When facts no longer matter: 3 key steps to return to civil dialogue

Dr. Kurt Gray on how to "find a healthy consensus again" in the Age of Trump

By Chauncey DeVega

Senior Writer

Published December 10, 2024 5:49AM (EST)

(Salon) Donald Trump will become the next president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2025. Although some have deluded themselves into thinking the contrary, there will be no deus ex machina moment to stop this from happening. As Trump and his representatives and agents have explicitly detailed and promised, on "day one" they will launch a political project that will cause severe harm to tens of millions of Americans and other people who live in this country. In the doublespeak and doublethink of autocrats and authoritarians, the Trumpists describe this project as "Making America Great Again."

There are approximately 245 million voting-eligible people in the United States. In the 2024 election, approximately 77 million voted for Donald Trump and 75 million voted for Kamala Harris. The remaining 90 or so million did not vote in the general election.

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As I asked in a previous essay here at Salon, Have the day-to-day relationships and shared sense of community, norms, reality and meaning that make a healthy society and democracy possible been broken beyond repair? Or are these divides greatly exaggerated and there is much more that ties the American people together than divides them and in the end that may be their salvation?

Dr. Kurt Gray is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he directs the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. Dr. Gray's findings have been featured in the New York Times, The Economist, Scientific American, Wired and NPR's "Hidden Brain." He is the co-author of the book "The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels and Why it Matters." His new book is "Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground."

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You are a social psychologist. What are you seeing in the Age of Trump and his return to the White House that the mainstream news media and political class are not -- or perhaps even more pointedly are refusing to see or are in denial about?

..... White conservatives are especially likely to resent the accusation that they are privileged -- even if it's statistically true -- because most of them don't feel particularly privileged. Instead, they feel threatened. These feelings stem from both the present situation and fears about the future. The economic future of white men without college is continuing to look bleak, and soon enough, white people will be the minority in America. These trends cause further fear when people have the (erroneous) zero-sum mindset, where one group's gain is another group's loss. ......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/12/10/when-facts-no-longer-matter-3-key-steps-to-return-to-civil-dialogue/