The inability to judge character



Four depraved human beings: Tammy Faye Bakker, Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Matt Gaetz. There are many more.


Regular readers here know that I do not subscribe to the notion that we need to “reach out” to the deplorables and “understand” them, as though they have something to teach us. I do understand them. I have been around them all my life. If they can teach us anything, it’s how not to be.

Back in the 1980s, when televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker had a television show called “The PTL Club,” I noticed that I, and other morally sane people, could watch the Bakkers and perceive in about a second that the Bakkers were crooks who were scamming their audience. I marveled at how so many people, for some strange reason, were unable to see that. The show lasted for something like 15 years.

In 1987, Bakker was indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with scamming people out of $185 million in donations. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Thousands, maybe millions, of people had not only been unable to see through the Bakkers’ act, they had sent millions of dollars to the Bakkers. Those people saw Jim and Tammy Bakker as the godliest of people. Some people continued to send money to the Bakkers even after Jim Bakker was in prison.

Why does this inability to judge character correlate so closely with religiosity and with whatever it is that leads people to vote for Trump?

This defect in moral perception has two sides, equally ugly. The same people who can’t see through a Tammy Bakker or a Donald Trump easily believe that the people they have been taught to hate and blame — liberals — are the kind of people who hate America, who are out to destroy America, and who traffic children in the basement of a pizza parlor. They believe that it’s poor brown-skinned immigrants, rather than an ill-regulated oligarchy of billionaires with a propaganda machine and the courts in their pockets, that are eating their lunch.

A constantly churning pageant of lies is required to keep the scam going. But those who have this defect can’t see through the lies any more than they can see through the people who are lying to them.

Jim and Tammy Bakker were petty thieves compared with the extravagantly rich global-tier con men who will come to power at noon tomorrow in Washington.

A recent poll found that Republicans believe that Trump will bring inflation down more or less to zero and will bring back cheap eggs. In the real world, chickens are dying from bird flu in record numbers. The real-world reason for egg prices is getting worse, not better. Wild birds spread the virus, and now cows are getting it, too. But that’s just one problem, and there are many more.

Republicans (this blows my mind) feel safer now. But the rest of us can see that no good can possibly come from an alliance of oligarchs and con men taking over Washington, with a crew actually selected for their corruptibility. When things go wrong, liberals will be blamed. Millions of people will believe it.

Part of why this moment is so terrifying is that none of us can predict what will happen during the next four years. It can’t be good. But if eggs suddenly become cheap again and the inflation rate falls to zero in a booming economy that lifts all boats, then I will happily eat my words.

Many people seem to have bought into the oligarch political theory — that democracy has run its course and is obsolete, and that only the swaggering masters of the universe are fit to run the world, the meaner the better.

I thought the world had already learned, always the hard way, how that political theory works out. But here we go again.

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