“I don’t understand how anyone can support Donald Trump. How can people be that stupid? How can people vote against their own interests?”
There is no mystery. Donald Trump is no mystery at all.
Anger, frustration and fear are blowing in the wind; or else Donald Trump would have disappeared years ago. We know that. But fear is the sine qua non of button pressing, the go to argument for persuasion. Or for anyone. Almost anyone who wants to win an argument or pass a point of view.
When I was trying cases before juries, the most persuasive arguments were to what the noted trial lawyer Don Keenan emphasized in his book, “The Reptile,” was fear. That book became a phenomenon in legal circles, virtually assuring that a larger verdict would be forthcoming if appropriately utilized in the right case.
The philosophy of the book is that juries or people do not really care what happens to others, but instead, care about themselves in the context of a community. A tribal ethos of self-preservation, an evolutionary protection. And for a long time, it worked in primitive hunter-gatherer societies. In the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years of humankind there has been only ten thousand years since the dawn of agriculture, an evolutionary nanosecond to adapt to a civil society. Our genetic makeup does not work that fast.
About five thousand years ago, there arose a priestly class, arrogating to itself the power to control its peers by manipulating fear of divine anger and retribution. These priests quickly learned how to usurp the previously direct individual connection primitives had with the spirit world, say, for example, dancing around a fire to comfort their fear of enemies, of famine, of the elements, of a harsh and unforgiving world of predator and prey.
Now the primitives could be told how to live their lives, pay homage to priests, and live in a community governed by an organized religion devoted to protecting them from harm, assuming they lived according to the rules. Among those rules was a rule book, (the bible) tribal markings, brandings, nose rings, circumcision, denoting those who belonged to the tribe and denoting outsiders as hostile, worthy of exile, death or even extermination.
One need only look to the blood-soaked twentieth century to see the workings of fear. Fear of Jews, Communists, Blacks, Non-Catholics, Catholics, Asians, Non-Aryans, Socialists, Liberals, Atheists, Protestants, pick one. If one goes back five hundred years or five thousand years, it does not matter. Humanity is rife with fear.
So, when people ask why Donald Trump has been successful in being elected to the Presidency of the United States of America and are confounded by his still large following, the answer is fear. Trump has mastered the art of manipulating fear and turning it into a cult, the religion of Trumpism. Fear of others.
When Trump talks about eliminating “vermin” from our midst, that statement alone should have been disqualifying. But it has not been. Because people fear vermin. People visualize rodents as loathsome, just as they did when Dr. Goebbels portrayed Jews as rats in his propaganda. Just as members of his tribe did nothing to speak out against the calumny.
So, Trump has become a high priest, a pied piper to his followers. Just drink the potion, the snake oil. You cannot argue with religion. In a way, most religions are cultish. They leave their initial cultishness behind with the passage of time. The older the religion becomes, the more acceptable it becomes, the less of a cult it is, the more it assuages fear.
People adhering to strict tribal customs perhaps do themselves and their community a service, but in rejecting the more widely acceptable customs of a society also isolate themselves from a more fearful, cosmopolitan (yes I use that word) point of view. More accepting of others. They inhabit a more insular world, more obvious in their differences and thus more of a target for hatred and prejudice. The answer to that is not clear. I imagine the answer could be a more tolerant society. But that is rare, and it seems that more illiberal societies arise in a time of immense technological and economic change, a more challenging time. A time more susceptible to Trumpian demagoguery and fear. Trump has mastered the art of manipulating fear. The fear of change. The need for scapegoats.
So, Trump is no mystery at all. Trump is fear itself. FDR’s “nameless, unjustified, unreasoning terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” So when Franklin Roosevelt worked to overcome fear in America, Trump has worked to restore it mightily to his own advantage, but to the disadvantage of his countrymen.
