Why voters choose Trump against their self-interest
Wondering about “the paranoid style in American politics,” I just checked the historian Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1963 essay to see if it had anything to say about Donald Trump. Yes, it did.
Paranoia is “a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution and of one’s own greatness.” Fun fact: it applies to political movements and their shouting leaders, not just to suffering individuals.
Hofstadter’s essay was published 53 years ago but how prescient. Trump has long surpassed Hofstadter’s suggestion that “in his extravagant passion for facts the paranoid occasionally manufactures them.” Yes, Trump believes the “public mind” is directed “through managed news,” just one of the ways he resembles Joseph McCarthy or Robert Welch Jr., who founded the racist John Birch Society.
Trumpians come in waves throughout history and they “appear to be all but ineradicable,” Hofstadter calmly wrote. In a strange way, this cheers me up but only in the way that when the plague pops up occasionally, I tell myself that we survived the last real go-round, though not well.
A distinctive thing about Trump is his flamboyant sexual aggression. Hofstadter wrote that paranoid crusades are sparked by social conflicts that bring fundamental fears and hatred into play.
What puzzles me this time is that rage at women — at abortion rights, Planned Parenthood and Hillary Clinton for being female — is usually the cry of the mob with pitchforks and torches. The leader usually professes sexual purity, however peculiar his behaviour in private. Trump is the opposite. In 1963, the idea of renewed feminism was still only being broached and American life was still what we would consider nightmarish for women. Even now, feminism is still at the starting gate and the backlash against what women have achieved so far is a major factor in Trumpism, just as it was when Sarah Palin’s 2008 disastrous Republican vice-presidential nomination opened the door to a new American derangement.
As for Trump’s female voters, they have inhaled misogyny all their lives; it is not a surprise to see that they breathe it out in 2016.
It is going to be very bad for women if Trump wins, possibly as bad — but in slightly different ways — as it will be if Clinton wins and Trumpians explode. It is also going to be bad for Trump voters who dream vaguely of personal benefit and they will be as disappointed as Brexit voters will come to be as the U.K. descends into a new long winter of discontent.
Trump has one precious interest at heart: his own. We have heard every theory of why Americans will vote for this appalling man against even their own economic and social interests.
Here’s another one, from the great liberal sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who has spent five years talking intensively to people who are nothing like her — partly because liberals are accused of never meeting the extreme right — in Louisiana, a state that exemplifies self-destructive voting.
Her new book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, is as intellectually interesting as J.D. Vance’s recent Hillbilly Elegy. She mentions “structural amnesia,” a British anthropological theory about the Nuer, a people of the Sudan who remembered some history but not all.
Their dominant institution was the kin system, always run by men. Men and women recalled 11 generations of male ancestors but nothing of their female forebears. According to this theory, “memory was an indirect expression of power,” Hochschild writes. Why recall the powerless?
Louisiana is the second poorest U.S. state, with 44 per cent of its budget coming from the federal government while its citizens have been proudly abandoned by the state. Just as for the Nuer, it is in their interests to forget their victimhood, their land ruined by the oil industry, their disastrous schools, their food and water poisoned by hazardous waste. They need money, help and environmental regulations.
But they “forget” this and vote for the Republicans, dominant in the South, who swear never to provide these things. This may doom them, but it allies them with power. It gives them status in their own eyes.
It’s a fascinating theory that might help explain why people flock to Trump rallies and cheer a demagogue who says things like “I love the poorly educated,” when he clearly despises them. He and his audience share status anxiety. They are anxious to forget many things about themselves.
Hillary Clinton will remind him. With Hofstadter and Hochschild as guides, let’s see how things play out at the Wednesday debate.