The Deep Story of Trumpism

[homersapien 11,393]

A psychological take on current politics that has a ring of truth to it.  It's not about policy anymore.....

 

Thinking about the Republican Party like a political psychiatrist

Derek Thompson

12-29-20

As a White House resident, President Donald Trump is a goner. But his stranglehold on the GOP seems as tight as ever: Three in four Republicans say they believe their man won the 2020 election. Can the GOP channel the energy of his most fervent supporters and advance a sort of Trumpism without Trump? The answer depends on what Trumpism is—a populist prototype, a personality cult, or something stranger.

To some, Trumpism marks the beginning of a new Republican Party. Four years ago, Trump created a coalition that was more blue-collar and less white than the GOP vote in previous elections by combining an anti-immigration and protectionist message with a call to dismantle the sclerotic and corrupt bureaucracy. In 2020, he expanded his working-class base by winning significantly more Latinos, especially in south Texas and Florida. “You can see the foundation of a possible after-Trump conservative majority that is multiethnic and middle class and populist,” the columnist Ross Douthat wrote in The New York Times.

But the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild believes that Trumpism is intimately tied—for now at least—to its namesake, because it exists beyond the logic of policy. It exists in the dreampolitik realm of feelings. “If there’s one thing I think the mainstream press still gets wrong about Trump, it’s that they are comfortable talking about economics and personality, but they don’t give a primacy to feelings,” Hochschild told me. “To understand the future of the Republican Party, we have to act like political psychiatrists.”

In her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild went to the Deep South to study an emerging conservative identity and came away with something like a Rosetta stone for the rise of Donald Trump. She offered a psychological allegory for the right-wing worldview, which she called the “deep story.”

Read: The lines that divide America

The deep story went like this: You are an older white man without a college degree standing in the middle of a line with hundreds of millions of Americans. The queue leads up a hill, toward a haven just over the ridge, which is the American dream. Behind you in line, you can see a train of woeful souls—many poor, mostly nonwhite, born in America and abroad, young and old. “It’s scary to look back,” Hochschild writes. “There are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well. Still, you’ve waited a long time.” Now you’re stuck in line, because the economy isn’t working. And worse than stuck, you’re stigmatized; liberals in the media say every traditional thing you believe is racist and sexist. And what’s this? People are cutting in line in front of you! Something is wrong. The old line wasn’t perfect, but at least it was a promise. There is order in the fact of a line. And if that order is coming apart, then so is America.

Hochschild tested this allegory with her Republican sources and heard that it struck a chord. Yes, they said, this captures how I feel. In the past few years, she’s kept in touch with several of her connections from the Deep South and keenly tracked their philosophical evolution. She’s watched the locus of their anxiety move from budgets (“They never talk about deficits anymore,” she told me) to the entrenched and “swampy” political class. She also witnessed the Trumpification of everything. “There used to be a Tea Party,” she said. “Now it’s all Trumpism.”

If we want to understand this movement, Hochschild told me, we have to understand what happened in the past five years to the people in the line. “I now see that the line metaphor in my book was only Chapter 1 of the deep story,” she said. “What I’m seeing now is there are more chapters.”

If Chapter 1 was “The Line,” Chapter 2 was “The Arrival.” When Trump appeared to the members of the broken line, Hochschild saw that he embodied the most ineffable aspects of the deep story. Trump might be a lifelong bulls***ter, but one thing he has never had to bull**** is his grievance toward liberal elites and his antipathy for the groups whom Tea Party Republicans already knew they hated. He animated their distrust toward Barack Obama with his birtherism claims. He gave shape to their hatred for Hillary Clinton by leading “Lock her up!” chants. “From his first rallies, Trump’s basic message has always been ‘I love you, and you love me, and we all hate the same people,’” Hochschild said.

Lest you think that is a facile interpretation from a coastal interloper, consider this more recent analysis from the GOP political consultant Liam Donovan: “One of the most impressive [and] politically utile things Trump has done from the beginning is get his fans to internalize their support and perceive even a mild rebuke of him [and] his actions as a personal attack on them.” Trump’s unembarrassed embrace of resentment politics made him the messenger of the broken line.

Tom Nichols: Engaging with Trump’s die-hard supporters isn’t productive

After “The Arrival,” Chapter 3 was “The Suffering”: Trump’s presidency. “A lot of nonreligious liberals can’t tune into the frequency on which Donald Trump is speaking to the right,” Hochschild said. Throughout his term, the president has been laser-focused, not so much on the day-to-day tasks of the job, but rather on calling out his political enemies—the press, the bureaucracy, the far left, the impeachers, the vote-counting software. But although liberals might see pathological anger here, Hochschild’s sources have told her they perceive something deeper than rage. They see suffering. “‘I’m suffering for you,’ is a profound message,” she said. “Suffering consolidates and strengthens belief. It puts an ism to the word Trump and gives a political project the shape of a religious movement.” Perhaps in part because Trump considers himself godlike, he is absorbing the underlying religious paradigm of voters who are seeking some new creed to explain the broken line and mend it.

Now we are in Chapter 4, “The Afterlife.” Since Trump’s political defeat, he and his deputies have asked followers to believe in miracles of escalating fantasy. What began as a simple telegraphed message—that Trump would never accept the results of an election he lost—has become an extravagant mythology, populated with new names and characters: Dominion, Hugo Chavez, international communist plots, illegal ballot dumps, mail-in voter fraud, urban voting irregularities, the Kraken! Trump’s conspiratorial reaction to his election loss is causing the GOP to fissure. On one side is the “Stop the Steal” movement and the majority of Republican voters who say they don’t believe the results. On the other side is a group that largely supports the president but considers the Stop the Steal movement theatrical, at best, and brain-wormed, at worst. Moving forward, Hochschild says, many Republicans will have to choose where they place the balance of their allegiance: Fall-in-Line Trumpism or Fall-Apart Trumpism.

David Frum: Populism without popularity

The deep story has always had a whiff of conspiracism: The Tea Partiers thought Obama’s rise to power was fishy, and they were already suspicious about the forward mobility of the back-of-the-liners. But in the past four years, conspiracism has bloomed beneath a president who welcomes any fantasy that makes him its suffering protagonist.

“Conspiracy comes from a place of wanting to understand and master forces that are beyond you,” said Hochschild, who still speaks with former Tea Partiers who have fallen into the maw of QAnon and Stop the Steal. “I hear them justifying their favorite conspiracies,” she said. “They say, ‘Well, I don’t believe that chemtrails are spying on me. I don’t believe that one, but I do believe these over here. They say, ‘I’m not crazy like that, but I do believe this.’” They locate themselves in the conspiracist sphere. And in Trump, they have found the paranoiac in chief of the conspiracist sphere.

Hochschild is telling us that Trumpism is not just a garland of public-policy proposals that any other Republican can drape around his or her neck. And it is more complex than a personality trait, or a talent for saying mean stuff on Twitter. Rather, Trumpism is an emotional planet that orbits around Trump’s star. Breaking the connection between Trump and the better part of the GOP will require either that Trump disappears (an unlikely proposition) or that a larger star emerges from the Republican backbench (also unlikely).

At the end of our conversation, I asked Hochschild what she’s learned from the past four years. “I used to think of political identity as something more solid,” she said. “I now think of political identity as like water that’s always going somewhere, that needs to go somewhere, but where it goes depends on the lay of the land, the rock formations that stand in its way,” she told me. She’s still waiting to see where Trump moves the mountain.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/the-lines-reshaping-america/547205/

 

[DKW 86 7,430]

Last book by DT:

Achieving Atonement Derek Thompson Derek Thompson, Aug 27, 2018 - Atonement - 185 pages 0 Reviews Derek Thompson sets out to describe how Christian atonement works and the place of Christ's violent death on the cross. The author says that any model of the atonement must satisfy the following criteria.1. Enhance the preaching of the gospel.2. Accord with the full range of biblical teaching.3. Be consistent with the good, gracious, holy and merciful nature of God.4. Encourage Christlike behaviour in Christians.5. Be coherent, reasonable, and ethical.6. Support ecumenism and retain the truths found in the churches' historical atonement teaching.Traditional atonement theories fall short at one or more points on this list and fail to engage successfully with the full range of issues, such as:a) Human responsibility for sin.b) Forgiveness and reconciliation.c) Justice and punishment.d) Sacrifice and atonement.e) Righteousness.f) Goodness, mercy and holiness.g) Evil in nature.These two lists define the integrity and comprehensiveness of an atonement theory and set a high standard for the new Lumen Christi atonement model. The author employs some unorthodox methods, using the tools of critical reasoning and draws on a wide range of theological works in an innovative approach to the problem. The proposed model is multifaceted, but unlike others that attempt to combine the traditional theories, Lumen Christi applies critical reasoning to each of the dimensions of creation affected by evil.The book is available in both print and eBook editions. More »

About the author (2018)

Derek Thompson was born in England in 1950 and in 1957 his family immigrated to Australia. He grew up and went to school in Penrith, NSW. After studying electrical engineering at Sydney University he worked for 34 years with NSW Public Works as an electrical engineer and project manager. After taking early retirement in 2009, Derek completed a Diploma in Theology with Charles Sturt University. For the last twelve years, Derek has been the Coordinator of the Illawarra Prayer Network and Public Officer for a regional ecumenical church organisation called Five Islands Christian Ministries Inc.

***DKW From here down.
1) This is written by Derek Thompson, an EE that retired early and has no background what-so-ever in psychology.

2) For the first time, the ultimate author, Hochschild, actually did some research, however non-formatted or non-structured it was. and did followup.

My critique in all this comes down to definition.

I still postulate that the "Credence of Trumpism" (Dr. Emeritus Hochschild's Line Theory and subsequent additions.) is in fact nothing more than the realization by many in the "White and Minority" and "Non-College Educated" classes that the promise of the American Middle Class and its Journey to Success and Wealth has been GUTTED as the inevitable byproduct of Globalization of Non-College Educated Wages.

The American Middle-class (White, Latino, and Black) are all seeing their wages stagnate and then decline. This is then leading them to look for "conspiratorial" reasoning for why their collective and individual work efforts and sacrifices are not yielding them the same fruits that they saw their parents or simply older generations produce.

As Globalization has continued in its march toward universal wages, those in the West have seen their wages stagnate and then retract. They continue to work as hard, some harder now, once you factor in newer Lean Technology that also utilizes Advanced Robotics and other Technologies and Methodologies that have in total dehumanized their interactions with their employers, the labor market, and now their very lives. 

IE: I see those that are NCE (Non-College Educated) and LTE (Lower Tech Skilled) as being forced by Wage Globalization into what I will kind of tongue-in-cheek call REVERSE MILLENNIALISM.  When we look at the public perception of the Millennial Experience we easily note the 1) Indebtedness of the College Educated and 2) the "Failure to Launch" or leave their parents' home until age 26 and later 3) and these issues are really just symptoms of Globalized Wage Suppression, now even in the Skilled Fields. 

Am I correct? Lets see some evidence:
1) With the ACA, we saw codification of the awareness of some of these issues with the medical coverage of children upto age 26.
2) Failure to launch is a national punchline. It's the old joke: "Yes Millennial, I see you have a Doctorate Degree, Now, I would like to add fries with that."       
3) The truly frightening thing to most Dems and Pollsters was that Trump's support within ALL MINORITIES grew from 2016 to 2020. How did that happen? We heard 4 solid years of Trump is a Racist, Trump is a Racist, and Evermore Trump is a Racist. Yet his support in all Racial Minorities grew. WAIT, WHAT???? 
4) Wages continue to stagnate, some politically astute are beginning to hear the growing crescendo to raise the minimum wage. This is not about the minimum wage so much as it is about collectively raising all wages. 
5) Traditional Markers of success will quickly fall away. This year, many car manufacturers will do completely away with....Cars. Many in the public see that if you are going to buy a conveyance, that conveyance may be your only conveyance and it better do more than haul people. So you buy an SUV or a COV and double the utility. 
6) Luxury Items: IE: Harley Davidson, the once dream guilty pleasure of Boomers is dying now. Motorcycles just dont make sense in a Millenial World. 
7) The Rise of the No Benefit Contract Worker.
8.) Outsourcing of More and More Skilled Jobs.
9)  If you are already fighting a losing battle with Life Success and you see more Immigrants coming in and taking your jobs, then Yes, Immigration will be on your radar. 
10) I am afraid that working from home will now become Working from India, China, etc. 
11) We now lease vehicles rather than buy. We cant afford new vehicles.
12) Alternative Housing, the rise of the Tiny House Movement.

As we Globalize Machines and Production Processes, the only way to cut costs and gain a profitability edge will be wage and benefit cuts and that is where we are today. 
In my own plant we have machinery from Italy, Other parts of Europe, and Asia coming in daily. We cut wages and benefits daily. If the wage cuts havent gotten to you yet, just wait, they are slowly marching toward your employment area. In my own company we just Outsourced 270-300 IT Jobs. We will continue to outsource as many jobs as we can because that cuts all benefits from company expenses. No more Pensions, 401K Contributions, Health Insurance. American companies are reaching for ways to rid themselves of these expenses. We now pay Helpdesk workers as little as $16/hour. Certified IT gets you $16/Hour???

What you may fail to see, until all this is a daily part of your world is that this is the World of More and More Americans. While the rest of the world normalizes toward our wages, We normalize toward theirs. And people who are supposed to be bread-winners and are supposed to be the leaders of their families do react Emotionally to what they perceive as threats to their families. Trump simply saw this and exploited it. 

Now, last point and clarity on this: It isnt Trumpism, it is Reverse Millennialism (my term). We have people that keep ascribing evil intent to simple emotional reactions to their circumstances. Fix their circumstances and this all goes away. Place some Temporary Tariffs on the border. Nationalize Healthcare. Make some college free to qualified students, say two years for skilled labor.

Years ago Freidman predicted the rise of the American Service Economy. That production etc must go to lower wage labor countries. That is where we are now. 

"Trumpism" Whatever that term means in its 1001 definitions is lead by a geriatric old man in poor health. Dont sweat this. No one sees a new Trump on the horizon and Trump will be dead soon.