evil, and must be wished away while plugging your ears and closing your eyes to millions of your fellow citizens.

After all, what is the end game of gerrymandering away people’s right to representation? Is this voter suppression just a stalling tactic, in hopes that, what, that we eventually empty out all of our cities by deporting everyone who won’t swear fealty to Emperor Trump? Or maybe that if we can just suppress liberals and minorities long enough, Jesus will come back and rapture all the Whites up to heaven?

In short, there’s just no mature, sober, reasonable rationale for gerrymandering and voter suppression. It appears to be a practical tactic for winning elections on behalf of a shrinking demographic, but really it’s just a tantrum by rural whites who are tired of seeing mixed-race couples in detergent commercials on TV, so they’re going to shred our electoral system to soothe their discomfort with social change.

Another deadly project that is fundamentally unserious is the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, along with an expanding group of people who did everything according to the legal immigration book, but are still, unfortunately, of the wrong hue. The basic facts about immigration are undisputable, but of course are still in dispute for political polarization purposes. Immigrants do not being massive, or actually any, increases in crime. Numerous studies have demonstrated that immigrant influxes into communities actually drive crime rates down. Immigrants are also a net positive for the economy, as they pay lots of taxes and receive virtually no federal benefits that are reserved for citizens only. The “crisis at the border” is completely self-inflicted, and is not actually a crisis at all. Everyone says that they like immigrants, but only if they come here legally. But then, we put virtually no money into actually facilitating that legal process. There are not enough immigration judges, and asylum claims are not heard in a reasonable amount of time, etc.

And then there is the overriding fact of demographic transition. Declining birth rates are a universal feature of advanced industrial societies that provide political rights, educational access, and economic opportunities for women. As such, all of these societies become elderly-heavy, and are in desperate need of young workers, to fill out the tax base and to do jobs that older people just cannot or will not do. So immigrant labor fills an obvious economic need, but MAGA folks just want no part of it. They would rather just deport everyone that is too dark and then hope, for what? That poor white people will then magically decide to pump out more babies, because employers will suddenly be compelled to jack salaries way up and give (white) people great benefits and traditional pensions again, even if the workers are just high school grads? How would that all happen? The laws of capitalism would suddenly be suspended, just because all the Latinos are gone? It’s just ridiculous.

Let’s look at one more issue where Trump and other conservatives are profoundly unserious: the outlawing of abortion and other policies that restrict women’s reproductive choices, and thus their liberty. First, let’s dispense with any theological opposition to abortion. This does not get nearly enough attention, but it’s worth fleshing out. First of all, if you are a Christian, what is more important, our brief life on earth, or eternal life with God? That’s a no-brainer. So considering that there is no explicit guidance on abortion in the Bible, who is to say that aborted fetuses don’t go directly to heaven? After all, God can’t condemn people who have never heard of Christ to eternal damnation, nor can children who die before understanding religion be eternally condemned. So there obviously must be a mechanism by which God sorts out the elect from the damned, for that big group of people who are either unable to understand Christianity (the mentally disabled and children who die before becoming intellectually sophisticated), or who have never encountered Christian teachings. So why would you obsess over aborted fetuses? An omnipotent God is perfectly able to handle the ambiguous status of fetuses and other people who cannot explicitly accept Christ for one reason or another. If you’re freaking out about “murdered babies” because of the eternal status of their souls, then your mind, and thus your God, is just not big enough. Time to upgrade your theology. Let’s put it another way: functionally speaking, there is no difference whatsoever between an aborted fetus and any child that dies before being able to intellectually understand Christianity. Any God worth the name will have things worked out for those situations, and to maintain that human beings should intervene just to force more fetuses through birth canals is just shoddy theology. But then, anti-abortion is not really about the souls of fetuses anyway. It’s about forcing sexual morality onto people in order to control them and bring about the sort of society that you want, regardless of what other people want.

Additionally, as mentioned earlier, forcing maximum births is just a fundamental refusal to understand the demographic transition that always happens when societies expand the full agency of women. Are we going to be on the side of other modern cultures that embrace women’s empowerment, or will we throw our hats in with the Islamic fundamentalists, who view females as baby-making and male-pleasing machines only? The Draconian efforts to control and dominate women’s bodies and liberties are doubly absurd (and again, in calling them absurd, I am not trivializing the situation — quite the opposite). It is a desperate attempt to reignite an archaic, obsolete, and theocratic worldview, smack dab in the middle of an overall culture that is becoming more scientific, more secular, and freer. This expansion of individual empowerment, even of (gulp) women, is absolutely a development and fulfillment of Western Civilization itself, that pearl-clutched thing that conservatives are always hugging to their quivering bosoms. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution all happened because of the ideas birthed in Christendom, not in spite of them. Individual agency and sanctity are the fulfillment of Western thought, not perversions of it.

That was the past-facing absurdity of pursing the oppression of women, The future-facing aspect is just as futile and outrageous. Is it really possible to institute a Handmaid’s Tale regime in the midst of the biggest, most dynamic industrial society the world has ever seen? How can you just withdraw the jobs, the power, the agency of tens of millions of women, without mobilizing a machinery of oppression far larger than anything that has ever appeared on earth? It’s just nonsensical. Again, these efforts to subjugate women are doing immense damage to our country, but they are still deeply unserious, in that there is no way to actually accomplish the perverted goals. We cannot go there without destroying ourselves.

So what’s the deal? How has a national political party and the social movement behind it become so absurd, so untethered from reality and the truth? The first part of the answer brings us back to the Polarization Industrial Complex, that massive group of media outlets, think tanks, and pundit factories that has evolved to provide “intellectual” cover for the plutocrats. The PIC is an idea-laundering entity, taking in the obvious fact that the wealthy have basically fucked regular people out of everything, and then spitting out deflections and scapegoating on the other end.

The PIC whispers to us: see, it’s not really capitalism or the wealthy that have done all the damage to our lives and our communities. No, it’s the Deep State, or the globalists, or high school trans athletes, or bad apple CEOs, or the the Jews, or the Blacks, or the immigrants, or the libs, or the feminazis, or Critical Race Theory professors, or any other grievance magnet group that can be scrounged up. The PIC keeps regular people angry at each other, looking down and sideways instead of up. [see earlier posts on this blog for more info on the Polarization Industrial Complex]

The deeper part of the explanation as to how conservative unseriousness has come to rule our lives is a little more slippery, and I haven’t thought it all the way through just yet. But it’s something like this: many traditional conservatives, and perhaps a lot of MAGA people too, know deep down that their leaders are ridiculous, and that a large percentage of what they say has nothing to do with reality in the strict sense. They know that it’s all performative, and thus purposely over the top and theatrical. But many of those same conservatives have decided that this doesn’t really matter, because they have given up on modern society as a whole anyway; not the gadgets and their digital dopamine hits, but on the idea that a modern economy and a modern state can actually be used to make people’s lives better. They believe instead that the public sphere is inherently corrupt, because they see nothing but hypocrisy, opportunism, grift, and dishonesty everywhere they look. And while conservatives generally view the “business world” more positively than government, they also can’t help but see the incredible unfairness and inequality that capitalism spins out. So they are now skeptical of anything coming out of that world as well.

Essentially, conservatives have split their consciousness, living only nominally in the modern world, while pushing their true identities backwards to the safer climes of the past, where things made sense because they were simpler. The conservative media landscape, or echo chamber, is in the business of cultivating this safe, simple space for its consumers, where men are men, women are women, where hard work pays off handsomely, and where customer service reps speak English and answer the phone on the second ring.

What Trumpism does is gather up many disparate grievance groups, and then re-pacakges the world for them into one massive, meta-grievance landscape, where all the actual complexities of living in the modern world are recast as a giant, cosmic liberal enemy, a medieval dragon of fire, evil, and fluid gender norms. In this unreal Trumpian meta-verse, the battle against the dragon is everything, and all else melts into air: democracy, human rights, due process, fair elections, the Constitution, balance of powers, scientific progress. These are all subsumed and erased, giving way to the quixotic tilting of Trumpism at the windmills of reality.

This is the key to combatting Trumpism, which will definitely outlive the man himself: understanding that these tens of millions of people are living in a meta-verse of delusion, a world so divorced from reality that the ridiculous has become the mundane, and insanity transformed into common sense.

Next time, we’ll look at the only way to fight this unserious Trumpian world: a revolution of the real.