This is the second post in a five-part series devoted to making better sense of how Donald Trump earned more than 74 million votes this year. The reason I decided to put time and effort into writing these posts is because I think Donald Trump's presidency is evidence of a society with extraordinary ills, and I have yet to see the sort of comprehensive analysis that I think we need in order to truly respond to this crisis.
I want to address the question of why Trump got so many votes in a way that seeks to a) understand the way Trump voters see themselves and their world, and b) makes sense of underlying social and historical factors that have created such a large number of people who are willing and even excited to vote for such a dysfunctional and dangerous man.
While it may be obvious, my primary audience is those of us who continue to express shock and outrage that anyone would vote for Trump. Part of what I'm trying to do is help us understand Trump voters better, not because I just want us all to sing kumbaya and get along, but because I don't think we can effectively respond unless we understand Trumpism in a meaningful way. Perpetual shock and outrage, while profitable for media outlets, are not reactions that will get us very far in the long-term. The first step to recovery is finding the strength to be honest with ourselves, and this is very much about recovery.
In the first post of this series, which was posted to this blog on November 28, I began by outlining basic assumptions I hold about human beings that have guided this project. In the main body, I offered my thoughts about a common debate that you're bound to run into if you go searching for why people voted for Trump: Was it really about racism or economic anxiety?
My two main points in that first post were 1) the number of votes Trump received is evidence of both racism and economic anxiety, and that we misunderstand the complexity and interlocking nature of both issues when we insist that either racism or economic anxiety was a more predominant factor, and 2) a hyper focus on trying to make sense of Trump voters through this either/or lens obscures a host of other factors that are equally important to understand.
In this second post of the series, I'd like to investigate some of those other factors, specifically as they're understood by Trump voters. I believe many of these issues are very much intertwined with racism and economic anxiety. I also think they deserve some attention apart from those important lenses.
What We Can Gain By Trying to Understand Trump Voters
I recognize that taking time to understand Trump voters is triggering for some people. A lot of attention has been paid to understanding Trump voters in ways that sometimes positions them as victims whose needs should be centered. While I agree this is a problem, I don't think it means we can't benefit from sincere efforts to understand why people voted for Trump. What I think it means is that when we try to understand any group of people, we need to be careful about doing it at the expense of any other group of people, especially when the stories we tell encourage questions about who's most victimized.
There are two important things I think we can gain from a sincere and sustained inquiry into the diverse factors and beliefs that led to Donald Trump receiving so many votes this year.
First, I think understanding the stories that Trump voters tell themselves can help unhinge stereotypes and caricatures many people who can't stand Trump hold onto. As far as I can tell, these stereotypes have a tendency to perpetuate Trumpism. They are so simple and incomplete that they encourage attitudes of liberal arrogance, condescension, and self-righteousness that Trump voters often point to in their reasons for voting for against Democrats. I'm not saying that people would not have voted for Trump if these stereotypes didn't exist. I'm saying they are part of the same problem that liberals often critique in Trump voters. As Chris Hedges puts it, the road to despotism is paved with righteousness. Any time we can complicate our ideas about each other, I think that's probably a good thing.
Second, a sincere and sustained inquiry into Trump voters' motives reveals an important source of information about what's happening in our country that actually often corresponds with the experiences of people who voted for Biden. We are increasingly living in a country whose political, social, and economic systems do not grant a majority of people easy access to decent and meaningful lives. By listening closely to all voters, I think we can come to understand that there is actually a lot of commonality of experience among Trump voters, Biden voters, and nonvoters. The differences come in the ways we make meaning of our experience - the storied nature of human conduct, as Theodore Sarbin put it.
So, with the rest of this post, I would like to get into those stories. What reasons do Trump voters offer for why they support Trump? What can these people's stories tell us about their experience in the United States? And toward what underlying problems might they point?
Trump as Therapist-In-Chief (Or Drug-Dealer-In-Chief)
For anyone who has a difficult time trying to imagine how or why someone could possibly vote for Donald Trump, I have a homework assignment for you. I want you to go somewhere you won't be bothered and take a few minutes to breathe. Then, I want you to imagine that you've lived a life in which you've never heard of anyone named Donald Trump. You know absolutely nothing about this man. Nothing. Never heard his name, what others think of him, or what he's done.
Next, I want you to imagine that you live in a country whose politicians and media don't seem to speak to you (which, of course, may not be much of a stretch for most Americans), and in the rare moments when politicians do seem to be speaking to you, their words feel hollow because you know from years, rather generations, of experience that they're just paying lip service to the idea that you matter. They're not going to do anything real to meaningfully affect your life in a positive way. And it's not just members of one particular party; it's both parties who have decided to entirely ignore you and your community.
Once you feel like you've really gotten yourself into this mindset, I want you to get online and watch a Trump rally or two - keeping in mind you don't know who this man is. But, as you listen, I want you to imagine the possibility that Trump might offer you something different than other politicians, and more importantly, the possibility that he's talking directly to you.
If you have the time, energy, and state of mind to do this very difficult assignment, you might learn a few things. First, you might notice that Trump acts less as commander-in-chief at his rallies and more as therapist-in-chief. Certainly not a competent therapist you'd choose if your goal was long-term healing, but a therapist who offers a powerful form of temporary relief for people who feel desperately alienated. In other words, this therapist offers a drug as a solution for pain.
"We expected something more from our lives," attendees of Trump's rallies seem to imply by showing up. "We deserve something better than this. Our country deserves something better than this. It's not fair!"
Trump responds, "I hear you! You're in pain, and you're right! It's not fair. You had reasonable expectations. You're just asking for what you deserve, and you're not getting it. You've been mistreated. The good news is that I know who did this to you. I know whose fault it is. And together, you and me, we're going to set things right. I'm a strong man. And in situations like this, when good people like you are being picked on by bullies who nobody else has the balls to deal with, you need a strong man. I need you, and you need me. We're in this together."
In other words, as therapist-in-chief, Trump is offering people a very specific strategy for dealing with a sort of pain they may not fully understand. And that strategy is to validate their sense of victimhood and suggest that the way through their undeserved pain is to righteously project it onto the people who supposedly caused it. It is an extraordinarily powerful form of Us vs. Them political rhetoric that is the basis of fascism and has spread not only among Trump voters, but has begun to show up in liberal rhetoric as well. The capacity for critical thought across the political spectrum is in decline.
Possibly the most important ingredient in Trump's appeal to his supporters is not what he says, but the way he makes them feel. In rallies, he talks often about how much he loves them and how much they love him. It's a huge lovefest. And people drive for hours to experience it.
Of course, it's not just the feeling of love that Trump offers. As Charles Blow put it in The New York Times, "Trump's magical mixture is to make being afraid feel like fun. His rallies are a hybrid of concert revelry and combat prep. Trump tells his followers about all the things of which they should be afraid, or shouldn't trust or should hate, and then positions himself as the greatest defense against those things. His supporters roar their approval at their white knight."
Trump's therapy is powerfully addictive for two reasons. First, it doesn't actually solve any problems. In fact, it only makes problems worse. He will forever be able to position himself as needed to solve problems that he's actually perpetuating. In other words, the idea of Trump as a savior functions like a destructive addiction. Second, and more importantly for the purposes of this post, it's a therapeutic approach that is grounded in something real. It responds to the stories lots of people in our country are telling about their lives that are the result of some very dangerous and very real social ills that neither the Democratic nor the Republican party has meaningfully attempted to address for decades. In this context, someone who appears to be a threat to the establishment of both parties can look extremely appealing to a large number of Americans.
What Stories Appeal to Trump Voters?
While there is obviously no way I could capture the stories of all 74 million Trump voters in a blog post, I'm going to try to organize the main threads of dominant stories I've come across. Of course, none of these threads apply to all Trump voters, but I think they apply to enough of them that they can teach us something. I'm sure I've missed important narratives, and I would be grateful for feedback helping me understand these stories better. I've organized the threads I've come across into three main categories:
- Democrats don't understand us and threaten our way of life
- We can't trust the government because they've sold us out time and again
- We want to feel hopeful about our future
Democrats Don't Understand Us and Threaten Our Way of Life
The real point of this section is to help us understand that, in the same way many Biden votes were not so much for Biden as they were against Trump, a great many Trump votes were more against Biden than they were for Trump.
I find that those of us caught in liberal thought bubbles often find this difficult to fathom, so I wanted to flesh out what's involved in this story from the other side.
Of those folks who cast their Trump votes against Joe Biden, there seems to be a strong sense that Democrats generally do not understand them and are pursuing policies that threaten their communities and way of life.
This story comes through most clearly in people who a) seem to be engaging in what some researchers refer to as a politics of resentment, b) people who see themselves as defenders of "traditional values," especially members of religious communities, c) white Americans who grew up with different expectations for how their lives ought to be playing out in the 21st century, and d) business owners who generally trust Republicans more than Democrats to create policies favorable for business and the economy. And of course, many people inhabit more than one of these identities.
It's easy for me to understand the politics of resentment. As I think about it, it has to do with a desire for dignity, or at least a desire to be understood and spoken to by someone who's actually making a real effort to understand us. And while I think that can be problematic when our own idea of who we are is highly delusional, it's also a basic desire that I think all of us hold.
I think it's fair to say that we middle and upper-income, urban-dwelling liberals are generally terrible at understanding the lived experiences of people who don't live like we do. Unfortunately, because we generally have access to the types of educational institutions and media outlets privileged within our culture, we also have an exaggerated sense of our ability to make good sense of the world. This arrogance works against the possibility of a humility that could actually help us get smarter. And I think it's important to keep in mind that this is the sort of intelligence that sets Democratic talking points and campaign messaging. It's also the sort of intelligence that pays the salaries of people who pontificate for a living in media outlets like MSNBC, CNN, and The New York Times - outlets that too often serve as little more than a mouthpiece for the leadership of the Democratic party.
If you follow these outlets, you'll generally be led to conclude that we can reliably predict how an individual will vote according to their race and gender. And when women or people of color vote for Republicans, there must be something wrong with them. We forget how complex people are, how differently people relate with their own identities in their unique communities, and how insular our own thinking tends to be. Most importantly, we forget that categories of identity, such a racial categories, tell us nothing essential about who a person is or how they'll behave. They might be able to predict how large groups are likely to behave, but at best, they are little more than a basis on which to ask better questions about the world, not on which to draw firm conclusions about it. Moreover, the assumption that the Democratic Party is necessarily the party that marginalized people must vote for is its own form of arrogant ignorance that inhibits Democrats from learning more about real people's lives and speaking to them in ways that feel authentic.
Elite liberal intelligence in our country is an extremely disembodied form of intelligence. It's the type of intelligence you acquire by sitting in class for the first part of your life until you can finally get a job where you can sit at a desk for the rest of it. It's an intelligence that forms itself through overly rational critique and criticism of the world based on secondary source material at best. And it is overly confident to the point of smug condescension. It generally doesn't understand life in rural or religious communities. In fact, I would argue that it really doesn't understand any form of deep community. It doesn't understand what it means to work with one's body, and it certainly doesn't understand religious faith. All of these forms of ignorance make it a dangerous form of intelligence, not because of what it knows and understands, but both because of what it doesn't understand and the power it wields.
Elite liberal ignorance uses language that understandably creates a sense of resentment in people who a) don't have the same privileged access to understanding better and more meaningful definitions of racism and other systems of oppression, and b) do understand what it means to work with one's body and the meaning of participating in a faith community that grounds them.
It would be difficult to describe the sheer emotion that can bubble up in Trump voters who are asked what it is about liberals that irks them so much. The answers so often come back: "I'm so sick and tired of being called a racist when I know that I'm not," or "They want to destroy our faith." Is there an inherent problem of lack of access to education here? Absolutely, but not only with conservative voters. Those who live in liberal thought bubbles also lack of form of education, and until they can learn more about the lives of other people in our country, they won't be able to speak in ways that don't contribute to a widespread resentment that is having real effects on our elections.
In a Miami Herald article from November 12th of this year entitled "Trump saw gains among Puerto Ricans. They say Democrats 'don't hear us,'" Puerto Rican Doctor Leo Valentin is quoted saying, "We saw these double standards, of how [Democrats] treated faith-based communities and how they treated small businesses. It's partly the forgetting about small businesses who don't have the resources to defend themselves from these measures."
Later, in the same article, Trump supporter and pastor, Rafael Mojica, is quoted: "The people who come from Puerto Rico...they have this mentality of what they hear at home. That we're Democrats, that Republicans are bad. The problem is a lot of people think about the candidate, but what's the platform? Thankfully, we've successfully given the right information to a lot of people."
I think Mojica represents a huge number of Americans who voted for Trump this year. He urges people not to focus on Trump the person, but to focus on the party platform that he believes will be most beneficial for their lives.
Before ending this section, I would be remiss not to say something about the Christian Right's role in leading us to Trump. As Chris Hedges points out in his book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, there is a minority of Christians in our country who vote overwhelmingly Republican and are "openly hostile to democratic pluralism" and "embrace totalitarian policies, such as amending the Constitution to make America a 'Christian nation.'"
The Christian Right is an important group to understand, and I want to say more about them in the third and fourth posts of this series. For now, I would note only that I think it's important for us to keep in mind that they do not represent a majority of Christians, and while some of them do see Trump as a savior, others clearly see him merely as a tool in advancing a much larger agenda they've been pursuing for decades.
While I obviously do not agree that Donald Trump is a suitable person to be president, I worry when I hear people complain that they just can't fathom how 74 million people could support such a man. There's plenty of evidence that many Trump voters don't support Donald Trump, not as an individual anyway. If we can understand that, we might be able to wade into difficult conversations with our fellow citizens better equipped.
We Can't Trust the Government Because They've Sold Us Out Time and Again
In her research on the politics of resentment in Wisconsin, Katherine Cramer uses the term "rural consciousness" to describe the feelings and attitudes of conservative rural voters in her state. She notes how common it is for rural voters to feel marginalized and ignored by government officials. They don't understand why their hard-earned tax money is going to pay for urban projects like state universities far away from where they live that they could never afford to send their children to, and they rarely have time to get to know the regularly-rotating cast of state and federal bureaucrats who spend limited time in their communities. While some of these attitudes are based on misconceptions, Cramer notes, they are nevertheless widespread and important to understand.
Similarly, journalist Thomas Frank notes that in Trump's rallies, he plays on a cynicism people have developed toward government. While he does pepper his rallies with racist and sexist comments here and there that are extremely repugnant, Trump often spends a majority of time talking about how he and the people he's addressing have been wronged, especially by unfair trade agreements like NAFTA, and how he is going to fix it.
One of the reasons I think so many people have been energized by the opportunity to vote for Trump is they see hope he might either bring real accountability to government institutions that have wronged them, or he might destroy them. Both of these possibilities create a tremendous amount of passion among those who feel resentful toward government.
There is little doubt that the United States has increasingly moved away from democracy and in the direction of plutocracy in the last few decades. The federal government has, in some ways, come to act like a shell company for the world's richest corporations.
We often make the mistake of imagining that politicians hold the most concentrated political power in our country when, in fact, it is the people who fund politicians' long-term careers, mainly multinational corporations, who hold the most concentrated political power. NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the Citizens United decision are but three examples of a federal government that has been paving the way for our country and its citizens to function as a host for corporate parasites whose leaders live hyper narcissistic lifestyles and see the entire world as an object for their exploitation.
The job of of many politicians and media outlets in this country has been to distract the population from this reality. The real pain and illness that are being caused by having a horrific parasite attached the body politic over the course of decades has been explained in a way that doesn't make the cause of the pain obvious. Instead of calling the financial crisis of 2008 exactly what it was, corporate welfare for the ultra-rich, politicians extolled to us the virtues of bailing out industries that we all depended on and helped us cope with the idea that our taxpayer money was being used to pay CEO bonuses at Wall Street casino firms like Goldman Sachs. It's a reasonable thing to do, we were told. These companies supported us, and we ought to support them.
As always, the effects of this corporate greed have had the most harmful effects on the most marginalized in our society. But as the effects multiply, and corporations increasingly seek to profit off of the infrastructure of the state itself (such as public schools, transportation, and retirement programs), the cost of their greed is creating more and more pain and anxiety for more and more people who routinely vote and whose futures are beginning to look different than they'd imagined.
While repercussions of events like the 2008 financial crisis are real, its origins are poorly understood. What is obvious, though, is neither the institutions in the government nor the dominant political parties were able to hold perpetrators accountable whose actions had enormous consequences in the realm of health care, education, and retirement nationwide. To my mind, it was an extremely underestimated proximate cause of Donald Trump's appeal.
It may be hard for some people to imagine, but there are Trump voters who also voted for Obama, and Trump voters who might have voted for Sanders if he'd earned the Democratic nomination. For these voters, I think Trump represents a hope that somebody could actually create some accountability for those who are creating a very real sense of pain in people's everyday lives. If not that, then maybe just burn the whole thing down because, fuck it.
In 2020, Trump may have created the possibility of a real shift of working-class voters away from the Democratic party and toward the Republican party. But for some of these voters, I think disillusionment with both parties is the stronger feeling. They'll vote for anyone who seems to suggest the possibility of real change. Again, I think this is something important for us to understand if we're going to develop a real ability to respond to this crisis.
We Want to Have Hope for Our Future
It is difficult to watch Trump rallies without noticing the sense of hope that he creates with his audience. The feeling, at least at times, is not altogether different than the feeling Obama created with his message of hope and slogan, "Yes we can."
And if you're looking for a group of people who feel hope under Trump, the fossil fuel industry is a good place to start. Coal, oil, and gas workers in states like West Virginia, Texas, and Wyoming have been hit hard in the last decades as their pensions run dry and local governments are starved of revenue fossil fuel used to reliably offer.
Trump has repeatedly offered lip service to these industries and in December of 2019 signed a bill that put federal money into shoring up the pensions of members of the United Mine Workers of America. In an online article posted by local Ohio news station WTOV9 (which is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group), UMWA Vice President Rick Altman is quoted as saying about the bill, "This is truly a historic day for the UMWA with the signature of our president. Our UMWA family can rest [knowing] that finally, the promise that was made to us has come to fruition. Lives have been saved."
It seems many Trump voters desperately want to feel hopeful about the future, but struggle to see how they can. As the world and its economies change, I think a lot of this anxiety is rooted in a legitimate fear that being the privileged citizens of the world's foremost empire will no longer ensure a lifestyle commensurate with that status. I think this is very much connected with expectations associated with being white, but it's also associated with the relationship that Americans of all racial backgrounds have with their own sense of Americanness, and what they think it ought to mean for them to be a citizen of the United States - the type of life they feel they ought to be able to live.
In his book, The Road to Unfreedom, Timothy Snyder introduces us to two types of politics he sees currently dominating Europe and the United States: the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity.
The politics of inevitability is the type of politics associated with people who've always told us that free-market capitalism would solve all our problems and bring democracy to people around the world. The idea is that progress is inevitable. We can always expect our futures to be bright, and our children's future will be even brighter. It is the dominant political narrative we've heard in the United States since at least World War II. In some ways, it seems to be a politics many Biden voters hope he can return us to (by helping to make America great again...differently, I guess).
In the last decade, the politics of inevitability has been put to the test in the United States. Health and welfare are degrading, public institutions are failing, an almost entirely unreported addiction crisis is raging across our country, and life expectancies are falling. We'd like to think that our futures will inevitably be better, but it's becoming more and more difficult to live inside that myth given the realities we're facing.
But even the politics of inevitability isn't all it may seem. As Snyder puts it, "The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one. The cliche of the politics of inevitability is that 'there are no alternatives.' To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to a premarked grave in a prepurchased plot."
In other words, just because many Americans have enjoyed living in this idea doesn't mean it hasn't been an illusion - an illusion that's stopped us from asking hard questions and engaging with our world in a meaningful way.
As the belief that our future will inevitably look better than our present begins to falter, Snyder argues that a different form of politics is emerging around the globe.
"Eternity arises from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity, and democracy gives way to oligarchy. An oligarch spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake protection to people with real pain."
As democracy declines, would-be authoritarian leaders begin to assert the "righteousness of inequality" and distract people from their lived experiences by turning national propaganda toward a mythical, heroic, and innocent past. Slowly but surely, people become frozen in eternity, constantly reliving their country's greatest imagined historical moments so that inequality and pain can be stabilized and numbed. Time disappears. The possibility of change disappears. And just like in the politics of inevitability, freedom is a not an idea anybody actually wonders about.
Trumpism, as I see it, is an interesting mix of a tiny bit of inevitability and large dose of eternity. Trumpism suggests we make things great again. We both move forward and stay stuck in a mythical past. A paradoxical authoritarian slogan fit perfectly for the United States.
In Fintan O'Toole's book, The Politics of Pain, he helps us understand how "the pleasures of self-pity" explain a strong undercurrent in our politics. "Self-pity...combines two things that may seem incompatible: a deep sense of grievance and a high sense of superiority."
Self-pity that is rooted in "a deep sense of grievance and a high sense of superiority" explains many Trump voters. But while these two things may seem incompatible on the surface, I think they are very deeply intertwined. I don't think it's possible to have a high sense of superiority without a deep sense of grievance. Illusions of superiority will always have to meet with reality at some point, and we either choose to hold onto our illusions at our own peril, or we attempt contact with reality on its terms. This is the point at which freedom becomes a possibility. It is also the point that the politics of inevitability and eternity are seeking desperately to avoid.
Even though the sense of superiority is an illusion, the effects of grievance are very real. They breed resentment, pain, cynicism, alienation, and despair. And, in addition to the very visceral experience of pain associated with struggling economies and failing institutions, these grievances seem also to be tied to a very real debate about whether the United States is in fact a good and noble country or a bad and evil country.
We're often not sure whether to be proud or to feel ashamed of being American. O'Toole writes, "When collective moods swing so radically from pole to pole, it is a safe bet that what is happening is not a transition from one to the other but a constant hovering between them." Do we have a right to feel superior and empowered? Or should we feel guilty and powerless? We just don't know, but we do have a range of politicians who will speak to whichever sentiment we might be feeling at any given time.
Of course, this is a false dichotomy. But similar to W.E.B. Du Bois's notion of the wages of whiteness, what I think Donald Trump is offering hurting Americans is a wage of whiteness wrapped in the garb of Americanness, of which some people of color are also able to imagine themselves a part.
"Yes, you might be hurting," Trump says to his supporters. "But, you're American, and for that, you can still be proud. You deserve to be proud. All Americans deserve to take pride in that identity. Don't let the Black Lives Matter activists tell you that you're a racist or that you have anything to be ashamed of. They're trying to take your pride from you. It might be all you have left in this country, so don't let them."
Again, a destructive drug is offered as a temporary solution.
It's superficial. It's temporary. It won't solve any problems in the long-term. But as a quick hit to the ego, it works. But the drug wears off, and supporters find themselves needing that reassurance over and over again until someone can come along and help them find meaning and hope in something other than a drug.
Conclusion
This has been part two of my five-part series on how Donald Trump earned more than 74 million votes this year. My goal in this post has been to investigate the ways Trump voters experience their own lives in relationship to their decision to vote for Trump. My hope is that some of the perspectives here might challenge stereotypes about Trump voters and offer a way of seeing things that might create new possibilities for positive dialogue and action. I'm sure I've missed things and would be grateful for criticism and feedback.
In part three, I hope to examine some of the short-term sociological, political, and historical factors that have contributed to Trump's victory, such as our media divide, a global rise in fascism, and the opioid epidemic. In part four, I plan to look at more long-term factors. And in the fifth and last post, I hope to explore meaningful strategies that all of us can take to heal ourselves and heal our country.
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