The Key to Trump is Stenner’s Authoritarianism
Tom Edsall has an excellent column in today’s NYT titled: Purity, Disgust, and Donald Trump. He begins with the work that I and my colleagues at YourMorals.org have done on the role of disgust in political life. How else can we explain Trump’s twin obsessions with bodily fluids and closing the borders to keep out human contaminants (see Bruni’s “Blood, Sweat, and Trump.” You can also read more about our empirical work in Donald Trump and the Politics of Disgust).
But even more important than purity and disgust, I believe, is the psychology of authoritarianism. That term is somewhat contested, but it’s striking that most of the experts Edsall interviewed agreed that that however you define it, Trump exhibits and exploits it. In this blog post I just want to point readers to what I think is the best treatment of authoritarianism out there: Karen Stenner’s 2008 book The Authoritarian Dynamic.
Here’s the full quote I sent to Edsall, trying to steer him to Stenner’s work;
I’d say the key to understanding Trump’s appeal is to look beyond values. We’re all accustomed to thinking about a range of conservative and progressive values, and Trump’s phenomenal success can’t be understood just by re-arranging values into a new recipe. The key is to be found in the work of political scientist Karen Stenner, whose research showed that there are three very different psychological types of people who have been supporting the Republican party since the 1980s: the “laissez faire” conservatives, who are not conservative at all, they are classical liberals who oppose government intervention in markets (like Rand Paul); the “status quo” conservatives, who are the classic Burkean conservatives, cautious about change, and highly responsible and conscientious (Jeb Bush and John Kasich); and the authoritarians, who are the most malleable or changeable depending on the political environment (Trump).In times of low moral threat, when they perceive that the country is relatively unified and the moral order is not being subverted, they are not particularly intolerant (Stenner finds). But, when they perceive that the moral order is falling apart, the country is losing its coherence and cohesiveness, diversity is rising, and our leadership seems (to them) to be suspect or not up to the needs of the hour, its as though a button is pushed on their forehead that says “in case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant.” So its not just rising immigration and diversity that has activated American authoritarians — it may be our rising political polarization itself, which has activated and energized a subset of the electorate that is now lionizing Trump as the first major candidate in a long time who has spoken to their fears and desires. In short, Trump is not a conservative, and is not appealing to classical conservative ideas. He is an authoritarian, who is profiting from the chaos in Washington, Syria, Paris, San Bernardino, and even the chaos on campuses, which are creating a more authoritarian electorate in the Republican primaries.
Stenner’s book is long, but she has produced a much shorter synopsis in a 2009 article titled Three Kinds of Conservatism. It is behind a paywall, but I’ll see if I can contact Stenner to get her to post a manuscript version.
The only slight correction I’d like to add to Edsall’s column is that he goes from my claim that Trump is not a conservative to my older writings about social conservatives and disgust, including my attempts to make sense of the widespread focus in ancient moral texts on food, sex, and bodily functions. I actually don’t know whether disgust is really characteristic of “status quo conservatives.” It’s possible that it is the authoritarians who drive the general correlation of disgust and self-declared conservatism. Given Hitler’s obsessive focus on disgust and vermin in Mein Kampf, and the general absence of such talk in classical conservative writings, I would guess that it is most characteristic of authoritarian psychology. I will have to look into this in the YourMorals dataset, and I hope other researchers can address that question.
I close by emphatically agreeing with Edsall’s concluding lines:
Whatever happens next, he has remade the landscape on which these conflicts will be fought — for better, or, more likely, for worse.
The country has been marching left for many years. In spite of the election of people such as Reagan it continues to march left. The left champions big government. The right champions smaller government. There is no evidence government ever gets smaller. The right has served as a drag on the left, but never stopped the momentum to the left thus the frustration of both sides.
It is like a big ship moving across the ocean. It is hard to turn. The left wants to move full steam ahead. The right wants to move in the opposite direction. When elected the right operates the throttle, but leaves the left in charge of the wheel. The right wants to know why the ship isn’t turning. The left wants to know why it is slowing down.
Trump says he will operate both the throttle and wheel and seems to be serious about it. Frustrated with rhetoric that never gets the right where they want to go he appears to be someone who will at least change direction even though the direction he intends isn’t exactly where they want to go he has the gall to turn the wheel. If he can get it headed sideways maybe someone else can come along who will continue the turning momentum.
To the right, no one else has done it. Here is a different captain. Give him a shot. It can’t be worse than the current direction.
This whole “big government/small government” thing is starting to get on my nerves. Why is it that whenever conservatives talk about reducing the size of government, it’s always about cutting the meat from regulatory agencies that we need to protect our natural resources and check the natural rapacity of corporations? If you want to cut the size of government, I’d suggest going after the Defense Department, the largest–and probably the most wasteful–agency in the government by far. I’m not holding my breath.
Not to mention that conservatives seem to have no problem enlarging government’s power to snoop into people’s bedrooms to try and control their sexual behavior.
Great quote from Carroll Quigley on this issue. This is from a lecture a few years before Quigley’s death in 1977:
“Conservatives now are telling us that we must curtail government, cut government spending, cut government powers, reduce government personnel for the sake of making individuals more free.
“Liberals, on the other hand, are still telling us, as they have for a long, long time, that in order to make individuals free, we must destroy communities. By communities I mean villages. Ghettos and cities. Ethnic groupings. Religious groupings. Anything which is segregated. We must destroy them. So that all individuals would be, if possible, identical. Including boys and girls.
“But the area of political action … in which you have government, individuals … three others: voluntary associations (which I’ll say no more about), corporations and communities. And if the liberals destroy communities for the sake of the individual, and the conservatives destroy the government for the sake of individuals, you’re going to have an area of political action in which irresponsible, immensely powerful corporations are engaged in opposition to individuals who are socially naked and defenseless.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nak-5nwL2Lk
It is funny how the words “free” and “liberty” are thrown around by conservatives, they essentially mean nothing and thus anything.
When there was small government, as in the federal government allowed states to do as they pleased, there existed slavery. It was the federal government that eventually constrained the worst in human nature when it created the Civil Rights Act for example. The same holds for environmental protection, in the creation f the EPA, protection of species in the Endangered Species Act, protection of workers in OSHA, etc.
No one has the right to harm and it is a hard fact that they will if not constrained by law, as shown in the situation before and after creation of “Big Government” in the protections of rights, the right to functional ecosystems, to not be harmed at work, to not be defrauded by businesses, etc, listed above.
The only truly essential government agency is the Defense Department. We can do pare down or do without much of what the federal government does.
Who is “we”?
What about the Department of Justice, the Homeland Security Departments or Immigration Control Enforcement? You can’t run any of these important functions unless you pay for them. You can run a functioning government agency or department with a government “shrunk so small that you can drown it in Grover Norquist’s bathtub.” No one likes to pay taxes, but pay your fair share. Just because a function of government is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, doesn’t mean it is not good or “constitutional.” The “General Welfare” clause gives the government the constitutional authority to pass laws for the common good of ALL OF THE PEOPLE, not just the 1%. Do you want to get rid of the National Parks and NASA? The unregulated, “invisible hand of the free market,” has never protected us or fixed the evils of economic market crashes, pollution, corruption,lack of infrastructure, epidemic, floods, workplace safety, lack of living wages, healthcare and gerrymandering.
The country is marching left? Well, yes … government does continue to get bigger. But inequality is increasing even more rapidly with more and more wealth becoming concentrated in the portfolios of the.o1%.
There’s some evidence that inequality is slowed and sometimes maybe even slightly reversed during Democratic administrations, but GOP administrations more than make up for that.
Could it be that the Big v Limited Gov’t is at least partially a distraction? There’s evidence that public policy and legislation is extremely responsive and accommodating to the investor class and to organized business interests and generally only minimally responsive to the expressed interests of the majority of the population. Of course, this is probably based on comparing opinion polls to well financed lobbying and election campaigns. It would also be a function of America’s lamentably poor voter turnout and political participation rates which are among the lowest in all industrialized democracies.
Suppressing voter turnout through restrictive legislation and cutting back on opportunities and venues for voting (along with dirty tricks played on vulnerable voting blocs) are a deplorable, but minor factor when compared to the relentless, long term and well financed, efforts to denigrate government and politics in the popular mind. The intensification of toxic negative campaigning and advertising in political races is only a part of these efforts.
In the meantime, almost all government spending cuts are to services for the middle class and the most vulnerable. This includes the hamstringing of regulatory agencies needed to protect the rights, health, and safety of consumers and workers
(most of us), And the bulk of the tax cuts go to the very wealthy who are the same ones who benefit when consumers and workers are not protected.
“There’s evidence that public policy and legislation is extremely responsive and accommodating to the investor class and to organized business interests and generally only minimally responsive to the expressed interests of the majority of the population.” Well, we have made capital and the pursuit of it the central goal of our society, forgetting that capital is a medium of exchange, a tool that we can wield for good or for bad. When we put well-being (human, non-human, the environment) at the center of our value system we might see a more equitable system but the lifestyle of the extremely wealthy will likely not be sustainable.
I love reading old posts like this – “Here is a different captain [Trump]. Give him a shot. It can’t be worse than the current direction.” LOL
I’d like to try to articulate a couple flashes of affect I felt as I read this. I know reason follows intuition, so here’s some reasoning that attempts to explain my admittedly conservative intuitions.
Please don’t consider anything in this comment as pejorative or mean spirited. It’s not my intent to be that way. Consider it, instead, the possible seeds of insights from the conservative moral matrix that may not be visible from the liberal one.
I think you’re WAY over thinking this.
Put aside all the fancy academic jargon and analysis, step back, look at what’s actually going on, and apply some basic common sense.
It’s really not that hard to see what’s happening. It’s no mystery. You’re making it harder than it needs to be.
Trump’s appeal is a backlash against political correctness.
He’s decisive, unafraid, and unapologetic.
He’s the only candidate in the entire race, Republican or Democrat, who is NOT walking on the eggshells of political correctness, constantly in fear of “offending” this or that identity group.
His actual words and ideas are secondary to this, if they matter at all.
He’s a breath of fresh air amid the staleness of modern politics. It’s as if he’s thrown open a window to let a cool breeze rush through the stagnant smoke-filled room of politics as usual. Many people who’ve felt trapped in the room – frustrated, disenfranchised – are rushing to the open window. The view out the window is immaterial.
THAT is his appeal. As a conservative I can tell you that authoritarianism plays exactly ZERO part of my perception of Trump.
The Stenner passage seems to be on the right track, possibly leading a conclusion similar to mine, right up until the point at which she says “He is an authoritarian.” Where did THAT come from? It’s a non sequitur in relation to all that precedes it. Her analysis, to me, seems like “Apples, apples, apples, apples. Therefore, orange juice.”
With all due respect – please remember my plea to not consider this pejorative – but this analysis reminds me a little bit of a sentiment often expressed by Thomas Sowell: “This is so dumb that only an intellectual could have come up with it.”
And by the way….
Anti-authoritarianism is something akin to a sacred value of the left. Remember the picture of the (insubordi)NATION mug from your talks.
So one has to wonder, is it pure coincidence that so many analyses by ideologically pure academic social science just happen to end up fixating on authoritarianism as the reason people are drawn to Republicans, or could there be another reason? I have to say, one detects an aroma of self congratulatory preening when so many analyses from mostly leftist academia seem to be drawn as if by gravity to the same sorts of conclusions about conservatives/Republicans (From the “Paranoid Style” to “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” to “The Republican Brain” etc.) As a conservative, conclusions such as those seem more in line with the liberal grand narrative about conservatives than they do with the way I actually feel, think, talk, act, or perceive conservatism to be. Do those conclusions comport with Jerry Z. Muller’s summary of conservatism? I think not.
If anything it’s the coddling of the “chaos on campuses” and beyond, in which only certain types of thoughts and ideas are considered acceptable, and where those who don’t toe the party line in lock-step support of those ideas are driven from their careers, that’s the real authoritarianism.
In this respect it’s Trump who is the ANTI-authoritarian, standing athwart the tide of the authoritarianism of political correctness and the culture of victimhood and vindictive protectiveness yelling “Stop!”
I think the conclusion that Trump’s appealing because he’s authoritarian is exactly backwards; it’s upside down analysis.
The response to my reaction to Stenner’s conclusion might be “That’s what the data shows.” Fair enough. How many conservative social scientists peer reviewed her work? What were their thoughts? Sometimes when one is investigating a crime and one is sure one has found the perpetrator one never considers the possibility that there might be other suspects. How many other suspects were considered, or even suggested, in the search for Trump’s appeal?
Did anyone suggest what I suggested? If not then why not?
Henninger calls this a revolt against political correctness. The “political correctness” includes all liberal policies that have been continually challenged by conservatives. It is the nature of the “revolt” that has earned the authoritarian label for some conservatives such as yourself. Authoritarianism is not a pejorative term. You are what you are, and you are and proud of it. Some label your views on how to deal with the revolt as authoritarian; if you have a better term that you don’t feel is pejorative, use it.
When “a revolt against political correctness” becomes code for “a revolt against common decency,” then we’ve got a problem.
The problem I see with this line of reasoning is that – as a country that has been dominated by leftwing politics and policies for 80+ years – the liberals are the authorities and are carrying out practices that fit the scope of authoritarianism more closely than anything in practice by the right.
Even the conservative view on immigration issues is hard to define as a matter of intolerance (as Stenner indicates). America’s tolerance for illegal border crossing is not shared by much of the rest of the world. Even Canada (as a proxy for international liberal leanings) routinely imprisons and deports those residing there illegally. Somehow, I do not see how deciding to enforce longstanding laws in the US reflects “kicking out those who are different” rather than acknowledging that a failure to adhere to decades old law has created a problem.
If anything, Trump’s rise is reflective of an anti-authoritarian mood with people who are tired of being forced to acquiesce to leftwing standards not only as a matter of law but in defiance of the law (i.e. failure to enforce immigration standards) or in basic mores. there is nothing more authoritarian in our country in the present than the anti-First Amendment policies (including Mao-ish public shaming mobs) manifesting in our extremely leftwing colleges.
And yes, using Stenner’s definition. authoritarian is pejorative.
Yeah, but Trump will lose in an epochal landslide because he is so deathly unpopular. His disapproval ratings are astronomical. Hillary will proceed to do everything these people don’t want and then some when she wins, and the Trump minions will get everything they deserve.
“the liberals are the authorities and are carrying out practices that fit the scope of authoritarianism more closely than anything in practice by the right.”
Puh-leeze. Remind me the last time a “politically correct liberal” threatened to
– torture you?
– kill your family?
– loosen the libel laws so as to make it easier to sue you?
– have you banned from entering the United States?
“How many conservative social scientists peer reviewed her work?..”
Forgive me, but I missed the part that said Stenner is a liberal. Is that simply an inference on your part?
and, “Sometimes when one is investigating a crime and one is sure one has found the perpetrator one never considers the possibility that there might be other suspects. ” –Careful, you’ll get yourself called a cop hater with talk like that.
I think the Indepenedent Whig is basically getting things right. A simpler explanation for Trump could easily be boiled down to: “We’re sick of your shit.” That’s it, that’s all.
It’s not like Trump voter are all reading the Alt-Right and saying to themselves “yeah democracy is the problem those guys Nick Land & Curtis Yarvin were right”, or even thinking at the level of “you know, Steve Sailer is right about ethnic groups being giant extended families and ethnically homogeneous societies like Japan & Israel really do have higher levels of social trust and general happiness so maybe Nationalism for every race would be a great idea to fight back against the Globalist elites.” Though I do suspect Nationalism vs Globalism is the next political divide, most people aren’t even thinking on that level. They’re just thinking “we’re sick of the Establishment’s bullshit.”
I suspect authoritarianism might be too simplistic of a metric. Perhaps a better way of looking at these dynamics is through the lens of David Sloan Wilson’s (& multi-level selection theory’s) adaptive groups.
Thus Trump’s authoritarianism combined with several other factors like in-group altruism, moral big brother, etc. signal the formation of a group that is very likely to enhance the fitness of its members. Combine this with Sigmund’s Tides of Tolerance simulation which shows gradually rising tolerance leads to a quick, temporary phase change to intolerance. The implication is that too much out-group orientation has weakened social bonds leading to a sense among some/many, that the nation level group is non longer adaptive for them.
Marginalization of conservatives should accelerate this feeling amongst conservatives more than liberals. Disgust signalling may therefore be a proximate cause of an ultimate genetic cause expression favouring adaptive group participation.
Stenner article is available at Research Gate and at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.
Thanks Dave … the Studies Centre copy had been removed.
At first I, too, thought it had been. When I Googled just the PDF, it turns out that they had only moved it to a different location on the site. The new URL is:
http://ussc.edu.au/ussc/assets/media/docs/publications/1006_Inequality_Stenner.pdf
I spoke to a Trump supporter over the holidays (a recently retired unionized machinist who has been a lifelong Democrat). When I asked what it was about Trump he likes, the very first word that came out of his mouth was “strength”. Then when I asked him to be specific, he said “well, he wants to build a wall on the border and make Mexico pay for it”. Then he said something like, “when’s the last time another country did something to benefit us?” I told him we benefit a lot from other countries through trade. We import lots of goods from countries like China and others that are cheaper than we can manufacture them, and that improves out standard of living. Then I told him how companies from foreign countries, such as Honda or Nissan or BMW, build factories here and employ lots of people and their cars offer us a wide range of options to choose from when we want to buy a car. But he wouldn’t have it. He was still echoing Trump’s rhetoric that we are getting ripped off more than we benefit.
But I digress. The point I wanted to make is that he likes Trump’s “strength”, which seems to be consistent with authoritarianism.
This looks like a good place for my comment that Trump frames (almost?) everything as a win-lose proposition. People are either winners or losers. Various policies are held to a binary standard. And in what should be for Trump more insightful views are reduced to bad economic analysis with only winners and losers.
Detractors are called losers, and worse. Supporters are called great, wonderful, etc. Even in the case of Romney, who in the Trump world is a loser and therefore useless to listen to, when in fact his experience in two national elections could provide a lot of insight. He might even have an idea or two about HOW NOT TO LOSE!
The wall is going to be the greatest wall ever, on time and under budget, and it is going to look good. Complain? And the wall gets ten feet higher. The wall keeps losers (rapists and drug lords?) from Mexico getting in. When Mexicans get in illegally, they win and we lose. I’d like to see the migrant farm worker, after 14 hours in the sun picking produce who laughs all the way to the six by six shack he shares with four other people and announces the obvious: “I’m a winner!” Trump wants to button down our borders and eliminate Muslims in particular until “we can find out what the hell is going on”.
Finally, I’m surprised to hear Trump talk about trade as if the country that sells the most, wins. He says we lose to China because we buy something like 400 billion more per year than vice versa. And the same for other countries. I don’t know if he is truly ignorant of the presumption of win-win in a free exchange, or if his role as a seller puts it in his head that if he is selling, he is winning and the other guy therefore must be losing. Does Trump really look at his customers as losers??
Trumps analyses are worse than simple. They mislead, instill value preferences, all by giving not even the illusion of choice. When Trump says it is either his winning way, or someone else’s losing way, is that even a choice?? I think it is time to review some textbooks on selling techniques.
The Wall Street Journal agrees with me:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/revolt-of-the-politically-incorrect-1452125196
Question: Given the situation we find ourselves in where “Caitlin” Jenner is celebrated as Woman of the Year, and Miley Cyrus is promoted as a role model for young girls, isn’t disgust at the direction liberalism is leading us in simply a sign of psychological health?
David Axelrod and Rod Dreher come to conclusions similar to mine:
http://theindependentwhig.com/2016/01/25/the-trump-phenomenon-pulls-back-the-curtain-on-the-american-mood/
Attributing Trump’s popularity to purity, disgust, and/or authoritarianism is too cute by half.
Sometimes it pays to set aside our over intellectualizing, step back, and apply a little basic common sense.
Milo Yiannopoulos has it exactly right, starting at about 4:15 of this interview when he says:
“The left created Donald Trump precisely by policing peoples language this carefully. His is the Newtonian response to what they did. They created him.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zalg45gzN_U&sns=em
“Newtonian response:” Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Bingo.
By the standards of most other developed countries America has a very liberal immigration policy. Just because a lot of working and lower middle class Americans want a shift to right on immigration policy hardly makes them maladjusted authoritarians.
Trump is basically just bringing the excessively liberal/libertarian US in line with other English-speaking countries like Australia.
Progressivism, not appeals to authoritarianism, begat Trump:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2016/02/11/80_years_of_progressive_politics_left_us_with_trump_376020.html
Attributing Trump’s rise to authoritarianism seems more like an attempt to fit the facts into the liberal grand narrative in which authority foundation is seen as bad, even evil than like an attempt to step back and looking with common sense at what’s actually going on.
I see a whole lot of denial in the comments. Not surprising – authoritarianism has a bad name for good reason. But still, ya’ll protest too much. Trump is winning the GOP primary by running Il Duce’s playbook, updated for the 21st Century USA.
The guy could go out there and give a “speech” that involved grunts and chest-pounding and his poll numbers would probably rise.
there’s a nice post about authoritarianism at vox. tl;dr fear threats may activate authoritarianism in the predisposed, and authoritarians are over-represented in the republican party. more physical fear threats like ISIS vs non-physical fear threats like the zita virus. but also fear of social change. same-sex marriage, muslims building mosques and the like. “What these changes have in common is that, to authoritarians, they threaten to take away the status quo as they know it — familiar, orderly, secure — and replace it with something that feels scary because it is different and destabilizing, but also sometimes because it upends their own place in society.” (…) lines up with “white working class populism.” http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism
but there’s another demographic puzzle in the U.S.: middle-age white men have begun killing themselves at pretty astonishing rates. just them.
“‘This is the first indicator that the plane has crashed,’ said Jonathan Skinner, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, who reviewed the study and co-authored a commentary that appears with it. ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but the plane has definitely crashed.'” https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-group-of-middle-aged-american-whites-is-dying-at-a-startling-rate/2015/11/02/47a63098-8172-11e5-8ba6-cec48b74b2a7_story.html
so I wonder if these two are related? in particular, I wonder if encroaching middle class financial instability is both driving the increase in middle-age white male suicides, and is a stenner activating factor for white working class authoritarianism? because if so, think we need to fix that right now
I find it intuitively wrong that you write that libertarians have low “care” scores because the libertarian hypothesis is that economic liberty produces greater wealth over the long term, thus it can be argued libertarians care more than naive “immediate”-carers.
I was bemused by the comments from Trump supporters here which were along the lines of “you’ve got it wrong. It’s not that we’re ‘authoritarians’, it’s just that we really, really, really hate Political Correctness”.
My response is: the movement of “Political Correctness”, while it is often annoying and occasionally misguided, is basically harmless, so why react to it so strongly? PC is weakening us in the fight against terrorism? Nonsense. Our reactions to those kind of security threats are currently entirely appropriate to the level of threat that terrorism actually poses (ie: well below that of traffic accidents). The very fact that Trump voters have such absurd and outsized reactions to things like terrorism, PC, etc, is exactly what *makes* them authoritarians!
I’m sorry to say this but – as much as I appreciate J. Haidt’s work – his insight into so called “Trump authoritarianism” is this kind of BS that comes from watching and reling on the mainstream media.
Saying that I can only agree with TheIndependentWhig and add my own obervation: if anyone there is truly “authoritarian”, it is Clinton’s camp and their globalist parners “master of puppets”.
It had become even more clear after Trump won the election and leftist hysteria beagun.
I have not read all the comments but I’ve read quite a few. I think what some are missing and Stenner is saying (although I haven’t asked her) is , Authoritarianism is not restricted to the right. Progressives can exhibit authoritarian behaviors as conservatives can. Just look at what is happening to debate on elite college campuses. When progressives perceive a “normative” threat, some will respond in authoritarian manners.
Can someone answer this question? Why are core trump supporters sticking by his side in light of his anti-American (pro-Russian) indulgences?
Does his behavior not patently violate of 4 of the 5 moral foundations… maybe all 5?
Interestingly, I find I can empathize with those who hate Trump and those who love him. I can literally feel it either way (though unlike others, I’m not blinded by either feeling). I think that those who love Trump are in a head over heels, girl falls for the confident, macho guy in high school trance. To carry the metaphor further: Say the high school macho-man is narcassistic and a liar, but the girl is still attracted to him. Still enthralled. When she’s around him, she feels on top of the world. We’ve all seen girls who remain attached to narcissists, even when the girls are hurt by him. No reasoning can unlatch the girl from her obsession. No seeming amount of hurt from the macho-man causes her to see it’s not in her best interest to stick around him.
That’s how it is with Trump. A blinding sense of admiration, loyalty and–when feeling like one is a part of him–invincibility and empowerment. Trump is to these jaded conservatives what Tyler Durden was to the anomie-ridden men in the book and movie Fight Club. In fact, that might be an even better comparison than the high school girl with the macho-man.
It’s hard for people who oppose Trump to understand. But if you like him, he enthralls. Like Tyler Durden, he’s what a lot of men wish they were. Rich, powerful, able to say whatever he wants. Trump’s masculinity and machismo stirs the machismo within his male supporters. And, when a leader (or boyfriend), has that kind of effect, the leader can do no wrong in the eyes of his followers. The rider on the back of the elephant–for Tyler’s followers, for the girl obsessed with the macho-man, for Trump’s followers–nothing will stop the rider from justifying anything and everything. Frankly, I’ve seen no way to talk the girl out of her ill advised attachment to the narcissist, and I don’t think I’d be able to talk a Space Monkey out of supporting Tyler. With Trump, the hold he has on his followers is just that strong.
People compare Trump to Hitler in policies: scapegoating immigrants, pledging to make the country great again. But more in common is their charisma. Their ability to inspire others to follow. Supporters of both, I presume, lost themselves in support. But the Trump-Hitler comparison overall doesn’t fly. It’s usually viewed as being in poor taste. My point is simply that Hitler was successful in large part due to his charisma, and Trump too has been successful in large part for his charisma,
I do not see a path to “speak to the elephant” of Trump supporters. Well, I do. What I mean is I don’t see any way to get them to reconsider or analyze their Trump viewpoints. I don’t think supporting Trump is wrong necessarily, but I do think blindly supporting anything–being immune to any and all reason–is certainly potentially perilous.
This is a really amazing post. After reading your book, I honestly was somewhat concerned about its bias coming from a moderate perspective (or maybe slightly left of center). You are clearly very objective, but you also make your political preference known so it’s hard not to be somewhat skeptical. Overall I absolutely love the book but I had a lack of closure due to it not addressing what we are now witnessing. Clearly it was written prior to Trump so it’s unreasonable to expect that you would have addressed it somehow in advance. But I would highly recommend that you include some of these thoughts in future editions or at least in the next preface. Knowing your thoughts on Trump and hearing about these additional sources make the framework as a whole seem much more complete in light of the current political environment.