NBN so clearly remembers waking up Nov. 4, 2016 with a new-found sense that we’re saps. Not simply because our country had just elected a president completely opposed to all our hopes and dreams for humanity. Rather, it was the discovery that so many don’t share those hopes and dreams including, as it would turn out, close friends and family. As we saw it, 62 million Americans somehow believed that what’s best for them is best for this country and the rest of the world can go hang. It was a wake-up call.
Readers, before you say: “What a sap,” consider for a second when NBN came of age. Grave moral lessons from the Great Depression and WWII were the timber from which our hopes and dreams were hewn. Sure, America’s done stupid, bad, even inhuman things. But then there is the United Nations, The Marshall Plan, USAID, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, The Civil Rights Act, the Clean Air and Waters acts. The Statue of Freekin’ Liberty. The ends always justified the means in America, right?
Nov. 4, 2016, marked open season on all that. The means became the end in the United States. Atlas shrugged, bigly. Rather than fight the good fight and “resist” this sudden, seismic shift in national priorities, NBN spent the next four years trying to figure it out. Tools for said investigation were two friends who helped put the past POTUS in power and tried again this last November. Two very different friends. We’ll call them the Bubba Bros.
There is no way the Bubba Bros would last five minutes in each other’s company. Yet here they are, four years later still wholeheartedly endorsing the unrelenting, indiscriminate deconstruction of our administrative state. They love this country but hate its government. (Who doesn’t, right?) Nonetheless, this impossible communion of such antithetical actors is a warning shot across the bow of those who, however reluctantly, believe our government can still be an agent for good. You know, saps. Understanding what binds the Bubba Bros, all 74 million of them, in Our Latest Post.
NBN readers, meet the Bubba Bros. Bubba1 is a gregarious bear of a man with the winning smile and easy manner essential to any salesman’s skills set. He’s a church-going, Christian Conservative champion of a consumer culture with which he struggles mightily to keep astride. Bubba2 is an academic possessing more degrees than a thermometer. Disdaining the US consumer culture, he nonetheless ardently defends the free-market economy driving it. Ivory Towers of academia and the infallibility cum-sanctity of the US Constitution are his religion.
Together these two clowns joined 74 million, including some of NBN’s close friends and family, in almost re-electing a leader bent on tearing apart just those things we like about this country. Environmental protection, helping the needy, institutionalized equality have no place in US governance, according to the Bubba Bros. Endorsing distinctly different visions of that governance, both men embrace as fail-safe a freedom first function of same. Who doesn’t like freedom?
Similarities end there, prompting NBN’s concerns the Bubba Bros represent a danger coalescing around far-flung faiths no democracy can reconcile. Deep religious beliefs drive Bubba1’s conviction that US government inevitably leads to moral decay a la LGBTQ, Black Lives Matter, Earth First, et al. Bubba2’s equally rigid academic disciplines mechanically equate government with socialism and societal decay a la Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et al.
Four years of exchanging emails and social posts reasoning with the Bubba Bros seemed for naught when the country chose a different path on Nov. 4, 2020. NBN hates waste, so we’d thought a little post-humous plumbing of those posts might help the 80 million still believing in our government to understand why 74 million think it better to blow it up. So, let’s delve a little deeper into the Bubba Bros’ beliefs.
Bubba1’s faith-infused politics has him spouting astounding logical-impossibilities like: The 2020 election was stolen with the blessing of the nation’s entire judicial system. Far left, not far right, militias took over the Capitol Jan. 6 despite sweeping electoral victories in favor of the former. BLM and the national, sometimes violent, protests it inspired are to blame for todays’ racial strife, not entrenched societal entitlements dating back to the Civil War. The main-stream media? We don’t go there.
Ironically, NBN knows Bubba1 as a wonderful, warm man through working together in the MSM. Years ago, we wrote, in that MSM stalwart the Boston Globe, of many wonderful community-interest initiatives Bubba1 spear-headed. Years later we find him embracing a radical right political agenda NBN dedicates a few hours each day to defeating. So, how can we still talk to, let alone like this guy?
Bubba2 is a friend since childhood. His articulate, deliberate defense of the indefensible is even harder to dismiss. A quick run-down of Bubba2’s beliefs: The Electoral College? A masterpiece of constitutional craftsmanship that only improves with age. Gerrymandering? Hey, everybody does it. Climate change? We’ve got better causes to champion. The growing political threat of Evangelical Christian conservatives? It’s overblown. The Main Stream Media? We don’t go there.
Ironically, Bubba2’s disdain for the MSM, and more recently Big Tech, stems from their increasing, arguably unprofessional, intolerance of something he’s worked against all his life: ignorance. Chastising both as “elites” he decries in the name of the First Amendment growing MSM and Big Tech unwillingness to indulge the conspiracy theories and alt-right “news” Bubba1 embraces. Unshakable faith in free markets, the US Constitution, and social sciences he dedicated his life to, allow these incongruous convictions to coexist unquestioned in his cranium.
Empirical evidence, not faith, form the base of Bubba2’s beliefs, according to four years’ worth of recommended reading he shoveled into NBN’s email inbox. A critical missing element in all is adequate or even any allowance for the ongoing, asymptotic digital disruption to the norms, standards and accepted practices he swears by. Most notably to that most inexact of academic disciplines: social science. The Ivory Towers are now buried under mountains of data and the 1st Amendment is no match for social media and deepfakes.
Bubba1’s misplaced faith is considerably more unsettling. Today’s Christian conservative movement increasingly employs a scorched earth policy with zero-tolerance for uncertainty or infidelity. Faced with the stark choice between increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories and excommunication from beliefs letting him sleep at night, Bubba1 doesn’t have a choice. Purveyors of that faith know this all too well and leverage it with increasing cruelty, extorting fidelity cum-fanaticism from tens of millions of Americans who, we strongly suspect, know better.
Still, we can’t hate either Bubba Bro because they, like us, simply, sincerely and yes, selflessly, want what’s best for this country. Tried and true faith in God and man which has shouldered centuries of social progress are the bulwark behind both men’s beliefs, even as bad actors leverage such loyalties into unprecedented societal discord a la Jan. 6.
NBN would be lost without some sense of God and our deep, abiding love of science, even as the Bubba Bros, and their 74 million brethren, cling ever tighter to one at the expense of the other. Which leaves us worshipping at the very lonely alter of uncertainty. Lack of doubt and excess of certainty is what seems to us to be the greatest threat to this country right now. With more of the former and a lot less of the latter, we just might find it easier to believe in each other. Said another way, let’s cut each other some slack.