So, this happened.
The first question might well be: Why should this be a big
deal for a non-American? After all, it was only a presidential election of a
foreign country, which is not supposed to be the business of non-Americans
anyway. The president of the United States is not almighty, will be as bound by
the realities of domestic and international politics as anyone else, and
certainly cannot make the country and its political system bow to his personal
will. It is surprising, considering what the polls seemed to indicate, and more
than a little weird, but so what?
I feel the need to bring some considerations together and
justify why it seems like a big deal. Why care so much about who won the United
States presidential election?
First, maybe this should have not been surprising. If
Trump’s victory came as a surprise, maybe that is just an indication that
something important about these times has escaped our attention.
It has been repeatedly pointed out that Trump’s success has
much to do with the anger and disillusionment of American lower middle and
working classes. These people are often by default suspicious of the federal
government, and they have been hit hard by economic trends, loss of jobs due
to globalization, and
the polarization of income that shrinks the middle class. These elections channeled much repressed anger. (Meanwhile, 370
economists, including some of the best in the world,
assert that Trump’s economic promises are based on fallacies and misinformation.) For people who do
not expect anything good from the established political factions, any radical
change may appear desirable.
However, that does not explain at all how Donald Trump, of
all people, came to win as the Republican nominee. Why on earth Trump? Just how
do people think he is going to be the solution to the problems mentioned above,
to such an extent that he managed to win despite almost non-existent support
from the Republican Party luminaries? Moreover, why do so many people on
this side of the Atlantic, people who have nothing significant to gain from changes in
the United States’ political direction, seem to be cheering for Trump?
The Republican Party is generally thought of as the party of an unrestricted free market, extreme individualism, and social conservatism. But
as the party’s agonizing over Trump’s candidacy showed, he was not appealing to
the traditional Republican principles as such. Most clearly, Trump did not gain
his support because he was conservative -- he is not. He was supported because he was
radical. Something else is involved than just a tipping of the scales between
the two established American political powers.
The Republicans have been the party of law, order, and
security since the 1960s. At a time when racial riots and unrest caused by the
social rights struggles provoked fear and uncertainty,
the party employed the message of hard-handed security measures and aversion to social change. Where Democrats
became the party more accommodating to social reform, Republicans came to
champion reluctance about extending the civil rights of minorities, even though
this was not inherently part and parcel with their other key doctrines.
Thus, today’s Republican party has come to encompass
mindsets that do not necessarily have much to do with each other.
Karen Stenner’s detailed analysis shows that what gets grouped together as the American “political
right” consists of three distinct dispositions: laissez-faire capitalism,
social conservatism, and an important third feature,
authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism, in the sense meant here, is the preference for uniformity and conformity in one’s surroundings, favoring hierarchy,
loyalty, and strong leadership. Since the early 1990s, there has been an
ingenious measurement device for the authoritarian psychological profile, which
sidesteps the methodological problems of asking people directly about their
political preferences. It consists of asking them about something universally
human, present in every culture, having prima facie nothing to do with
politics: child-rearing practices.
Questionnaires ask about the most desirable kinds of
upbringing for children. The respondents are asked what features they see as
most important for their children to have. They are asked if it is most
important to teach children independence or respect for elders; self-reliance
or obedience; being considerate or being well-behaved; and curiosity or good
manners. Picking the second preference in each pair has proven to be a reliable
indicator of authoritarian preferences.
What is interesting is that Trump’s success has been driven
by
his appeal to
people with authoritarian preferences. He did not only
gather the votes of social conservatives or disgruntled poor people: he
gathered the votes of authoritarians, who are many, and not by any means
confined to the political right.
It is important to note that authoritarianism differs from
conservatism. What Stenner calls “status quo conservatism” may often support
the same causes as authoritarianism, but it is importantly different. According
to Stenner’s analysis, conservatism prefers stability and security in society,
resisting change and preferring established practices over reforms.
Conservatism is disposed to maintain the status quo, even when the status quo
includes many divisions and diversity in society. Authoritarianism, on the
other hand, is disposed to enforce uniformity, homogeneity, and strict social
hierarchies in society, even when this means drastic measures and a radical
upheaval of the status quo. Neither of the two is inherently connected with
laissez-faire capitalism.
Trump’s success starts to make more sense when one considers
the possibility that his message reached a large class of people with
authoritarian tendencies. With his self-assured and outrageous demeanor, he
portrayed himself as the kind of strongman leader who will force radical change upon the country, and disregards all kinds of typical political correctness which might stand in his way.
Another interesting hypothesis, also put forward by Stenner,
could explain why the political force of authoritarianism has not been more
evident before. The hypothesis is that authoritarian tendencies are often
latent until “activated”, and they are activated by perceived threats to social
order and personal security. The hypothesis makes a lot of sense, thinking about the effectiveness of the
standard political maneuver: underpinning the support of the ruling regime
by turning people’s attention to an outside threat. According to
Hetherington and Suhay's study on Americans, it is not only those with pre-existing authoritarian tendencies who are
susceptible to the effect. Also people without those tendencies may respond to
real or imagined threats by becoming more authoritarian. That is, by turning to strong
leadership, traditional values, and unity of the group.
When people experience uncertainty and fear, it seems to be
a natural reaction to turn to one’s community for safety, and become less
tolerant of diversity and differences of opinion in that community. People feeling threatened, either by physical dangers or by rapid changes in social norms, tend to seek safety, consciously or
unconsciously, from forceful leaders and uniformity, strict norms, and
structure. The racism that arises from activated authoritarianism is not so much
racism as such; it is, to use Stenner’s term, more general “difference-ism”.
This may explain the otherwise completely baffling phenomenon where hostile
attitudes, once they have become prominent against some minorities, seem to
target also evidently harmless groups, such as disabled people.
If it is true that (to simplify) scared people are more
prone to attach to authoritarian leaders, this may tell something illuminating
about totalitarian societies and dictatorships. It is easy enough to understand
that people can be scared into submission in a dictatorship. But the result of
living under a constant threat may be deeper than simple reluctant submission.
It might be that people can be scared into actually
supporting authoritarian regimes – the regime is a self-feeding machine that constantly provides the impetus for its own support.
According to Stenner, the authoritarian psychological
profile favors
“ ... structuring society and social interactions in ways that
enhance sameness and minimize diversity of people, beliefs, and behaviors. It
tends to produce a characteristic array of stances all of which have the effect
of glorifying, encouraging, and rewarding uniformity and disparaging,
suppressing, and punishing difference.” (Stenner, "Three Kinds of Conservatism", Psychological Inquiry, 20, p. 143)
So, authoritarianism seems to be the preference for homogeneity and strength in unity and the distaste of diversity and difference. It
is certainly a widespread trait, although one rarely encounters it in a
completely outspoken or unqualified form in politics or social life – at least
until now. But there seems to be a less radical preference, which is closely
related to the authoritarian mindset, but even more humanly universal and
comprehensive: the preference for order and hierarchy. What I have in mind is a
mindset that does not oppose diversity as such, but demands that any existing
diversity is made sense of by classifying it in clear and permanent ways. It
demands that things, phenomena, and people have labels and that they wear
those labels on their sleeves.
Very many people who could be described as conservative or
authoritarian seem content to accept the existence of various kinds of
diversity if that diversity is made clear-cut and intelligible by labels and
classifying concepts. Let there be blacks in the neighborhood, as long as
they keep to themselves and do not try to become one of “us”; let there be
equal rights for women, as long as women do not try to become men and take over
“men’s jobs”; let there be equal rights for homosexual couples, as long as
homosexual partnerships do not constitute “marriage”. Nobody likes to find out
that their long-lasting ways to make sense of the world have gone obsolete, and
that their concepts no longer mean what they used to mean. Sticking to
traditional meanings of concepts and inherited worldviews is, like
authoritarianism, an expression of the tendency to seek safety in order and
tradition when the world outside seems to change too rapidly. It is probably no
accident that populists like Trump use
name-calling so extensively. Sticking
easily remembered, emotionally loaded labels to everyone and everything speaks
directly to his target audience. It feeds the audience’s urge to classify,
simplify, and know what is what.
Finally, there might be an explanation as to why these
preferences seem so deeply alien to some. On the face of it, a preference for
order and homogeneity over ambiguity and diversity is a perfectly intelligible
need, and certainly not in any obvious way irrational. Why is it so baffling
and repulsive to many; to such an extent that well-educated people struggle to even understand
where authoritarian tendencies come from?
Maybe somewhere on the bottom of all this lies a fundamental
difference in worldviews. On the one hand, there are people who see order as
the basic, “default” feature of the world. There is a pre-determined natural
order for things to be, and undesirable things are conceived as resulting from
the order’s being disturbed in one way or another. Order is the default state
of the human race and society. Whenever there is a deviation from the order, this is
attributable to some external agent, malicious or delusional, who must be
stopped before it breaks the world’s rightful structure apart. On the other
hand, there are people who see change as the basic, “default” feature of the
world. The only permanent thing is that everything changes. History, the story
of the human race, or the fates of societies do not follow any pre-determined
path, and much of the developments that shape our lives are attributable just
to random chance. People are fellow travelers in a chaotic and unpredictable
world that is not in any way inherently hospitable to them. The way to survive
is to build unity where there once was none, adapt, and develop. Circumstances
change, and societies change with them, whether we like it or not. The only
relevant choice is between controlled change as opposed to chaotic and
unpredictable change.
Something like the first worldview may be an unspoken and
non-reflected part of the authoritarian disposition, as well as those more
moderate mindsets that share features with it. The inability to understand or
relate to the first world-view, on the other hand, could be part of the reason
why the needs of authoritarians and their means of responding to threats seem
so alien to many. If something along these lines is right, it is no wonder if
authoritarians tend to be climate change deniers. It goes against a
basic building block of their worldview – the conviction that if things are just
left to run their course, things will fall back into their rightful order.
Why is the election of Donald Trump a big deal? Because he
cannot be dismissed as a singular accident, a mere charismatic snake-oil
salesman, or a very-probably-one-term president brought about by a critical
amount of protest voters. He awakened politically a subset of people that is
permanently there and can be mobilized to support ruthless and radical
leaders, especially when there are high levels of fear and uncertainty in the
society. His success is part of the same nationalist, isolationist, and
disunifying trend that is growing in European politics, in Brexit, and
elsewhere. Now, when Trump’s themes, his campaigning style, and his surely
conscious choice to rather appear vigorous than worthy of respect, have won him
the White House, it is hard to believe that the same methods would not be
copied in European politics sooner or later. The European Trumps are probably
already on their way.
