Michele Goldberg's columns in the New York Times are always well worth reading, and today's was particularly fascinating. She looks at social isolation and loneliness as a factor in the formation of the Trump cult. Some excerpts:
"There are many causes for the overlapping dysfunctions that make contemporary American life feel so dystopian, but loneliness is a big one. Even before Covid, Americans were becoming more isolated. And as Damon Linker pointed out recently in The Week, citing Hannah Arendt, lonely people are drawn to totalitarian ideologies. 'The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships,' Arendt concluded in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” describing those who gave themselves over to all-encompassing mass movements.
A socially healthy society would probably never have elected Trump in the first place. As Daniel Cox, a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in FiveThirtyEight shortly after the 2020 election, the 'share of Americans who are more socially disconnected from society is on the rise. And these voters disproportionately support Trump.'” (our emphasis)
Goldberg goes on to point out that the malicious QAnon cult is part of the pattern of drawing social outcasts to a quasi-religion. In that, they feel a part of something -- a larger family -- that they haven't felt before. Goldberg ends with a story from Michael Bender's book “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost” about 60 year-old fanatic Trumpist Randal Thom:
"One of the most vivid characters in Bender’s book is Randal Thom, a 60-year-old Marine veteran whose wife and children left him because of his drug problem, and who spent time in prison. 'The rallies became the organizing principle in his life, and Trump fans loved him for it,' writes Bender. 'Like Trump himself, all of Randal’s past mistakes didn’t matter to them.' When he got sick with what he believed was Covid, he refused to go the hospital, lest he 'potentially increase the caseload on Trump’s watch.' (He survived but died in a car crash on his way home from a Trump boat parade in October.)" (our emphasis)
Thom died as he lived: in fealty to a malignant master con man who cares about himself and no one else, and who regarded followers like Thom as "losers."
