Could it have something to do with our politics? With the sociopath in the Oval?
This puts Americans way out front of other nations on the
we-hate-our-compatriots scale. In the 24 other countries polled by Pew, most
people called their fellow citizens somewhat good or very good.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the United States
is Canada, where 92 percent say their fellow Canadians are good, while just 7
percent say they’re bad.
Why are we so down on our fellow citizens? It may have
something to do with our politics.
Some 30 years ago, my dear friend the late Republican
Senator Alan Simpson told me Democrats viewed Republicans as stupid and
Republicans viewed Democrats as evil. “I’d rather be in the stupid party,” he
chuckled.
I asked him why Republicans saw Democrats as evil.
He took a deep breath. “Religion.”
I said I didn’t understand.
“It’s the Christian right,” he said, as if talking to a
five-year-old. “Since Reagan, my party has been a magnet for religious
conservatives and Christian fundamentalists, where it’s all about good and
evil. Too bad, pal. You’re on the evil side.”
That was 30 years ago. Since then, the divide has only
sharpened.
In 2012, Mitt Romney told
supporters that “47 percent” of Americans would vote for Obama no
matter what because they’re “dependent upon government ... believe that they
are victims ... believe the government has a responsibility to care for them
... [and] pay no income tax.”
Insulting 47 percent of Americans was no way to win an
election. It was also no way to unite the country.
Then in 2016, Hillary Clinton described half of Trump’s
supporters as a “basket
of deplorables.” Also no way to win or to foster mutual trust.
Once Trump took office, dislike of our fellow citizens
soared.
Before he entered the White House, 47
percent of Republicans and 35
percent of Democrats said people in the opposing party were “immoral.”
By 2022, after years of Trump’s venom: 72
percent of Republicans and 63
percent of Democrats called people in the opposing party
“immoral.”
Since he’s been back in the Oval, it’s gotten even worse.
After Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, Trump blamed a “radical left bunch of lunatics” for the killing. Vice President JD Vance, parroting Trump, vowed to “punish these radical leftist lunatics.”
As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted at
the time, “Kirk’s assassination could have united Americans against political
violence, but the Trump camp seems to be preparing a campaign to destroy
opponents.”
When a federal judge ruled in September that Trump didn’t
have authority to send National Guard troops into Los Angeles, White House
spokeswoman Anna Kelly — in language typical of what we hear from the Trump
regime — called him a “rogue
judge” and claimed Trump “saved Los Angeles” from “deranged
leftist lunatics sowing mass chaos.”
After ICE agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in
Minneapolis, Kristi Noem, Trump’s former secretary of Homeland Security, called
the two of them “domestic
terrorists.”
Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has sent out
a steady stream of tweets — catching some 380 million views on X — claiming
that its agents have been under attack by U.S. citizens it describes as “terrorists,”
“rioters,”
and “agitators”
and asserting, among other things, that “Americans are fed up with rampant
criminality ruling this country.”
Meanwhile, Trump has been threatening to
cut off funding for
various programs that help poor Americans, vilifying them as “fraudsters” and
withholding money from Democratic-led states.
A few days ago, Vance charged that Medicaid and food
assistance programs were rife with fraud perpetrated by “bad actors in our society … who
take the goodwill and trust of the American taxpayers and use it against us,
[who] decide to make
themselves rich.”
***
For more than a decade, Trump has told us that certain other
Americans should be feared: among them, Democrats, liberals, Mexican Americans,
Muslim Americans, Black Americans, transgender people, and LGBTQ+ people. All
are presumed to be the “enemy within.”
As Barack Obama said at
Jesse Jackson’s memorial on March 6, “Each day, we’re told by those in high
office to fear each other and to turn on each other, and that some Americans
count more than others, and that some don’t even count at all.”
Is it any surprise that a majority of Americans now describe
the morality of other Americans as “bad?”
But I can’t help wondering: How much of our distrust and
resentment is the byproduct of something more fundamental that’s been unfolding
in America for over four decades — something Trump exploited but that would
have invited a hateful demagogue like Trump eventually: the increasing
concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands?
Trump took advantage of anger and distrust that had been
building for years — at a system increasingly seen as rigged against most of
us.
What do you think?
