The Puzzle of Trump Support

Americans have spent the past four plus months watching a profoundly unfit and erratic man do significant damage to America’s interests while debasing the highest office in the land, and they are increasingly asking each other how this could have happened. How could anyone have voted for a man who flaunted his ignorance of  government and the world, who demonstrated emotional instability virtually every day, and who repeatedly and publicly violated the most basic norms of civility?

For that matter, given his performance to date, how is it possible that a majority of those who voted for Trump still support him?

A number of columnists and social scientists have attributed Trump’s support to economic distress. I’m not buying it. Economic concerns, Hillary hatred and similar motives may have coexisted with other characteristics of Trump voters, but on closer look, they lack explanatory power.

Two paragraphs from a recent article in Politico come much closer to the mark:

Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement was not really about the climate. And despite his overheated rhetoric about the “tremendous” and “draconian” burdens the deal would impose on the U.S. economy, Trump’s decision wasn’t really about that, either. America’s commitments under the Paris deal, like those of the other 194 cooperating nations, were voluntary. So those burdens were imaginary.

No, Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from this carefully crafted multilateral compromise was a diplomatic and political slap: It was about extending a middle finger to the world, while reminding his base that he shares its resentments of fancy-pants elites and smarty-pants scientists and tree-hugging squishes who look down on real Americans who drill for oil and dig for coal. (Emphasis mine.)

I’m well aware that the plural of anecdote isn’t data, but the few people I know who voted for Donald Trump fit this analysis perfectly. They harbor profound racial and (especially) cultural resentments. Support for a buffoon despised by knowledgable, thoughtful people was their way of sticking it to the “elitists,” those snobs who read books and newspapers, support the arts, drive hybrids and recycle their trash.

Post-election research tells us that Trump voters weren’t poor, but they were disproportionately uneducated, white and rural, and deeply resentful of urban Americans, African-Americans and brown immigrants. (Pale Brits and Canadians are okay.) They share a conviction that the “smarty pants” are looking down on them, and if we are honest, there’s a fair amount of evidence supporting that conviction: today’s America is extremely economically segregated, and just as racial segregation fosters racial distrust and stereotyping, economic segregation reinforces tribalism and disdain for the “Other.” That disdain goes both ways.

This is not to deny the economic contribution to those resentments. If economic policy could help rural communities flourish again, the cultural hostility (although probably not the racial animus) would abate somewhat. Right now, however, the more evidence of Trump’s incompetence and volatility that emerges, the more his core supporters deny administration wrongdoing and buy into improbable apologetics and wild conspiracy theories.

They’re adult versions of the kids on the playground who stuck their fingers in their ears and said nah nah I can’t hear you.

When this bizarre episode in our country’s history has run its course, and government has (hopefully) returned the policy-making apparatus to mature adults who respect data and evidence, who understand cause and effect and the scientific method, we will need to address the concerns of people left behind by social change, people who feel adrift in a brave new world that they find utterly inhospitable.

We need to do something, because “I’ll show you!” is a really bad reason to hand the nuclear codes over to a dangerously incompetent clown.

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Worldviews Black and White

On Sunday, the Washington Post had an article tracing the influence of what it called “shadow charities” on shaping the political climate that led to the election of Donald Trump. It focused upon the career of

David Horowitz, a former ’60s radical who became an intellectual godfather to the far right through his writings and his work at a charity, the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Since its formation in 1988, the Freedom Center has helped cultivate a generation of political warriors seeking to upend the Washington establishment. These warriors include some of the most powerful and influential figures in the Trump administration: Attorney General Sessions, senior policy adviser Miller and White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

The article raised several issues, including the blurred line between actual charities and the current IRS definition of not-for-profit organizations entitled to tax exempt status. That issue is important; taxpayers are subsidizing nonprofit “educational” activities that are more accurately described as promoting political propaganda.

That said, absent a wholesale revision of the tax code and a considerable reduction in the categories we deem eligible for tax-exempt status, this will not be an easy problem to fix. My version of propaganda is likely to be very different from, say, Mike Pence’s.

What was particularly interesting to me was the description of Horowitz, and his trajectory from far left to the even farther right.

Horowitz was a “red diaper baby” of communist parents in New York City. After attending Columbia University in the 1950s, he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, an anchor of leftist thinking.

Over the next two decades, he took on prominent roles in the New Left. He served as an editor of Ramparts, an influential muckraking magazine in San Francisco.

But by the late 1970s, he had decided that the left represented a profound threat to the United States. On March 17, 1985, he and a writing partner came out as conservatives in a surprising Washington Post Magazine article headlined “Lefties for Reagan.”

In August 1988, Horowitz launched the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles, a nonprofit group that would become the Freedom Center.

We all know literary and political figures who have made the journey from Left to Right, or Right to Left. Horowitz reminds me of a relative of mine who was a pontificating “Young Socialist” in college, to the great consternation of his much more conservative family; when I ran into him many years later, he was an equally rabid and doctrinaire right-winger.

I have come to realize that most of these “conversions” have very little to do with the content of the political philosophies involved. These are not people who have mellowed with age and softened formerly rigid worldviews. For whatever reason, they have “swapped” Certainty A for Certainty B. We live in a complicated world, where “right” and “wrong” are often ambiguous, and bright lines are hard to come by. For many people, that moral ambiguity is intolerable. They need certainty. They need to be able to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys.

And they desperately need to believe that they are with the “good guys.”

We see much of the same phenomenon in our churches, synagogues and mosques: there are members who value their congregations for the warmth of community, who listen to sermons for illumination into life’s “big questions” and for the insights and guidance offered by their particular doctrines. There are other members who see those doctrines as literal commands from On High, as blackletter law removed from any historical context or nuanced interpretation.

Some people have a psychological need to hold tight to dogma–whether Left or Right, political or religious–in order to function. They need a world that is reliably black and white, where  rules are clear and unambiguous, and where good guys and bad guys are easily identified.

The messy uncertainties and complexities of modern life are challenging to all of us. Accepting a doctrine that purports to explain what is otherwise confusing and threatening–a doctrine that identifies friends and enemies– is a huge temptation.

It’s a temptation we need to resist.

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Blaming the Culture

I recently read yet another overheated article suggesting that huge numbers of people in Western democratic countries are either depressed or demoralized, and blaming this “psycho-spiritual crisis” on our consumerist culture.

Our descent into the Age of Depression seems unstoppable. Three decades ago, the average age for the first onset of depression was 30. Today it is 14. Researchers such as Stephen Izard at Duke University point out that the rate of depression in Western industrialized societies is doubling with each successive generational cohort. At this pace, over 50 per cent of our younger generation, aged 18-29, will succumb to it by middle age. Extrapolating one generation further, we arrive at the dire conclusion that virtually everyone will fall prey to depression.

The article does concede use of a rather over-inclusive definition of “depression;” evidently, when people who have been diagnosed as depressed are examined more closely, the majority don’t actually meet the clinical criteria for that diagnosis. The rest are merely despondent, or as the article labels them, “demoralized.”

[D]emoralization is a type of existential disorder associated with the breakdown of a person’s ‘cognitive map’. It is an overarching psycho-spiritual crisis in which victims feel generally disoriented and unable to locate meaning, purpose or sources of need fulfilment….

In a paragraph that certainly demoralizes me, the article describes the attributes of this social angst, and ascribes them to consumer culture:

As it is absorbed, consumer culture imposes numerous influences that weaken personality structures, undermine coping and lay the groundwork for eventual demoralization. Its driving features – individualism, materialism, hyper-competition, greed, over-complication, overwork, hurriedness and debt – all correlate negatively with psychological health and/or social wellbeing. The level of intimacy, trust and true friendship in people’s lives has plummeted. Sources of wisdom, social and community support, spiritual comfort, intellectual growth and life education have dried up. Passivity and choice have displaced creativity and mastery. Resilience traits such as patience, restraint and fortitude have given way to short attention spans, over-indulgence and a masturbatory approach to life.

I’m not sure what constitutes a “masturbatory approach to life,” but it’s an interesting term…

The article continues at some length, condemning the “void” in which contemporary citizens find ourselves. You can click through and evaluate the argument for yourselves. In my case, although I found several points persuasive, taken as a whole, I would classify this as one of a growing and unhelpful number of  “pox on modernity” diatribes that assumes a rosy and ahistorical past of human connection and satisfaction, and simplifies a complicated issue that philosophers have wrestled with for a very long time: what gives our lives meaning?

How do we create a culture that provides everyone with a sense of purpose while avoiding a coercive imposition of collective norms and the “uniformity of the graveyard.”  

There is much to criticize in consumer culture. There was also much to criticize in the cultures that preceded it. Singling out consumerism writ large as the sole driver of contemporary angst, however, misses the point.

Our problem is larger: how do humans create a society that respects our differences and facilitates individual moral autonomy, while still providing the social infrastructure necessary for meaningful community? How do we create a society in which we can be fully realized “I’s” within a co-operative and nurturing (but not stifling) “we”?

Somewhere between a stultifying communitarianism and a dog-eat-dog libertarianism there’s a (non-masturbatory) “sweet spot.” We need to locate it.

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Sing, Dammit..

Later this morning, I will give a brief talk at a brunch for the Indianapolis Women’s Chorus.

What’s that old saying about music having charm to soothe the savage beast? (Actually, the original–correct–version is “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast,” but I sort of prefer the bastardized version, since I’ve been in a pretty savage and beastly mood lately.) At any rate, the Women’s Chorus makes beautiful music, and I’m looking forward to the performance portion of the program.

Here are the brief remarks I plan to share.

_______________

I am honored to be here today, not just because the Women’s Chorus makes beautiful music, but because your mission, and your celebration of diversity, has never been more important.

Like many of you, I have been depressed and frightened since last November’s election. That election rewarded a campaign based almost entirely on appeals to American resentments–on appeals to ignorance, racism, misogyny and homophobia–and it left me wondering what had happened to the country I thought I lived in.

In the wake of that election, though, I’ve been energized and amazed to see unprecedented levels of civic engagement, from the Women’s March to the marches in support of science and the environment, to the turnouts at Congressional Town Halls across the country, to new activist groups springing up every day. Here in Indiana, Women4Change was organized last November, after the election; today it has close to 14,000 members.

We are not alone. And we can learn a number of lessons from what has come to be called “the Resistance.”  Let me just share three of them:

  • Lesson number one: We the People are not helpless. When so many Americans rise up and demand better policies and better government—when we let our elected officials know that we won’t continue to allow them to enact policies that take from the poor and give to the rich, that we won’t continue to turn a blind eye to corruption and cronyism, that we will refuse to let racist, sexist and homophobic tactics divide us—we can prevail.
  • Lesson number two is particularly gratifying to old feminists like me: women can and will empower other women. Women can and will stand up for our right to self-determination, our right to equal pay for equal work, our right to control our own reproduction, and our right to live our lives on our own terms. We can and will encourage more feminists—female and male– to run for public office, and we can and will support them when they do.
  • Lesson number three is one that members of the Indy Women’s Chorus know well: the performing and visual arts are inherently and powerfully political. Not partisan, but political and progressive. More hearts and minds have been changed through story and song than through blog posts and editorials—and I say that as someone who has a blog and writes editorials. The arts—music, dance, theater, painting—are what separate humans from animals; communication through the arts touches and teaches us in profound and moving ways.

I applaud what you do, and I am so grateful to be a part of today’s event. Thank you for asking me!

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We Aren’t Number One…Not Even Close

Donald Trump is accelerating America’s retreat from the world stage, illuminating our national flaws and demonstrating the contradictions between our aspirations and our performance.

Let’s be honest: a nation that could elect this ignorant, unstable man is a nation seriously in decline. If we are really prepared to be honest, we will also concede that America’s social and racial divisions, extremes of inequality and lack of anything approaching an adequate social safety-net aren’t exactly attributes that confer bragging rights, either.

A prime example is our overpriced and underperforming health care system, which our Congressional overlords are eager to make even worse. How long can intellectually dishonest pundits and politicians keep a straight face while peddling the myth that American medical care is “the best in the world”–that “we’re number one”?

The truth is that, if you are very wealthy or have exceptionally good insurance, you can get extremely good care for serious illnesses in the United States. If you don’t fall into one of those categories, not so much. And if you are an average American with a treatable ailment–or an ailment that should be treatable– your prospects are even worse.

Over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton reports on yet another in a long line of studies ranking national healthcare systems.

A new study that looks at the effects of highly treatable diseases, ones for which greater access to continual medical care can mean the difference between life and death, finds that the American health care system lags behind much of the developed world.

There are a number of ways to evaluate healthcare systems, but if you are measuring outcomes over a country’s population, rather than touting cutting-edge therapies available only to the privileged few, the U.S. has long lagged other industrialized countries.

Christopher Murray, a researcher at the University of Washington, and his collaborators looked at 32 causes of death in 195 countries from 1990 to 2015 to create a health-care quality index they used for rankings. Murray described the findings as “disturbing.”

“Having a strong economy does not guarantee good health care,” he said. “Having great medical technology doesn’t, either. We know this because people are not getting the care that should be expected for diseases with established treatments.”…

As might be expected, many highly developed nations, such as Norway, Australia and Canada, scored well. Those in more-remote areas in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean scored poorly…

The United States measures well for diseases preventable by vaccines, such as diphtheria and measles, but it gets almost failing grades for nine other conditions that can lead to death. These are lower respiratory infections, neonatal disorders, non-melanoma skin cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, ischemic heart disease, hypertensive heart disease, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and the adverse effects of medical treatment itself.

The United States spends enormously more for medical care than any other country–twice as much per capita has the next most expensive system. We just spend our dollars in the least efficient ways possible: multiple non-standard insurance forms, laws that prohibit government agencies from negotiating drug prices, and private insurers whose high overhead costs include everything from marketing to sky-high management salaries and corporate jets. (Medicare’s overhead runs about 3% in contrast to 24-26% for private insurance companies.)

Obamacare is far from perfect (what we really need is “Medicare for All”), but its passage did represent a move in the right direction–and an acknowledgement that access to healthcare is a human right, not a consumer good to be made available only to those with sufficient disposable income. But rather than working to improve it with “fixes” that are fairly simple and obvious, the White House and  the Congressional GOP consistently sabotage it, most recently by threatening to end crucial Affordable Care Act payments to insurers. Politico has reported on the move, and the fact that it would guarantee huge premium increases, the withdrawal of insurers from the O-Care markets, and generally cause chaos across the individual health insurance marketplace.

It’s enough to make you think American policymakers put a higher priority on the bottom lines of Big Pharma and Big Insurance than they do on the health of average citizens.

But then, what do we expect when we elect people so corrupt and self-serving they don’t even care about the health of the planet their children and grandchildren will inherit?

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