On the eve of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, I flew out to Ohio to meet with writing students at Ashland University. Ashland is a city of 20,000 that serves as the seat to a rural county of the same name. It sits halfway between Cleveland and Columbus, just off Interstate 71.
As a political junkie residing in Massachusetts, I was elated to visit an actual swing state in the thick of an actual election year. I marched around asking everybody I met about the race. The university folk all insisted Trump was too crazy to win. The cashier at the discount market where I loaded up on snacks insisted Clinton would be indicted before Election Day. The undergraduate who drove me around town, a native of Ashland County, sounded uncertain. She said most of her kin were going to vote for Trump but she couldn’t be sure because they had stopped talking politics with her after she enrolled in college.
I had arrived in Ohio with my own preconceived notions, of course, shaped by the many stories I’d read about the growing disenchantment of working-class voters over the loss of manufacturing. Ashland fit the profile. The biggest factory in town, which once employed 1,100 workers making pipes and haying tools, was long gone. The second largest had shipped hundreds of jobs to China a decade ago. The city still had a college, some small businesses, and acres of service industry jobs: chain hotels, fast food joints, a vast Walmart filled with cheap foreign goods, which rose from an ocean of asphalt that girdled the highway. The terrain around Ashland had changed, too, as small crop farms gave way to large-scale dairy and livestock operations.
I remember telling my wife on the last day of my visit that a Trump presidency didn’t feel so far-fetched out here in Ashland. On election night, as Trump racked up gaudy margins in the rural enclaves of the Midwest, I thought of Ashland. The county went for McCain by 5,800 votes in 2008, and Romney by 7,000 votes four years later. Trump beat Clinton by 11,500.
This story was the one most widely circulated in the days after the election, often bolstered by a prescient quote from the 1998 book Achieving Our Country by the late philosopher Richard Rorty. Rorty argued that the American left made a grave moral and strategic error when it shifted focus from economic injustice to identity politics. He prophesized that unskilled workers, left in the lurch, would eventually “decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for,” a jocular bigot able to channel their resentment “about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates.”
Media commentators, liberal ones especially, gravitated to Rorty’s theory because it presented Trumpism as a rational, if disturbing, response to economic frustrations, which progressive policy could presumably fix.
But the more social scientists crunched the election data, the less sense it made. The majority of Trump voters, for instance, were middle-class and wealthy suburbanites. More significantly, Trump crushed Clinton in counties where unemployment had fallen in recent years. The jobless rate in Ashland County stood at 14.7 percent in 2010. By the time I visited, it had shrunk to 4.3 percent.
Am I saying that Rorty was wrong? No. He was spot-on in foreseeing how a sense of futility and anti-elitist rage would ripple through the realpolitik. (Recall the young college student who drove me around in Ashland, the one whose relatives wouldn’t talk politics with her.) But Rorty was telling only a small part of a much larger story, one in which Trump is no more than an unexpected coda.
After all, he’s been trotting out the same pitch for three decades. His first speech as a presidential aspirant, delivered in 1987, featured all his standard complaints: America was a disaster. We were being kicked around. The world was laughing at us. Why? Because of foreigners and politicians and eggheads and softies. “If the right man doesn’t get into office you’re going to see a catastrophe in this country like you’re never going to believe,” he huffed. “And then you’ll be begging for the right man.” To understand how Trump went from a fringe character to the right man, we have to understand how the psychology and attitudes of the electorate shifted around him.
That begins with the rise of polarization.
It can be easy to lose sight of this, but there was a time in American politics when the central motivation was pride in one’s own party. In the 1950s, only 10 percent of voters had negative feelings toward the opposing party. That number now stands at 90 percent. Those who hold “very unfavorable” views of the other party have tripled since 1994. The result is that negative partisanship has become the default setting of our electorate, a culturally sanctioned form of discrimination.
In 1960, only one in twenty Americans voiced an objection to a child marrying a member of the opposing party. As of 2010, the figure stood at half of all Republicans, and a third of Democrats.
What’s more perplexing is why partisanship has spiked so dramatically. Because political identity is voluntary, people treat it as fair game for hatred in a way they never would with race or gender. Political scientists such as Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster see the rise in negative partisanship as “part of a vicious cycle of mutually reinforcing elite and mass behavior.” They mean that voters and politicians are egging each other on.
A 2014 study of political attitudes conducted by political scientists at Stanford and Princeton is more pointed. “Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained,” they concluded, “to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race. We note that the willingness of partisans to display open animus for opposing partisans can be attributed to the absence of norms governing the expression of negative sentiment and that increased partisan affect provides an incentive for elites to engage in confrontation rather than cooperation.” Not only is political bigotry now more powerful than racial bigotry, but it’s us voters who drive the cycle of animus.
It’s too easy to blame hyper-partisan politicians or media outlets. They are merely symptoms of a growing prejudice that resides within us.
In the fall of 2016, I taught a course in literary journalism at Wesleyan. A month before the election, I had my class read an in-depth profile of a fanatical Trump supporter in the Washington Post. Using this as a model, I asked my students to interview a person whose political views were in direct opposition to their own. Only two students completed the assignment. The rest claimed they couldn’t track down such a person.
The atmosphere in class after the election was bereft. We were into the workshop phase by then and one student submitted an essay denouncing Trump. The piece made no effort to divine the motives of the 62 million Americans who had voted for him, beyond imputing their hatred. In class, I gently suggested that empathy might lead him to a more nuanced set of explanations.
“I don’t have any empathy for Trump voters,” the author replied.
He didn’t mean that he couldn’t summon any empathy. He meant that it would be a betrayal of his principles to try. Several of his classmates nodded.
I found this statement distressing as a teacher. The central point of a class on literary journalism, so far as I had conceived it, was to compel students to recognize that there was a big, complex world outside of their experience, and that the most useful attitude to adopt toward this world was not one of contempt but humble curiosity. I understood my student’s desire to condemn the outcome of the election. But bad outcomes, as I had labored to convey, were the result of bad stories. It was the duty of journalists to listen to these stories. Then to use the tools at their disposal—reporting, research, reflection—to interrogate them, to determine the ways in which they were shaped by rage and confusion and disappointment rather than, say, facts or logic or compassion.
All semester long, I’d argued that the whole point of literature, and by extension literary journalism, is to complicate our own moral perceptions by forcing us to accept that other people matter, that their struggles and hardships matter, and that their delusions cannot be tamed until they are understood. Propaganda has the opposite aim: to simplify moral action by dismissing the humanity of others.
I tell this story—before turning my attention to Trump voters—to emphasize that polarized thinking afflicts all of us. To those moderate or liberal readers old enough, I invite you to conduct a thought experiment. Try to recall what it was like to spot a Bob Dole bumper sticker on someone’s car. Think about what sort of judgments you made about the driver. Now think about the judgments you made about the driver when you saw a Trump bumper sticker. Here’s my list: white, male, racist, misogynist, uneducated, gun-owning, gullible, and paranoid.
This sort of bigotry is what I have in common with my student.
As a reminder: reflexive partisan hostility is not the result of gridlock, but its cause. Republicans in Congress made obstructing Obama their central agenda because any talk of compromise would be met with the threat of a primary challenge from someone more suitably unyielding. This is why the GOP is captive to its most extreme partisans, and why Trump’s path to the nomination was not just predictable, but inevitable.
He intuitively exploited “the absence of norms governing the expression of negative sentiment.” For years, GOP leaders issued various dog whistles. Trump wolf whistled his prejudice and his poll numbers surged.
Party officials, pollsters, and the media viewed his bombast as a sure sign of doom in the general election. But they had underestimated the magnetic power of negative partisanship. Threatening to jail his opponent or invoking a fantasy of her assassination was no longer going too far.
Exit polls showed that 90 percent of Republicans came home to Trump. They voted for him even if they disagreed with his core positions on immigration and trade. Twenty-seven percent of whites voted for him even though they wanted the next president to have more liberal policies. Nearly a quarter of Trump voters said he lacked the temperament to be president, and was not qualified for the office. Seventeen percent said they were “scared” or “concerned” about a President Trump.
That sounds puzzling until you consider the percentage of Trump voters who reported being scared or concerned about a Clinton presidency: 94.
None of this should have come as a complete surprise, given the warning the historian Richard Hofstadter issued 50 years ago, in his seminal tract The Paranoid Style in American Politics. “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” he observed. “In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated … how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”
Trump undoubtedly leveraged the “animosities and passions of a small minority” to win the GOP nomination. But he was never some reality TV revolutionary. Trump was the new face of an old political tradition, one that stretches from the redbaiting inquisition of Joseph McCarthy to the zealots who inveighed against the international gold ring at the turn of the 19th century.
Over the past few decades, the GOP has revived this paranoid style, turning legislative programs into pogroms. Obama’s effort to expand medical coverage became “a government takeover of health care.” Universal background checks on firearms sales became a prelude to wide-scale gun seizures. Trump simply shoved this conspiratorial mindset onto the brightest stage in American politics.
Here’s how Trump put it in his 2007 book, Think Big: “The world is a vicious and brutal place. We think we’re civilized. In truth, it’s a cruel world and people are ruthless. They act nice to your face, but underneath they’re out to kill you … Even your friends are out to get you.” Such ideation breeds militancy. Social conflict is not “something to be mediated and compromised,” Hofstadter notes. Instead, the paranoid exhorts his followers to “fight things out to the finish,” which should explain the pleasure Trump took in seeing protestors roughed up at his rallies.
“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms,” is how Hofstadter put it. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization.”
The story Trump told about America was of a holy land infiltrated by foreigners who lurked beyond, and within, our borders. Whites unsettled by a rising demographic tide flocked to his rallies to partake in a grand drama of national reclamation whose central feature was an orgiastic denunciation of those dark, and dark-skinned, forces aligned against their cause.
This style of nationalism—familiar to anyone versed in the Old Testament—has been on the rise for decades in Europe. Just like here, most observers assumed these movements were driven by economic anxiety stemming from globalization. But political scientists at Harvard and the University of Michigan who tracked social survey data from nearly 300,000 Europeans over a dozen years discovered, to their astonishment, that the factors predicting support for nationalists weren’t economic at all, but social, racial, and attitudinal.
True believers weren’t wage slaves pining for better jobs. They were self-employed, or small business owners—the petty bourgeoisie, basically—who wanted white privilege preserved and laws enforced and immigrants deported. Demographically, this far-right coalition was “concentrated among the older generation, men, the religious, majority populations, and the less educated—sectors generally left behind by progressive tides of cultural value change.”
That’s a pretty sharp thumbnail of the Trump base. And it helps explain why his base embraced proposals that were, to put it gently, regressive. In South Carolina, for instance, 75 percent of all Republicans favored banning Muslims from America. A third of Trump partisans wanted to ban gays and lesbians; twenty percent felt Lincoln shouldn’t have freed the slaves.
More moderate Trump supporters inevitably downplay these stats. But research compiled by the political scientist Philip Klinkner shows that racial resentment was second only to party identification as a driver of Trump support. As you move from the least to the most resentful view of African Americans, support for Trump climbs 44 points. Klinkner assumed factors such as income and economic pessimism would also predict Trump support. They did not. As with European far-right movements, economic stress wasn’t triggering racial resentment. It was already there, a cause in search of a candidate.
Even more depressing was a survey given to 2,000 white Americans that detected “substantial levels of dehumanization among Trump supporters” across all income levels. More than half thought African Americans were less evolved. Twenty-seven percent described them as “lacking self-restraint, like animals.”
Reading this description sent me reeling back to one of the enduring images from the campaign trail: the elderly white man who sucker-punched an African-American protester in the face as police were escorting him out of a Trump rally in North Carolina. The victim of this assault was immediately detained by police officers. The perpetrator, John McGraw, was neither detained nor arrested at the event. He was, however, interviewed by a TV crew.
“You bet I liked it,” he said of the rally. What was his favorite part? “Knocking the hell out of that big mouth. We don’t know who he is, but we know he’s not acting like an American. The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.”
I thought, too, about an old Ray Bradbury short story entitled “And the Rock Cried Out.” It begins with a pair of wealthy white Americans, John and Leonora Webb, on vacation in a small Latin American country. The year is 1963. A great war has killed most of the population of the United States, Europe, and Russia. “The day of the white people of the earth is over and finished,” a newspaper announces.
What ensues is a series of excruciating scenes in which the Webbs are stripped of their possessions and hunted down by natives. The couple finds safe harbor at a hotel with a manager who offers them a chance to save themselves, if they’re willing to accept menial work in the kitchen. But the Webbs have lived within their privilege for so long they can’t envision a life without it. They refuse.
“We have never let ourselves think about our being a minority,” Webb tells his wife, “and now it’s hard to get used to the fact.”
“We’re being consistent, anyway,” she replies, as they march stoically toward death. “Spoiled, but consistent.”
The story—which Bradbury composed in 1953, at the height of American imperial power—is a grisly parable in which the Webbs become a blood sacrifice for centuries of racial and economic hegemony. It kept coming to mind because it taps into a primal fear that lives inside men like John McGraw: that they are destined to become prey. No one ever says this out loud. But for a large segment of the American population (much larger than anyone realized) the specter of racial revenge feels more urgent than threats such as climate change or nuclear winter. This was the dystopia that Trump consistently plugged into: Fear of a Brown Planet.
It’s the reason he continually portrayed minorities as predatory, from Mexican rapists to African-American cop killers to Muslim sleeper cells. It’s the reason his fairytales about Muslims cheering as the Twin Towers fell, and his bogus stats about black-on-white crime, held such power. White supremacists understood Trump instantly and intuitively, because racial anxiety animates their worldview. The rest of us never quite grasped how persuasive this appeal was.
We should have.
In April of 1989, a white woman jogging through Central Park was raped and severely assaulted. That same night, a large group of boys entered the park from East Harlem. Some threw rocks at cars, others assaulted and robbed passersby. The police took a number into custody and quickly developed a theory that five of them (the Central Park Five) had committed the rape. The suspects, four African Americans and one Hispanic, confessed after lengthy police interrogations. The press seized on the brutality of the crime, and its racial dynamics, to fan hysteria among New Yorkers. They created a parable suited to the roiling anxieties of a city in which both violent crime and income inequality had spiked, in which crack ravaged poor neighborhoods while Wall Street minted millionaires.
Two weeks after the arrests, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in the city’s four major dailies, topped by two giant headlines:
BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.
BRING BACK OUR POLICE!
A Trump polemic ensued:
What has happened to our city over the past ten years? What has happened to law and order … What has happened to the respect for authority? What has happened is the complete breakdown of life as we knew it…. Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes … I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them. I am looking to punish them.
Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!
The effect of these ads was immediate. One woman suggested, on live television, that the suspects be castrated. Pat Buchanan, a former White House advisor who later outmaneuvered Trump for the Reform Party’s presidential nomination, called for them to be hanged in Central Park by June 1. As a reminder: they had yet to be tried.
Trump’s civic impulses hadn’t been awakened by crime as it affected all New Yorkers. After all, there were thousands of rapes in New York City in 1989, including one the same day as the Central Park case in which an African-American woman was thrown off a four-story building in Brooklyn. What mattered to Trump, what occasioned his outrage, was the story of dark-skinned thugs invading an iconic Manhattan preserve to defile a white female investment banker.
It’s worth noting the historical roots of a story like this, which stretch back to the era that gave Manhattan its name. The British who settled New England were absolutely petrified of Native Americans. It was this terror that helped spark the Salem Witch Trials and later justified the wholesale slaughter of natives. White colonists were haunted, too, by the possibility that slaves would rise up and exact a revenge commensurate with the barbarism of their subjugation. Courage and valor have been central virtues in the American psyche precisely because we are a population steeped in the fear Bradbury identified: an uprising of the dark other.
Although no physical evidence linked them to the crime, the Central Park Five were convicted on the basis of their police confessions. In 2002, a judge vacated the guilty verdicts, after DNA evidence exonerated them, and identified the actual perpetrator, a serial rapist who confessed to the crime and provided prosecutors precise details of how he carried it out. The Central Park Five was a bad story that led to a bad outcome.
Trump refused to accept the exoneration and scoffed at the notion that he should apologize. He condemned the city’s 2014 decision to compensate the five men for their suffering. “I think people are tired of politically correct. I just attacked the Central Park Five settlement. Who’s going to do that?”
Many of us look at a statement like that as heartless. But within the American electorate there is a certain kind of voter who cares more about social order than due process. They are said to have an authoritarian mindset. This doesn’t mean they support authoritarian regimes. It’s a psychological profile, not a political label. Voters with the authoritarian mindset value discipline and stability, and fear outsiders, especially those who portend change. When they feel threatened, they look to leaders who offer strong, simple, punitive solutions—even and especially if these solutions violate previously accepted moral norms.
In the fall of 2016, a PhD student named Matthew MacWilliams, who studies authoritarianism, began to suspect Trump supporters fell into this category. He polled likely voters and found that the authoritarian mindset predicted support for Trump more reliably than any other indicator, including racial and economic factors.
Think again about Trump’s Central Park Five ad, the one calling for them to be executed. To people with an authoritarian mindset this kind of rhetoric is thrilling precisely because it flouts the rules that handcuff weaker leaders. Right from the beginning, Trump defined America as a nation under siege and nominated himself as the only guy strong enough to solve the crises that had overrun the weaklings in Washington. Without exception, these solutions were strong, simple, and punitive. Mexican rapists? Build a wall. Illegal immigrants? Deportation squad. Terrorists? Kill their families. Captured terrorists? Torture. Muslim Americans? National registry. Chinese? Trade war. Disruptive protestors? Assault them.
He lavished praise on authoritarians for being strong leaders. One of the most alarming reports during the campaign came from a foreign policy expert who advised Trump and claimed that the candidate had asked, three times, why, if the U.S. had nuclear weapons, it couldn’t use them.
GOP leaders often reacted with horror to these revelations. But the party had been catering to the authoritarian mindset for the past half century.
Much has been made, for instance, of Nixon’s Southern Strategy of 1968. The accepted wisdom is that Nixon converted white Dixiecrats into Republicans by hustling racial resentment. But he was making a broader appeal to his Silent Majority, one that echoed the paranoia Goldwater had mainstreamed four years earlier. America had gone berserk. Race riots plagued its cities; violence beset its college campuses. The time had come for a candidate who would restore order before it was too late.
This appeal was somewhat obscured during the Reagan Revolution, because Reagan had the Soviet Union, a truly authoritarian regime, as his foil. During the George W. Bush era, Americans defined themselves in opposition to Islamic fundamentalism. But the underlying message of the party—beyond tax cuts and deregulation, the goodies forever pledged to its donor class—was a promise to crack down on anyone who broached traditional values. This has meant opposing social change in any form: civil rights legislation, hippie agitators, women’s rights, gay rights, criminal justice reform, environmentalism, and, more recently, globalization and immigration.
Trump creamed a field of traditional conservatives in the 2016 primaries because he emerged as a fiery spokesman for racial and authoritarian appeals that party leaders had more quietly embraced as an electoral asset. Once he was the nominee, the power of negative partisanship kept him competitive.