The following is a guest post from Jennifer Baker from the College of Charleston’s Department of Philosophy.

---

“You know what I call COVID? A solution to Social Security.”  

“If they try to impeach Trump, if they even DARE, you realize there will be BLOOD in the streets. Blood in the streets.”  

“It’s true, it’s legal to kill born babies in New York State.”   

“Liberals. Liberals. Liberals. Liberals. Liberals. Liberals. Woke. Woke. Woke.”   

“Cry more, Libs.” 

If you know a tough guy, this is the kind of thing you get used to hearing.   

When the tough guy says their tough guy thing, it’s not an invitation to debate, it’s a flag in the sand. My husband and I treat the aggression differently. I might scrunch my face but then deftly change the topic. He, especially lately, puts an end to it immediately, calling his Trump-supporting friends idiots and morons and hanging up the phone.  

If you listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck, you are listening to some tough guys. My first thought on learning that Limbaugh had gotten cancer was to worry about how he would find a non-liberal team of physicians. I actually had the worry. It was only for a moment, but it shows that I had gotten used to the idea that liberals are Limbaugh’s enemies, out to thwart him at every turn. And that is patently ridiculous. That is absurd.

I listen to right-wing radio hosts whenever I am alone in the car. I am usually just observing their fears and imaginations, not caught up in them myself, but always fascinated. My husband asks how I can stand their voices. Their voices have the same tone, even the local woman host on the station. It is kind of begging and barking at once. Despite all of the bluster, it is plaintive and uncertain, which is why it is so much more interesting to me than how people normally address others. It always feels like they really, really need listeners to just believe them. I was never surprised when the hosts would kind of break down on air, which I caught a few times, saying how hard their work was and they just could not do it anymore. It does not sound possible to maintain. They often begin, in what sounds like full salivating rage, to describe liberals and then just sputter. Literally, they can’t find a description that makes sense. Sometimes liberals are unfun. Sometimes liberals just don’t get it. Sometimes liberals are obsessed with death. Before the election Limbaugh said liberals are “obsessed” with voting.  It’s too much. It never adds up.  

There would be a cycle where something Trump was accused of was “fake news” and then a day or so later it would be defended as being a normal thing for a President to do. The case being made just seemed exhaustingly ad hoc. In fact Hannity used to defend Trump because he said we would be so “bored” without him.

None of our friends, and of course not the radio hosts either, have been supportive of the Capitol raid since it happened. Glenn Beck, who has been saying conservatives are at “war” (he uses that word and all the associated imagery) for as long as I can remember, sounded very nervous after the raid and told listeners that they should now just “defend their homes.” This was news to me and to at least one caller he let on, who asked how we would have ever had the Revolutionary War if we had only defended our home.

Beck, who might be an extreme case, after all, often says the apocalypse is coming and he welcomes it, due to what liberals do to him here. It has gotten that bad, he explains day after day. This is, of course, audibly a man in incredible despair. But due to…liberals? How does a person become this dramatic? Can other people be torturers just by being more liberal than Glenn Beck?

If you have read Edmund Burke on the sublime or Corey Robin on Burke , you know there is an explanation for Beck’s strange suffering. And it’s one that conservative writers have often embraced (Robin is an actual scholar on this subject and finds Burke’s argument recreated in Joseph de Maistre, Roosevelt’s speeches, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, Churchill, Goldwater and Fukuyama). The idea is that for some of us, the churn of life becomes tedious. Pleasure and enjoyment are not doing it for you. It becomes clear that your life is not one that involves the high stakes you want to envision: danger and threat at every turn. So you try to rule over others, and this becomes dull, too (as they too easily comply, and the thrill dissipates). What next? You get into a little freelance violence as philosophy. Maybe it is just talk of all of your guns. Maybe it’s actually stockpiling guns as the radio hosts brag about. Maybe it’s wearing patches that say “I am just here for the violence” like we saw at the Capitol raid. Maybe it is leaving scathing and bizarrely cruel comments under local news stories on Facebook like moms in my area do.  

We work ourselves up until we see enemies and get terrified. Burke describes the moral psychology so that in this mode your sense of self gets enlarged and vacated: “The mind is hurried out of the self.” We imagine ourselves as exalted heroes in a great cause but it’s all in our minds, imaginary.

This seems right to me. This seems to be what is happening when our friends get in the tough- guy mode. I think my husband cannot tolerate it because it’s a cringey and embarrassing put-on. In fact, the internet seems the perfect way to enact this “mode” because to any actual friend, it’s obviously phony.  

This is the reassuring thing about this particular thirst for violence, as Burke explains it: it really is a put on, a show, all for a feeling. It’s not that the violence won’t be engaged in (as we saw at the Capitol), but does not end up being quite what a dreamer would hope for. The Trump fans who are now facing federal charges had, I assume, no idea how difficult it is to face federal charges. The men and women who were put on the no-fly list are assuring us that this is not what they imagined. These were not people at war in any kind of realistic way.   

So my question is, how do you let a person know that?

My own non-confrontational approach hits several of the markers of “success” according to a few psychologists and philosophers on the subject of political polarization.  

•  I am not the much-blamed bubble. I hear directly from supporters of a President who I think had no respect for values like rule of law or even ethical principle.  
• I have plenty of what Bob Talisse, in Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place calls “civic friendships,” which is a matter of maintaining “nonpolitical” bonds and engaging in “nonpolitical cooperative endeavors.”
• I am also not a snob (which might be all it takes to achieve 1 and 2) nor mistaken about the socio-economics of the “Trump fan.” See Caitlin Flanagan’s recent critique of the Capitol violence for an example of both of these. I don’t buy that this kind of snideness causes the attitudes that (I do buy) are much deeper, a la Burke. It’s just that to a non-snob the jokes don’t even land. None of those things she lists are the issue.  

So despite these things, seeing the Rambo-talk turns into action makes a person want to be a bit clearer on what they have against the tough-guy talk. If how to keep people from dreaming of civil war for reasons they can hardly articulate is a very complex topic (see summaries of how to deradicalize terrorists, histories of uprisings in other countries, new work on political tipping points and on the way we select information), this still does not solve the issue of what I should do when on the receiving end of some ridiculous ranting.

And I am starting to think my husband’s approach is better than my own. He’s plain and blunt and critical and it seems like we often assume you cannot be that way towards a Trump fan, as if they cannot be engaged directly in terms of the things they are actually saying. Maybe people fear Trump fans, I think that is part of it. I also think many people (and especially media columnists) think telling a Trump fan they are wrong is to engage in some kind of snobbery, no different than mocking Olive Garden, as if political views and restaurant-taste are in some blend that has to be considered only at a remove or you sound like Flanagan. Maybe this explains the lack of critical engagement with the actual things the right-wing hosts say. And I would submit that each of these reactions is actually harmful to anyone caught up in Burkean revery, just adding fuel to the fire. I think writers should be less afraid of being a snob (who cares? why hide it? no one wants to be like you!) and more conscious of pitying someone to the extent you do not even take on their stated views directly. You can only pity people you do not know. You do not pity a person you understand. Ergo, any attempt to avoid dealing with actual Trumpian claims as a way to show respect seems very poorly motivated.

And to the extent I do understand, I think my husband is right to tell a tough talker to snap out of it. To say call back when you are being reasonable, or not at all. They do call back.  

---