I’ve been saying this for years, as have many other pundits, but in a nation that thinks religious liberty is – somehow – under attack, it’s worth emphasizing that magical thinking, infectious in its own way, often has unsightly consequences, as Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent point out in The Plum Line:
Republicans always feared this day would come, when Trump would become not just an erratic, divisive president but someone whose manifest unfitness for office would result in full-blown catastrophe.
They decided they had no choice but to stand behind him, and convinced themselves that it might work out well. It would be a crazy four years, but maybe Trump would grow into the job, and maybe retaining the support of a dwindling constituency would be enough to squeak out another election win or two.
The incompetence and bigotry of the Trump Administration is, in a way, symbolic of the very phrase magical thinking. It symptoms include denial and disbelief in the observations and analysis of people who study reality; a belief that, with enough will, reality will bend to the needs, religious and political, of the magical thinker who can’t tolerate reality; a willingness to deny anything that makes reality less than their ideal.
Especially if that ideal includes such concepts as power, prestige, and wealth.
There are many obvious examples: Anthropogenic climate change deniers lead the way, even as storms worsen, tides creep in further and further. Next in line is Covid-19 denial, QAnon, and the list goes on.
But the roots are deeper than we sometimes realize. Think of the Scopes Trial of 1925, in which whether or not evolution should be taught in public schools was on trial, followed by Creationism, and, when that could not be sustained in the nation’s courts, Intelligent Design (ID), the foul child of the Discovery Institute. This deeper root to magical thinking is not often mentioned outside of the Skeptics community, although some of the latest defenses of ID’s magical thinking has led their “thinkers” down truly odd and pathological paths that might be clues as to how far the adherents of ID have wandered from rationality.
But now we’re seeing the fruit of persistent magical thinking.
Plenty of them went further and eagerly embraced Trump and Trumpism, too, while actively working to insulate him from accountability for all of his degradations. Now a new possibility has emerged: that this election could be not just bad for Republicans, but positively cataclysmic.
Cataclysmic? You know those horrifying pictures of California burning, fire storms consuming all in their path?
That’s what’s happening to the Republican Party, and magical thinking is the accelerant, the substance that is making the fire unquenchable. Until magical thinking is banished from the Republican Party, it will be the Party of Kooks. Indeed, it may remain the Party of Kooks for decades, and a new conservative party that, if it is wise, does not tolerate the kooks, will form to be a home for real conservatives.
And if you’re a Republican whose tender religious sensibilities are offended at having this blamed on you, tough shit. That’s how it is.
