Tag Archives: fear

The Roots Of MAGA

Regular readers of this blog have already encountered my analysis of the MAGA cult: white people–mostly but not entirely male– terrified of losing social dominance, and deeply disoriented by a modern world in which ambiguities and “shades of gray” threaten to overwhelm the “faith-based” verities they cling to.

These are the same people who supported Hitler in the 1930s, and support other autocrats today–and the rest of us are in danger of losing America to these limited and terrified folks if we don’t understand the roots of their movement. A recent Substack essay from The Rational League mined the available research and confirmed much of my thesis. (In the quotes below, I’ve omitted the copious citations–to access them, you should click through.)

It began:

It was never about taxes or trade or immigration, at least not in the ways its supporters claim. It was about fear. About losing status. About the aching dread that the world no longer bends to you. And when power begins to slip, the mind scrambles to make sense of its new fragility. That’s when people reach not for reason, but for revenge.

As the research demonstrates, our divisions are not political –they are far deeper and more primal. The essay quotes studies that explain “what happens when large groups of people feel their dominance is being eclipsed, by demographic shifts, cultural liberalization, economic globalization, and the slow unraveling of myths that once placed them at the top of the social food chain.” In such environments, “facts become irrelevant. The mind will do what it must to protect the self. And it will vote for whomever promises to punish the world for changing.”

Support for Donald Trump, and the movement that continues to orbit him, is not best explained by ideology. It is better understood as a reaction to psychological discomfort. A fusion of fear, status anxiety, and identity protection. It draws power from ressentiment, not reason. From feelings of insulted entitlement, not informed civic interest. Trump didn’t awaken this current, he merely performed it better than anyone else .

This is not speculation. It is the clear consensus of two decades of psychological, neurological, and political science research. What follows is not just a condemnation of MAGA’s authoritarian drift, but a forensic examination of how it thrives, in the mind, in culture, and in power.

The research tells us that fear is situational–a “psychological accelerant that turns political disagreement into existential warfare.” When people feel threatened, when they find themselves living in a world they no longer understand, they respond by demanding order and obedience, and the punishment of those who refuse to obey. Fear, the academic literature tells us, isn’t just a side effect of MAGA– it’s the selling point. Trump’s message was simple: “the world is dangerous, but I will protect you, and hurt the people you fear.”

MAGA cultists believe that society is under siege. In numerous studies, MAGA folks have scored high for Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), defined as “submission to strong leaders, aggression toward deviant groups, and strict adherence to tradition. The more threatened people feel, the more they long for control, hierarchy, and retribution, all things Trump promised in spades.”

Trump’s followers are not irrational. They are reacting, often viscerally, to a perceived collapse of the world they knew. Crime is down, but they feel unsafe. Immigration enriches the economy, but they feel invaded. Diversity increases opportunity, but they feel erased. Trump doesn’t need to solve these problems. He just needs to affirm that they exist, and promise to punish whoever caused them.

In other words, status anxiety is what motivates the MAGA base–fear of irrelevance. The MAGA base consists of those who once felt socially dominant and now feel displaced. Trump promises to put them back on top.

The essay is lengthy and well worth reading in its entirety. It cites the copious scholarship that explains the authoritarian phenomenon and the danger it poses to democracy.

This isn’t just a movement of bad ideas. It’s a movement of deeply felt insecurity, fused to a political figure who offers vengeance, not vision. And in that fusion, the need for power replaces the desire for truth. The need to dominate replaces the value of liberty. The need to feel morally superior replaces the capacity for self-reflection….

The threat is not just Donald Trump. The threat is the psychological scaffolding that made him possible, and that will remain long after he is gone, unless we dismantle it at its source.

Unfortunately, this informative essay doesn’t tell us how to go about “dismantling it at its source.”

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What Keeps Me Up Nights

I sure hope I make it to November–not because I’m old (although I am), but because I spend my days obsessively following politics–both national and local– and vacillating between hope and despair. Indiana is scary enough, but as I noted yesterday, the national election will pose an existential challenge: America will either go forward or far, far back.

The source of my angst about the Presidential election was recently summarized in one of Robert Hubbell’s daily Substack newsletters. As he wrote:

The election will be decided by hundreds of millions of Americans taking democracy seriously by voting in tens of thousands of elections at a moment in history when one party wants to deny women full citizenship and personhood, deny Black Americans the right to vote, deny LGBTQ Americans their dignity and equality, deny children safe schools, deny all Americans a future free of man-made climate catastrophes, deny workers of a living wage, and deny the peaceful transfer of power every four years.

When I look at the threat posed by that party–once (in a very different world) my own party–I fear for the futures of my grandchildren and the others of their generation. I get bitter when I think about a reversal of the social progress made by activists of my own and previous generations who worked hard to bring the American “body politic” closer to our founding aspirations of liberty and equality. 

But most of all, I mourn the death of my long-held belief that the great majority of my fellow Americans are sensible, good-hearted and fair-minded. Until very recently–actually, 2016–although I knew that there were angry, disturbed and hate-filled people “out there”–I estimated their percentage of the population at something between 10%-15%. I have been rudely disabused of that estimate, given the grim recognition that millions of my fellow-citizens continue to support a man who is defiantly ignorant, hateful and very obviously deeply mentally-ill–presumably, because he gives them permission to revel in and voice their own bigotries and grievances.

And then there’s the Electoral College, which scholars estimate gives Republicans a 3% advantage….

But then I get hopeful. (I have emotional whiplash..)

The Harris/Walz ticket is so normal, and the enthusiasm they’ve generated is so encouraging. Not only do the Democrats have better candidates, former Republicans–including very conservative ones like Liz Cheney– are coming out of the woodwork daily to endorse them. They’ve raised much more money, which–in addition to powering their campaign–is another sign of support and enthusiasm. They have a widespread “ground game” with far more field offices than the Republicans. New registrations are up, especially among groups that tilt Democratic, calling the “likely voter” screens employed by pollsters into question. 

In the wake of 2016, there has also been an explosion of grass-roots organizing. According to a 2019 report from the American Community Project, those post-2016 grassroots groups — sometimes labeled “Resistance” groups — have become an electoral force to be reckoned with.

Reporters and academics have established certain baseline facts: The new groups are disproportionately composed of middle-aged to retirement-age college-educated women.

They are especially prominent in America’s “suburbs.”

Their hands-on campaigning formed part of the “Blue Wave” that flipped suburban seats to the Democrats in November 2018.

Since 2019, those groups have continued to grow and multiply, in significant part thanks to Dobbs, the Supreme Court’s reversal of a constitutional right to reproductive liberty which continues to motivate voters, especially but not exclusively women voters. 

I can’t shake my belief that if Americans of good will and good sense turn out to vote, Democrats will not only win, but win big, that November could really be a “Blue Wave” election, a turning point that could revive my previous faith in the American public. 

MAGA is, after all, a reaction to the broad cultural changes in this country–changes that include widespread acceptance of the growing equality of women, LGBTQ+ Americans and people of color. Large numbers of families now include same-sex couples and/or religious and racial intermarriages. Fewer Americans report memberships in fundamentalist Churches. Workplaces are increasingly diverse, and Americans from a variety of backgrounds now work together and get to know each other. All of those cultural changes have lessened fears of the “Other” that were once more widespread.

I remained convinced that MAGA Republicanism is a panicked reaction to those cultural changes by people who feel threatened by them. Social change is destabilizing, especially for people who lack the personal or communal resources to adapt–but surely, that doesn’t describe a majority of Americans.

In November, we’ll see which of these contending analyses is correct, and we’ll know what kind of world my grandchildren will inhabit.

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Pool Tables And Gas Stoves

Sometimes, we need to remind ourselves that drumming up fear to achieve less-than-admirable ends is nothing new.

I was on the treadmill the other day, listening to old show tunes on my iPods. ( My very unsophisticated musical tastes run to Dean Martin and the Rat Pack, although I make exceptions, especially for show tunes.) I was speed-walking to the Music Man. 

“Ya Got Trouble” was the song sung by Professor Harold Hill when he is using the fact that a pool hall has opened in River City to stoke fear in the city’s residents.

You probably remember:

Friends, let me tell you what I mean. You got one, two, three, four, five, six pockets in a table. Pockets that mark the diff’rence Between a gentlemen and a bum, With a capital “B,” And that rhymes with “P” and that stands for pool! And all week long your River City Youth’ll be frittering away, I say your young men’ll be frittering! Frittering away their noontime, suppertime, chore time too! Get the ball in the pocket, Never mind gettin’ Dandelions pulled Or the screen door patched or the beefsteak pounded. Never mind pumpin’ any water ‘Til your parents are caught with the Cistern empty On a Saturday night and that’s trouble, Oh, yes we got lots and lots a’ trouble. I’m thinkin’ of the kids in the knickerbockers, Shirt-tail young ones, peekin’ in the pool Hall window after school, ya got trouble, folks.

Hill ramps up his warning, telling the “fine folks” of River City what’s in store:

One fine night, they leave the pool hall, Headin’ for the dance at the Armory! Libertine men and Scarlet women! And Rag-time, shameless music That’ll grab your son and your daughter With the arms of a jungle animal instinct.

Scary! Hill warns that, “the idle brain is the devil’s playground!” But then he offers the antidote to all this evil: a boy’s band. For which he will sell them the instruments and band uniforms.

Contemporary Harold Hills are selling medicines for imaginary diseases  all around us.

Did the Consumer Product Safety Commission issue a finding that gas stoves can cause asthma in small children? OMG! “They” are coming for our gas ranges! Those “woke” bureaucrats in Washington are going to ban the use of gas cookstoves, and they probably won’t even pay compensation! That’s what you get when you let Democrats run the administrative branch of government!

The fear and frenzy stirred up by GOP culture warriors prompted the head of the agency to issue a statement confirming the research results and the fact that the CPSC is looking for ways to reduce indoor air quality hazards, but does not intend to ban gas stoves. 

CPSC also is actively engaged in strengthening voluntary safety standards for gas stoves.  And later this spring, we will be asking the public to provide us with information about gas stove emissions and potential solutions for reducing any associated risks.  This is part of our product safety mission – learning about hazards and working to make products safer. 

There’s a lesson here for Americans who laughed at the comedic effectiveness of Harold Hill, or are currently marveling at the ability of Republican culture warriors to convince lots of people that “the government” is coming for their gas stoves. Stoking fear about– and then directing anger against– otherwise innocuous matters, works. In the Music Man, the tactic sold band instruments; in the great gas stove eruption, it allows angry citizens to confirm their anti-“wokeness” and determination to vote against “the libs.”

We see the tactic all around us. 

Are LGBTQ people more visible? Those Drag Queen story hours and library books about Heather’s Two Mommies are turning toddlers gay!

Are the kids learning about events we older folks didn’t encounter in school? Things like the Trail of Tears or the Tulsa massacre? Allowing teachers to include the seamier side of American history is a “woke” attack on American Exceptionalism and the firmly-held belief that we are–and have always been–the good guys.

Did epidemiologists tell us to  protect our friends and families from disease by wearing masks during a pandemic? They are obviously part of that “woke” elite that is constantly attacking American freedom!

Etcetera, etcetera.

Ya got trouble, my friend–right here in  America! You need to fight back. Threaten the library. Scream at school board members and have the smug culture warriors who dominate your legislature tell teachers what they can and cannot say. Insist that the President fire Dr. Fauci! (Whoops–too late. He retired.)

And tell your friends on Facebook that the government will have to pry your gas stove out of your cold, dead, oven-mitted hands.

Harold Hill clones are everywhere.

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It’s All About Status…

In 2017, Robert P. Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute, published The End of White Christian America. He presented copious evidence that demographic change was eroding the hegemony of the White Protestant males who had exercised social–and often, legal– dominance since the founding of the United States. He also provided evidence that awareness of their impending loss of status explained  most of their political hysteria.

Last week, New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall revisited the issue of status, or more accurately, fear of its loss.

More and more, politics determine which groups are favored and which are denigrated.

Roughly speaking, Trump and the Republican Party have fought to enhance the status of white Christians and white people without college degrees: the white working and middle class. Biden and the Democrats have fought to elevate the standing of previously marginalized groups: women, minorities, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and others.

The ferocity of this politicized status competition can be seen in the anger of white non-college voters over their disparagement by liberal elites, the attempt to flip traditional hierarchies and the emergence of identity politics on both sides of the chasm.

Researchers have begun studying what we have come to recognize as one of the most powerful motivations of human behavior. That research tells us that perceptions of diminished status is a source of rage on both the left and right. Add American divisions over economic insecurity, geography and values, and that rage only deepens.

Status is different from resources and power, although possession of those assets certainly contributes to it. It is based on cultural beliefs rather than material wealth or position.

Edsall quoted a Stanford professor who studies the subject.

Status has always been part of American politics, but right now a variety of social changes have threatened the status of working class and rural whites who used to feel they had a secure, middle status position in American society — not the glitzy top, but respectable, ‘Main Street’ core of America. The reduction of working-class wages and job security, growing demographic diversity, and increasing urbanization of the population have greatly undercut that sense and fueled political reaction.

People convinced that their status is low tend to gravitate to “anti-establishment” and radical candidates on both the Left and Right. Those fearing loss of status are different. One Harvard researcher explains that people  drawn to right-wing populist positions and politicians, such as Trump, usually “sit several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder in terms of their income or occupation.”

My conjecture is that it is people in this kind of social position who are most susceptible to what Barbara Ehrenreich called a “fear of falling” — namely, anxiety, in the face of an economic or cultural shock, that they might fall further down the social ladder,” a phenomenon often described as “last place aversion.

Apparently, the more socially marginalized people are, the more likely they are to feel alienated from the country’s political system — and the more likely they are to support  radical parties.

Radical politicians on the left evoke the virtues of working people, whereas those on the right emphasize themes of national greatness, which have special appeal for people who rely on claims to national membership for a social status they otherwise lack. The “take back control” and “make America great again” slogans of the Brexit and Trump campaigns were perfectly pitched for such purposes.

Other researchers emphasize that populism and fear of losing status are not the same thing. Populist movements stress group cohesion and equality; dominance, they point out, leads to self-promotion and support for steep hierarchies. That said, the research confirms that it is almost exclusively right-wing political actors who actively campaign on the status issue. 

The research confirms that it is fear of losing status, not actual status, that is the key political motivator.

I was particularly struck by this observation from a researcher at Duke:

Those who cannot adopt or compete in the dominant status order — closely associated with the acquisition of knowledge and the mastery of complex cultural performances — make opposition to this order a badge of pride and recognition. 

Dismissing journalists as “enemies of the people,” denying the reality of climate change, and refusing to wear masks and engage in social distancing are all part and parcel of this opposition to “elitists.” 

Edsall’s column has much more detail on the research. It explains a lot of America’s current polarization. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell us what we can or should do about it.

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Fear Itself

Paul Krugman’s column on August 24th really, really hit the proverbial nail on the head.  It was titled “QAnon is Trump’s Last, Best Chance,” and it homed in on the nature of the snake oil that Trump and the GOP are peddling.

Last week’s Democratic National Convention was mainly about decency — about portraying Joe Biden and his party as good people who will do their best to heal a nation afflicted by a pandemic and a depression. There were plenty of dire warnings about the threat of Trumpism; there was frank acknowledgment of the toll taken by disease and unemployment; but on the whole the message was surprisingly upbeat.

This week’s Republican National Convention, by contrast, however positive its official theme, is going to be QAnon all the way.

I don’t mean that there will be featured speeches claiming that Donald Trump is protecting us from an imaginary cabal of liberal pedophiles, although anything is possible. But it’s safe to predict that the next few days will be filled with QAnon-type warnings about terrible events that aren’t actually happening and evil conspiracies that don’t actually exist.

Think about that last line: terrible events that aren’t actually happening and evil conspiracies that don’t actually exist. Inculcating fear–of Black people, Jews, immigrants, socialists–has been a Republican staple since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” but until recently, it was only a portion of that strategy.

Now, the once-Grand-old-Party has nothing else.

As Krugman points out, the messaging employed by this administration has focused on efforts to panic Americans over nonexistent threats.

If you get your information from administration officials or Fox News, you probably believe that millions of undocumented immigrants cast fraudulent votes, even though actual voter fraud hardly ever happens; that Black Lives Matter protests, which with some exceptions have been remarkably nonviolent, have turned major cities into smoking ruins; and more.

It has been a constant barrage of Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts.”

Krugman says that much of this focus on imaginary threats is a defense mechanism from people who have no clue how to do policy, or to cope with real threats.

Covid-19, of course, has been the. all-too-visible example of that inability. In the face of massive American deaths, Trump has offered quack remedies (drink bleach!), and little else other than blaming China. and denying the severity and extent of the pandemic.

Trump, in other words, can’t devise policies that respond to the nation’s actual needs, nor is he willing to listen to those who can. He won’t even try. And at some level both he and those around him seem aware of his basic inadequacy for the job of being president.

What he and they can do, however, is conjure up imaginary threats that play into his supporters’ prejudices, coupled with conspiracy theories that resonate with their fear and envy of know-it-all “elites.” QAnon is only the most ludicrous example of this genre, all of which portrays Trump as the hero defending us from invisible evil.

If all of this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. And it’s almost certainly not a political tactic that can win over a majority of American voters.

Trump’s base is terrified. They are afraid most of all of demographic change, of losing their white, Christian, masculine privilege, but they are also deeply uncomfortable with the increasing ambiguities of modern life. They  want desperately to “return” to a world that never was.

Real-world policies–the kind that would appear in a party platform, or be embraced by competent grownups–can’t soothe those fears. The Republican Party has retreated to the only thing it has left: fantasy.

So they are ramping up the fear and telling us “those people” are to blame.

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