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President Donald Trump
Done Gone Gaga Maga Saga: Lessons From the Elections
There is a Trump in all of us.
Posted November 10, 2020
The recent election has left many on the winning side in a state of disbelief, much of it pertaining to the question: How could so many Americans vote for someone who many perceive as demonstrably cruel, narcissistic, corrupt, and ignorant?
This surprise, however, is telling as it betrays an underlying assumption: We Americans are better than that. We are special. It can’t happen here. This assumption is problematic because if the facts of history show us anything useful, it is that the full range of humanity’s dispositions is alive in all of us—nations and individuals alike. Examine closely the life of any person or nation and you’ll find myriad dark intents, impulses, and actions. No one’s closet is skeleton-free.
Psychologically speaking, the mark of humanity brands us all. Thus, every person has the potential for experiencing, and acting from, both love and hate, kindness or cruelty, cowardice or courage, truth or falsehood, moral righteousness or corruption. And since social systems are made of people, so do they. And since elected leaders reflect people's desires, so do they.
This duality in fact animates the dramatic theatre of human affairs: Courageous people (and nations) are not devoid of fear; rather they must wrestle with and overcome it. Being good—as individuals or nations—denotes not the absence of demons but a capacity for conquering them. In other words, to the extent that Trump is cruel, selfish, and dishonest, and morally corrupt—and it is a devastating extent—there is a Trump, and a vote for Trump, in all of us. Those who pin Trump’s rise on some fundamental "otherness" characterizing his fans are naïve at best and willfully hubristic at worst, neither of which constitutes a useful stance from which to mend individual or national brokenness.
Those who voted for Trump did so for many different reasons. Some voted for him because he was the Republican candidate, or because he was anti-abortion, or because his policies benefitted their bottom line, or because they liked the white power tunes emanating from his dog whistle, etc. But it is quite likely, given what we know of human psychology, that many of those who voted for him were attracted not by the contents of his words and actions but by the process he embodied: power assertion.
By evolutionary logic, identifying and aligning oneself with a powerful agent or entity is a wise strategy for survival. Thus, we are all inherently alert to the signifiers and indications of power. An opportunity to align with someone powerful is not easy to pass up, even if the costs are high. Many movies, novels, and myths have as their theme the seduction of power and its attendant corruptions. The taste for power manifests in our myriad totems and tales of kings, saviors, superheroes, Gods, and monsters.
The allure of power is such that in its presence, other considerations tend to diminish. So long as you’re on the side of the powerful, you’ll survive, and few things are more urgent than survival. Thus, whatever qualities other than power are possessed by the powerful become immaterial, as do the means by which the power was obtained. How and why you dominate are secondary to whether you dominate.
Thus, when Trump insults, shocks, brags, breaks norms, flaunts rules, moves pieces violently on the board, or merely grabs a chokehold of our attention, the contents of his actions matter less than that his process demonstrates power. It is this performance of power that makes him attractive to so many. His fans dance to his beat, not to the lyrics.
Submitting to power is a deeply embedded dynamic in the human psyche. Aligning ourselves with power makes us feel safe, particularly when we feel besieged (as many Trump voters feel). Leasing our mental space to power also spares us the heavy lifting of figuring out stuff, including what is true. Truth becomes whatever the power asserts as such. It is true because the power has asserted it. A challenge to the power is by definition a challenge to the truth. Truth claims from any other source are merely an assault on power.
Much of what we’ve seen with Trump manifests this basic dynamic. Drawn to, soothed, and emboldened by his projected power, his fans have little use for factual truth. Trump’s statements serve that function, requiring no external verification. His statements are true because he made them. His opponents’ counterclaims are assaults on him.
Power’s capacity to detach us from our allegiance to truth is aided by the fact that human logic is agnostic. It can flow from any premise without losing its compelling internal coherence. If the premise is false or morally corrupt, the logic will still work perfectly. To wit: If my premise is that all men are goats, and I observe that Joe is a man, then my inference that Joe is a goat will be logically infallible. Yet since my premise is not factual, my conclusion will nevertheless be wrong.
A premise need not be rooted in fact to serve as a foundation for a robust, coherent logical structure. It needs only to be believed. This means that the logic that follows from a lie has the same appeal and clarifying persuasive power as that which flows from the truth.
As people and cultures detach themselves from allegiance to facts and truth, they run a higher risk of using the powerful tool of human logic in the service of false premises. To wit: Once you define a group as rapists and murderers, let’s say, then it follows logically that we need to keep them out at all costs, and doing so feels both urgent and right.
Fact and fiction, good and bad are from the perspective of logic one and the same. A powerful demagogue needs only to convince his followers of the premise. The followers’ actions will roll from there by the force of great conviction down the greased rails of logic.
Three main problems, however, inevitably derail the demagogue’s plan. First, human behaviors and emotions are not equal with regard to their potential for harm. Certain roads are more slippery than others. It’s easier to drink too much wine than too much water. Likewise, the dark angels of our nature tend to be highly intoxicating yet difficult to reign in and control once activated. Chaos, like fire, eventually engulfs and devours its source.
The second problem is rooted in the fact that facts exist, and they cast their influence without regard to how powerful any person (or nation) is. In the long run, disregarding the factual basis of things in favor of narratives born of power worship results in conflict, in which the facts of the world win out. Father Zosima’s corpse (shout out to Dostoevsky’s fans) will rot, regardless of what the faithful believe. Coronavirus kills whether you believe in it or not.
The third problem relates to the well-known maxim that often in life the right amount of something has a positive effect, while an overdose of the same thing is toxic. This principle is true of human psychology as well. In the context of this discussion, faith in a powerful leader can be good. Blind faith never is. To be sure, blind faith is seductive, because it simplifies things, requires less cognitive effort, and increases motivation and energy. If I’m certain my leader is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all right I have fewer reservations about following and sacrificing for them.
In a short-term conflict situation, the side that’s united in blind faith and power worship therefore has an advantage. Thus, we all possess an evolved propensity for blind faith, for the whole-cloth acceptance of a premise (or a person) and the consequent negation of doubt. But life is long term, and a person or system will over time lose their course and their hold on reality absent mechanisms for self-correction such as doubts, or science. Or elections.
