Smith: Fighting for more than belonging

Photo by Doug Mills of The New York Times / President Donald Trump's tie is blown by the wind during a campaign rally at the Laughlin/Bullhead International Airport in Bullhead City, Arizona, on Oct. 28, 2020.
Photo by Doug Mills of The New York Times / President Donald Trump's tie is blown by the wind during a campaign rally at the Laughlin/Bullhead International Airport in Bullhead City, Arizona, on Oct. 28, 2020.

Public opinion polls in the aftermath of the election (if you choose to believe them) have put me in mind of the Fighting Chicken Lips, a group of young men I encountered at a tender age.

More on The Lips, as they sometimes called themselves, in a moment. But first, a data point: About half of Republican voters still believe that Donald Trump "rightfully won" the presidential race. Some polls, in fact, show that more than three-quarters of Trump supporters think Joe Biden's victory was a result of fraud.

This despite the fact that nobody has produced credible evidence to support Trump's claim that he was deprived of a second term by a cabal of conspirators that includes a dead Venezuelan dictator, the current government of Cuba, election officials in many states (a lot of them Republicans), software designers and, of course, the president-elect.

As the president's former national security adviser, John Bolton, explained to ABC News: "Their basic argument is this was a conspiracy so vast and so successful that there's no evidence of it. Now if that's true ... We need to hire them at the CIA."

No sitting American president has ever before tried to overthrow an election result. And since so few Republican officials have called out their leader's behavior, it stands as the position of one of our two major political parties: The U.S. election wasn't fair. That is, American democracy has failed.

The party rank-and-file isn't questioning this, by and large, because Republican leaders - governors and members of Congress, state legislators and local officials - have generally greeted the president's posturing with silence.

Why won't good people - including some of our neighbors and friends, who surely care about this country - stand up to it?

To answer this, let me introduce you to the Fighting Chicken Lips, a group that formed in the first weeks of my long-ago college years. First-semester students weren't eligible to be members of fraternities and sororities on our campus so a band of young men created their own little group with a silly name. They became Lips.

I recall a young fellow pausing at my cafeteria table, his eyes searching the room with some unease. "You see any Chicken Lips here?" he asked.

Social psychologists tell us that "belongingness" is a fundamental human need - behind only our physiological and safety needs, according to the noted psychologist Abraham Maslow. Humans form attachments easily, experts say, and once an association is formed, we're loath to break those bonds.

This is why our political system is now more about loyalty to a group than cohesion around issues or ideology. If you doubt that, consider that the Republican Party abandoned decades of fiscal conservatism under Trump, whose single term in office added $4 trillion to federal deficits, not counting the trillions spent this year to fight the coronavirus.

Surely Democrats aren't any less willing to slip beyond the comfort of cohesion. But to be an orthodox Republican in the Trump era has required willful abandonment of facts. Standing with Trump, even at the cost of one's fundamental principles, has become the litmus test for belonging to the party.

More potent than mere job security, though, belongingness is the key to understanding the hold that a morally unfit, intellectually unsound and operationally inferior leader has on his troops. Donald Trump has become the Chief of the Chicken Lips.

It's not only Democrats who should embrace a post-Trump future; Republicans need to reclaim their party from this president, so that it stands for something other than holding onto power for its own sake. For all of us, the fraternity of America should be our great aspiration.

New York Times News Service

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