Los Angeles (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – In our post-election blues, many pundits have started a post-mortem exploration of what went wrong with the Democrats’ optimistic outlook of winning the election, by even the thinnest margins. Explanations of Trump’s and Republican’s sweeping victory range from the ravages of inflation on the working class to the immigrants’ invasions of the country and the culture wars all playing out within an environment of fake. Most perplexing to Democrats and the left has been the huge number of non-college-educated men, many from underprivileged strata of society, who preferred Trump to Harris by an impressive 24 points margin. They were mesmerized by Trump and his promise to “Make America Great Again” even though Trump’s policies, such as tax cuts, during his first presidency, did not directly improve their lives.
Yet they refuse to believe that while in office Trump put forth policies “designed to cut health care, food and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans.” Under Trump, the income gap between the richest and poorest income brackets grew by 9% annually, leaving those with stagnant wages in low-paying jobs with little prospect of upward mobility.
Political analysts have done a reasonably good job of identifying the factors that helped Trump to victory. Still, we are mystified by what drove so many working-class males, including a significantly large number of blacks and Latinos, to choose Trump, despite Bidden-Harris’s concrete policies to help working-class Americans. By voting for Trump, they were voting against their self-interest. Psychology can help us better understand the root cause of this puzzle. The place to begin is the provenance of the “rage” that Trump has so effectively capitalized upon. His unrelenting rageful rhetorics were not intended as a steppingstone to constructive solutions to address the grievances of the working class. It was rage for the sake of rage against all political and social institutions. These had to be destroyed with virtually no plans to replace them.
As a psychologist/psychoanalyst, I focus on important challenges besetting the development of normal masculinity that embraces the experiences of strength, generativity, relevance, productivity, and reasonable power. Usually, these experiences develop within a family setting in which the son successfully experiences himself as a chip off the old block through identification with a capable, loving father. However, despite the strong presence of the father within the family milieu, if the society at large does not treat the father’s role as a respectful equal, the son will experience a huge sense of shame which is channeled into anger and resentment resulting from his self-respect having been compromised. We know that poverty and the stress of incessant struggles for survival reduce the chance that the father could live up to the expectations of the son as a positive loving model of identification. Alcoholism, drug addiction, and domestic violence are some of the most damaging consequences resulting from the generational transmission of trauma within this group which society habitually neglects. America’s increasing wealth inequality exacerbates this dynamic.
“Insufficient Weight,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024.
Over the long haul, with the untenability of strong identification with a solid father, the male grows up with a “father hunger” –a longing for a father figure who can make up for all the helplessness and humiliation he experienced as a child into adulthood. The unconscious wish is to have enough power to turn against the society that shamed him by depriving him of a father who could carry sufficient weight in society that could in turn fulfill the needs of the son to have a solid sense of himself as a man. The painful experience of shame and its annihilating impact is deeply damaging to the core of the sense of self. He feels broken and unfulfilled in an environment where he cannot be seen! The typical unconscious tit-for-tat solution to this loss is to hold society responsible for depriving him of his legitimate developmental needs. The expression of rage and retribution artificially rescues their damaged sense of self from the painful ravages of shame. Hence, here lies Donald Trump’s genius in mobilizing his unyielding supporters with the slogan “I’M YOUR RETRIBUTION”!
Through his audacious rebellion against the society that has deprived this disadvantaged group, Trump has become their Messiah. He is the only one who can restore their sense of self, repair their injured ego, and provide them with a new sense of self-respect and dignity through his crusade against all the societal norms that have excluded them. To them, Trump comes across as the powerful, fearless father figure that these “little boys” long for. His crusade against every norm of the “illegitimate” society helps heal and restore their deprived dignity. The society Trump has exposed is disqualified and no longer has the power to humiliate them. Hence, the more unconventional, the ruder, and cruder Trump becomes in shunning all the rules of civility, the more powerful his healing touch.
This idealization of a strong, fearless father figure is exactly what this population longs for to feel lifted and accepted. There is also a great vicarious pleasure from Trump’s unbending will and power. The society that disempowered them is being disempowered by the valiant father figure giving them a strong illusion that through this idealization everything that escaped them in the past has become within reach. If society and its norms are debunked, as Trump time and time again openly avows, then there’s no reason to feel deprived, unanchored, or adrift.
Trump is the warrior/savior of this group; he gives them the gift of belonging and importance. His legal convictions are meaningless and/or false because society no longer carries any moral weight to pass judgments. Trump’s heroic stand against society is both edifying and offers them a newfound sense of belonging, respect, and trust in their idealized identification.
In the circumstances outlined above the primitive defenses of denial and disavowal aided by fake news and conspiracy theories inevitably produce a certain degree of disconnect with reality. Psychology can help us understand this and why some groups unwittingly work against their self-interest by abandoning reality.
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