Republicans have since Nixon and the return of Law and Order after the chaos of the Liberal 60s been the President’s Party, for it is the Republican President that is the center of power for Law and Order, which is a Republican value that translates into being against anything Democratic. Trump puts the GOP into a bind, just as corrupted priests put the church in a double-bind where no matter what they do, the lose.
The double-bind of self-interest values that cancel each other creates a tension out of which a higher morality is born, an act of Conscience, if you will, that goes abasing self interest for the higher good. Those who invest their identity in the their institutional power find themselves in a moral crisis when their choices are all bad. That explains the paralysis of the current GOP. They cannot choose anything but lose/lose…so they don’t act.
In both systems, Church and State (the Republican state that is) the Center holds the system together like a tent pole. Grace and power flows down from the Top of the cosmic tent pole like a lightening rod attracting electricity. This is the symbol of the pyramid, the paradigm of ancient civilizations that began in Sumer in the Nuclear Near East. The center must hold at all costs. The tent has a hierarchy of descending power from the Dynamic Center that is the pope or the president on earth, or God as the Source of power in heaven, from the King to all those below, with the common people at the bottom.
Liberalism, however, inverts the pyramid and puts the people at the top as the source of power. Evangelicals call this Humanism, the anti-christ because for them Christ is the Tent Pole.
We are currently is a clash of mythologies. The Church/State system of the Republican Party is patriarchal, of course, and the liberal mythology is matriarchal. Witness women rising to the call. For the goddess, all her children have equal value. For the Father, only those who measure up, can lift the hammer, get his blessing.
When the Goddess breaks into a Patriarchal culture, you always have a creative renaissance, like in the 60s. But then the kids become rowdy, and the Father is called to restore law and order. We need to create a culture where both father and mother sit on the thrown sharing power.
When liberals and the “Fake” News try to understand and communicate with Trump people you have two self sustaining world views with different frames of reference that are mutually dependent upon the same reality. The liberal reference is to facts and information; the Republican reference (today but it doesn’t use to be) is value and meaning. The liberals are non-fiction, just the facts, and the Republicans are interested in the Story, because it is only stories that give meaning to the incoming data. We have this objective field of data with a dome of value and meaning superimposed over it in which people gather to find value and meaning in their fragmented lives.
The objective world is a fragmented world, and thanks to social media and internet, domes of value and meaning can be erected on this field of facts like a revival tent. This is creating a modern schizophrenia as we live in the rational world of science and manuals, but we are also living in a story world at the same time. Children can handle the juxtaposition of story and facts, the unreal and the real, but the modern adult is not doing so well. He believes the story is real and the scientific facts are real…but wait…you can have two realties, so one has to go…uh, lets do away with science and empirical evidence and just stick with the story of reality.
You know this is the definition of insanity, don’t you. If you live in your personal story, you are judged in sane. If you get a large group of people to live in their with you, you have a movement. But then the rest of the world must be fake.
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