A Whiplash Effect To Trump Cult Forming, Called UNITE

There is a new Silent Majority in America, we are given to understand by a recent Axios article that consists of “the overwhelming share of Americans who never tweet or watch cable news.” Now this is interesting conceptually. I didn’t know that the number of Americans who don’t tweet or watch cable news was “the overwhelming majority.” That comes as new information and frankly as a shock. Now that may be because in following politics that’s the milieu in which I am immersed in. But even before I began living and breathing politics daily I was certainly aware of cable news and social media.

But granting that Axios (and the study they cited that reached this conclusion) is right, here’s an interesting point and this one I agree with totally: the level of social discourse has plummeted in this nation for the past seven, eight years. Yes, it has.

Now, an organization of activists, professors and consultants is appealing to that majority by leaning into a disappearing quality — treating others with dignity.

• UNITE, a group founded by Special Olympics chair Timothy Shriver is getting buzz with its “Dignity Index,” which scores tweets, cable news segments, debates and speeches on a scale of 1 to 8.
• For example, speech that earns a score of 1 is calling for violence against those who disagree with you. Speech that earns a perfect 8 puts yourself in the other person’s shoes.

🛠️ How it works: “It’s not our disagreements that cause division,” says Tom Rosshirt, chief strategist at UNITE and lead author of the index. “It’s contempt that causes division.”

• “The trouble with politics today is that the benefits of contempt outweigh the costs,” he says. “You can use it to raise money; you can use it to get on television.”
• “We know that treating people with contempt in our family will cause our family to fall apart. What we don’t yet know is that treating each other with contempt will tear our country apart.”

👀 Zoom in: UNITE rolled out the Index in Utah ahead of the 2022 midterm elections and invited a panel of Utahns to get together and score political speech.

• The intrigue: Even when panelists didn’t support the same candidates, they often did agree on how those candidates’ words should be scored.
• And those who used the index reported a “mirror effect.” Scoring others’ speech with dignity in mind pushed them to consider their own speech.

Susie Estrada, a graduate student in education at the University of Utah and one of the scorers in the pilot program, said she started noticing contempt in her own internal monologue — the way she was speaking to herself.

• “It’s not easy to offer up dignity, especially when we’re all unlearning past behaviors,” she says.

Steven Lehnhof, another Utah student and scorer, who says he’s a left-leaning moderate but lives in a conservative part of Utah, tells Axios he uses the index when speaking to friends and even his fiancée, whose views are sometimes more conservative than his own.

• “Once you have someone in a room and you have to acknowledge their worth, that’s when the conversation flows positively,” he says.

📬 We want to hear from you! What are your tips for productive, respectful conversations even when disagreeing?

• Tell us at [email protected], with your name and hometown, and we’ll feature some of your tricks in a future edition.

I actively encourage getting involved with this. This is a sane way to gain back some lost ground in this country. In 2016 when Donald Trump made his presence manifest in our national speech, it was the equivalent of lying down in the barnyard with the pigs. We all got muddy. And contempt is the order of the day. I certainly grant you that.

But let’s be clear about a few things: Yes, a return to respectful discourse would be nice, but let’s be clear about what the basis of our national discourse is. We’re in a war right now to either remain living in a constitutional democracy or adopt fascism. This isn’t Marquess de Queensbury time, this is a basic time for decision on a fundamental level. It’s a time when America will either continue as she has been for 240-some years or morph into something else altogether different.

Assuming that at some point we can get back to civilized discourse and let’s face it, that’s going to be in a post-Trump world, then yes, we should do that. But let’s save our form of government first.

Point being, I don’t want to have nice chit chat about whether or not fascism is something we should adopt as a means of governance. That’s not a topic for nice chit chat. Let’s save democracy and then we can have nice chit chat about topics of interest that aren’t so black and white, so life and death.

I don’t want to see fascism normalized and that is exactly the risk we’re running if we suddenly decide that being polite is the overriding concern. No, it is not. Saving our asses, our way of life, the way of life that our forebears died to preserve, that’s the first order of business. Once we have secured that, then yes, we should do some clean up efforts and cleaning up the way we interact with people who disagree with us is a good start.

The MAGAs are not people who disagree with us. The MAGAs are people who follow a charismatic cult leader and bow to his every whim. They will follow him into a fascist regime in a heartbeat. And so until that threat is quelled, until Donald Trump is off the political radar, I say we put first things first and defeat Trump and keep America great. Then we can all go to charm school. Not before.

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