At emptywheel, Ed Walker posted an interesting essay about why so many people voted for “a revolting bag of guts [who] has no integrity, no loyalty to the Nation or anyone besides himself, and no reason to want to be president other that personal gratification and staying out of jail.”
He turned to Rousseau, who said “All ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom, for although they had enough reason to feel the advantages of political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers.”
Walker acknowledges the “deeply human desire for security and certainty,” and notes that not everybody acts on that desire. In other contexts, I’ve seen the term “tolerance for ambiguity,” which seems to resonate here. If you are driving by a desire for security and certainty, and you’ve absorbed enough of what I (and a lot of others) would call deception, misinformation, or simply “lies,” then maybe Walker is right that “millions of Americans choose to abdicate their freedom and responsibility to judge based on their own principles.”
Of course, we’ve never had the kind of freedom that people in some societies in human experience have enjoyed.
