Since the beginning of the year I’ve been listening regularly to Sam Harris’ podcast,
Waking Up, on which he has engaging and thought-provoking conversations with people from a wide variety of fields. As he summarizes on his
site, his intent is to explore ‘important and controversial questions about the human mind, society, and current events.'
In the wake of last fall’s election results, ‘current events’ has, not surprisingly, become a recurring topic of his conversations with the guests he invites onto the podcast, just as it has for so many of us in our discussions with family, friends and colleagues (assuming, of course, that we can even broach the subject at all in the current polarized climate). His guests have included: former world chess champion, and now political activist, Gary Kasparov (
The Putin Question); political commentator, and former speech writer for George W. Bush, David Frum (
We’re All Cucks Now); journalist and author Anne Applebaum (
The Russia Connection); and, in the wake of the most recent revelations of mid-May, Applebaum again, along with journalist and author Juliette Kayyem (
The Path to Impeachment).
One question that has surfaced repeatedly in Harris’ conversations and analysis: why do Trump’s core base of supporters consistently dismiss as unimportant Trump’s on-going string of seemingly self-destructive behaviors — actions and statements that for any past politician would have certainly been career ending?
Harris, for example, raised that question in his discussion with Applebaum in
The Path to Impeachment (~29 minutes in):
So, what do you think it’s going to take, because this is the thing that I find above all so depressing about what his existence is doing to American society. I mean it’s just uncanny to continually hear from Trump’s defenders, who seem completely oblivious to his flaws. No matter how awful you imagine Hillary Clinton to be, and how much you wouldn’t want her to be President, it seems to me that you have to admit that Trump is showing some signs of a dangerous unprofessionalism, at least. And so I mean, what do you make of the fact that there seems to be no path from where we are through the brains of Trump’s defenders to an admission of what should be obvious, that this person is unfit for office. What would he have to do, do you think, to actually turn the tide?
Applebaum’s answer was the verbal equivalent of throwing her hands up in the air, saying that, well, perhaps the tide will finally turn, that enough negative stories will build up to create a tipping point. Her response is not altogether unreasonable given the unceasing stream of shocking moments that Trump has generated. My concern with that line of thinking, however, is that it’s been the working assumption since early in the primaries; there has been a consistent belief after each new negative event by or about Trump would be the one that finally ended his run — and obviously that point has so far not been reached.
I would argue that this line of thinking — believing that the next mistake he makes will be the decisive one — constitutes a kind of failure of imagination on the part of those dismayed by Trump as president — an inability to recognize and acknowledge the deep-seated nature of his base’s commitment to him. Only by understanding the origins and depths of this commitment can we imagine how Trump’s political story might end. To that end, I suggest that Eric Hoffer’s treatise from 1951,
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, offers a path to just such an understanding; in it, Hoffer demonstrates how all mass movements, whether they result in good ends or bad, "share certain essential characteristics." (xi). (For my full review of the book follow the title link; quotes from the book include page number references.)
To be clear, I would not characterize Trump’s supporters as constituting a mass movement in the traditional sense. His base largely continues to support him, but does not appear to be, at least at this point, a mobilized group ready to be called to action; they voted for Trump, and are now simply waiting for him to fulfill the promises he made during the campaign. Nonetheless, many of Hoffer’s descriptions in his book of the general characteristics of members of mass movements seem to be strongly represented among Trumps hard-core supporters. Thus Hoffer’s analysis can perhaps provide insight into the motivations of these supporters, and why they hold so faithfully and tightly to Trump.
It must be acknowledged that those who voted for Trump certainly had a variety of reasons for doing so, including, for example, a visceral dislike of Hilary Clinton and strong conservative views on particular social policies. But I feel that the most valid analysis of his support has recognized that the core base grew out of a much more fundamental and so much more enduring motivation: people frustrated with the path their lives are taking, who feel little hope for the future, and who are convinced that the political and social elite of the country not only cares nothing for their plight, but actively pursues policies that work against their interests.
I recently heard an interview given by historian Vincent Harding back in 2011 (details
here) — long before Trump appeared on the political scene — in which he provides a trenchant analysis of the source of this frustration:
I have a feeling that one of the deeper transformations that’s going on now is that for the white community of America, there is this uncertainty growing about its own role, its own control, its own capacity to name the realities that it has moved into a realm of uncertainty…. Up to now, uncertainty was the experience of the weak, the poor, the people of color.... But now, for all kinds of political, economic reasons, for all kinds of psychological reasons, that uncertainty, and unknowingness, is permeating what was the dominant, so-called, society. That breaking apart is for me more likely the source of the anxiety, the fear, the anger, the unwillingness to give in, the need to have something that they can hold on to and say, this is the way and it's got to be our way or we will all die.
The feelings of “anxiety … fear [and] anger” Harding describes have led to a deep frustration among a significant portion of the American population, and, turning now to
The True Believer, we find that the starting point of Hoffer’s analysis is in fact that “the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements.” (xii) Hoffer goes on to write that American society can be particularly reactive to the kind of uncertainty that Harding has described:
One of the most potent attractions of a mass movement is its offering of a substitute for individual hope. This attraction is particularly effective in a society imbued with the idea of progress. For in the conception of progress, “tomorrow” looms large, and the frustration resulting from having nothing to look forward to is the more poignant. (15)
Hoffer adds, in a statement that now, almost seventy years later, feels ripped from the top stories of our day:
The present-day workingman in the Western world feels unemployment as a degradation. He sees himself disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things, and is willing to listen to those who call for a new deal. (27)
As noted above, the central point of Hoffer's thesis is that the frustrated masses that come together to form a political or social movement — whether with positive ends, such as the American Revolution, or negative ends, such as Nazism — share certain common characteristics. For one, to be moved to action, Hoffer found that they must in part be “intensely discontented yet not destitute … [and] wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking.” (11) It would certainly be hard to dispute that many of Trump’s supporters seem to underestimate the challenges Trump could face in delivering on his promises, whether it is to bring back in significant numbers heavy-industry manufacturing jobs, or to make Mexico pay for the wall, to name but two of the more obvious examples.
Regarding the willingness of Trump’s core base of supporters to discount his seemingly unending string of controversial and often offensive statements and actions, Hoffer’s analysis again resonates. He argues in the book that, by submerging themselves into a unified mass of the disenfranchised, people lose the critical discernment of individuals, and develop such feelings and behaviors as “a facility for make-believe, a proneness to hate, a readiness to imitate, [and a] credulity.” (59)
In particular, he describes a “connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity.” (83) He notes that “the facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ. … To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason.” (79) Thus, critically — and dishearteningly for anyone who hopes that sober discourse could turn Trump’s supporters against him — “the fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense.” (85)
This then would appear to be the point we have reached. A group of people so angry, so disenfranchised, so
frustrated (to use Hoffer’s term) that they are beyond the reach of reasoned counter-argument. In such an environment it is not so surprising then that for Trump’s base: any facts contradicting what Trump says are defined as fake news; Trump’s inability to make good on his legislative promises despite Republican majorities in the House and Senate is blamed on a lack of support from establishment Republicans and Democrats; calling Trump out for inopportune or inappropriate comments is simply the press or his irrational detractors making a mountain out of a molehill. It would seem that there is quite literally no argument that can be made that would convince a hardcore supporter of Trump to turn their back on him.
Which leaves us where? What is then the path to Trump’s base turning on him? I would argue that path goes through Trump himself. He will have to say or do something that shows him reneging on what he promised his base, something over which he clearly and visibly has control and for which his base cannot rationalize the blame for his failure onto other politicians or the media.
The challenge is that Trump seems to instinctively recognize this, and so continues to push a legislative agenda that fulfills his promises even though it clearly can never pass as proposed; he assumes that his supporters will blame that failure on congress. Meanwhile, on those things that are truly within his control, he does what he promised during the campaign, whether through executive actions, or, for example, in pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Accord. He cannot be reasoned out of doing these things, because he is not doing them for ideological reasons — he does them to survive.
Note, too, that making the argument to Trump that he is now losing some of his support is unlikely to gain traction with him. He was told throughout the primaries that he couldn’t win, that the numbers weren’t there, and yet he became the Republican nominee for president; and this repeated itself again in the general election. Even if some supporters have indeed now begun to drift away, there remains a vocal core that continues to support him. Given all that, why would he suddenly start listening to the polls, and stop believing in his own infallibility? And, ultimately, his self-assuredness only reinforces his supporters’ faith.
Thus, we come to recognize that the answer to the question of why Trump’s base seems so unwavering in its support despite all he has done lies not in over-simplified and disparaging explanations of irrationality or stupidity. Harding’s identification of the social shifts now taking place suggest that a significant portion of the American population has sunk into a deep frustration with their lives; Hoffer’s analysis demonstrates how this frustration can lead people to band together to create a powerful and unyielding group ready to rally behind a populist candidate, and how such a group would become largely immune to arguments against their standard-bearer.
Those with the power in politics and society at large to effect changes that could have acknowledged and attempted to ameliorate the social and economic challenges for a significant portion of their fellow citizens over the past several decades have failed to do so, and have as a consequence allowed the development of a group of people primed for Trump’s arrival on the scene.
At this point, it would seem that we are all consigned to ride this political roller-coaster for the foreseeable future.
As an aside, there is one rather disturbing thought to consider: if Trump does finally fall from power, and Pence becomes president, it’s not clear that Trump’s base would support Pence going forward — in fact, it seems highly unlikely, as Trump’s hard-core base clearly seems to find little to like in either the Republicans or the Democrats. Thus, after coming together to pin their hopes on Trump, they will suddenly find themselves without a standard-bearer in government. Will they quietly become invisible? Or, will they perhaps turn to a new populist leader, one more competent and focused than Donald Trump, who may harness their frustration with even more dangerous effectiveness?
Other reviews / information:
Hoffer anticipates too the rise in hatred that has been evident since late in the campaign, and has only spread since election night. The use of hatred of the other may seem a commonly accepted means of riling up a crowd, but Hoffer’s analysis provides perhaps a new and deeper insight into how such techniques work. He notes that “even in the case of a just grievance, our hatred comes less from a wrong done to us than from the consciousness of our helplessness, inadequacy and cowardice — in other worlds from self-contempt.” (94) Thus, again, the heart of the matter is to be found in frustration and disenfranchisement. In a statement with strong implications today, seven decades after it was written, Hoffer claims: “Should Americans begin to hate foreigners whole-heartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.” (96)
My book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
