Creeping Fascism No Problem for Trump’s Durable Base
President Trump at an Aug. 30 rally in Evansville, Ind. (Evan Vucci / AP)
How, liberals and progressives ask with shocked amazement, can President
Trump’s supporters continue to back him? They persist even as one piece of
evidence after another emerges of his epic and pathological gaslighting, his
shameless immorality, his abject criminality, his wild stupidity and his
corruption. Then there’s his chilling authoritarianism, his tendency toward
fascism, his ugly sexism, his textbook malignant narcissism and his nasty
racism.
These flummoxed observers aren’t wrong about Donald “Don’t Believe What You See
and Hear” Trump’s terrible, duplicitous and unabashedly Orwellian nature, but
their incredulity is naive.
Yes, the evidence is clear as day—to people who pay serious attention to
evidence. Nine of every 10 Americans—and certainly a larger share of
Republicans and Trump backers—believe in the existence of God. Ask most
Americans what exactly one is supposed to believe in when it comes to “God,”
and they will say little or nothing in the way of empirical proof. It’s never
quite clear what the concept and word mean. It’s about faith, not evidence.
Evidence is easily devalued in a faith-based nation in which magical thinking
(a critical component of authoritarianism and hardly limited to religious and
metaphysical matters) is rife.
“Cognitive dissonance,” a mental pattern first identified by the psychologist
Leon Festinger, doesn’t help. People confronted with evidence that contradicts
their convictions don’t typically correct their beliefs, Festinger found.
Instead, they more commonly double down on their mistaken idea rather than face
the mental and egoic pain associated with admitting erroneous thinking. The
more they have invested in and even lost from false beliefs, the more they will
respond to contrary evidence by actually intensifying their attachment to those
untrue notions. (This may help explain how Trump often seems to gain support
after talking heads, reporters and politicos call him out for saying or
tweeting something particularly absurd.)
Right-wing media worsens the problem. A potent network of counterfactual white
Republican news and opinion outlets regularly amplify and reinforce
fact-trumping feelings and cognitively dissonant reactions. Watch Fox News and
listen to noxiously racist, nationalist and neo-McCarthyite talk-radio
hate-mongers like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin. Nothing is clear as day across
the soulless landscape of radically conservative media, where 2+2=5; war is
peace; love is hate; corporate Democrats are Marxists; antifa is a giant mass
movement created by the Democratic Party; black football players who take knees
during the national anthem are traitors; the billionaire rentier Donald Trump
is a friend of the working man; anthropogenic global warming is a “hoax”; and
“God” wants us to burn every last fossil fuel on earth. As Trump’s wacky
post-modernist lawyer Rudolph Giuliani put it recently, “truth isn’t truth.”
Feelings trump facts all the time in the U.S. This is true on both sides of the
major-party aisle. Talking in 2007 and 2008 to highly educated campus-town
liberal Democrats, including plenty of doctorate holders and religious
skeptics, I consistently found that facts were of little use in trying to dent
their deeply entrenched and utterly false view that Barack Obama was a people’s
champion of peace, democracy and social justice. To paraphrase the Beatles,
they had “a feeling [about Obama]–a feeling deep inside, oh yeah.”
The so-called mainstream liberal media is itself no great champion of truth. It
perversely purveyed George W. Bush’s Orwellian nonsense about Iraq’s supposed
“weapons of mass destruction.” As I was first writing this paragraph (last
Friday), moreover, Trump’s cable-news bêtes noires CNN and MSNBC were immersed
in a seemingly endless and totally absurd memorialization of the war criminal,
lifelong imperial war hawk and corporate neoliberal John McCain as a
Christ-like embodiment of transcendent human decency.
There’s also the selective and partisan use and interpretation of evidence.
Trumpsters know some facts very well. Tell them their president lies, cheats
and commits crimes, and some of them will remind you that Bill Clinton, Barack
Obama and Hillary Clinton have done the same. They’re right about that (Obama’s
apparent observance of his marriage vows notwithstanding), even if they often
get their facts wrong on how and why those corporate Democrats (absurdly seen
as Left by Republicans) transgressed. And it’s never clear how the readily
documentable fact that Democrats do nasty things makes Trump’s epic awfulness
any less awful.
Trump’s backers also cite undeniable facts of economic expansion, the stock
market explosion and a falling official unemployment rate during Trump’s
anti-presidency. But Trump boosters leave out and often deny the fact that the
expansion started under Obama. They ignore the considerable downsides of the
Obama-Trump “boom”: over-stagnant wages, savage economic and related racial
inequality, environmental destruction, massive public and private debt, the
over-concentration of stock ownership and profits in the hands of a small
minority, and the reckless overvaluation of stocks and other financial
assets—harbingers of a coming crash encouraged by Trump’s heedless deregulation
of finance.
Trump backers seem to think the U.S. capitalist economy is micromanaged in the
Oval Office, as if Trump—who can’t even read a basic balance sheet—is
personally responsible for the business cycle he’s been fortunate to ride.
That’s a pretty stupid thing to believe.
Speaking of stupidity, what about Trump’s real or alleged idiocy? The “mentally
deranged dotard” (North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s colorful description of
Trump last summer) would probably outscore George W. Bush (more on that dolt
below) but come in below the Clintons and Obama on standard intelligence
measures. Whatever his brainpower, however, Trump is an inexhaustible font of
fatuous and inane political assertion. Take, as one example, his frequent
go-to: climate change denial. Then there’s his claim that thousands of Muslims
danced on the roofs of apartment complexes watching the World Trade Center
towers collapse on 9/11, as well as the ridiculous assertion the U.S. is being
flooded by immigrant rapists and murderers.
These would also make the list: the preposterous charge Trump was denied a
popular victory over Hillary Clinton by immigrant voter fraud; the ludicrous
allegation Google has “rigged” its search engine against him, and the wild-eyed
contention that a small leftist anti-fascist group (antifa) will drown the
nation in violence if Democrats take over Congress in the 2018 midterm
elections. Finally, there’s Trump’s openly and insanely false claim that NBC
doctored (“fudged”) an interview he did with Lester Holt in May of 2017—an
interview in which he clearly tells Holt that he fired FBI Director James Comey
because Comey was investigating the president’s connections to Russia. Every
day seems to bring a new ludicrous and patently false tweet or comment from
“President Dunce Cap.”
Sadly enough, however, stupidity is not necessarily a big problem for much of
the population. Ten years ago, historian Rick Shenkman wrote a book titled
“Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter.” The book
was filled with depressing statistics like the following:
● A majority of Americans didn’t know which party was in control of Congress.
● A majority couldn’t name the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
● A majority didn’t know the U.S. had three branches of government.
● A majority of Americans told pollsters in 2003 they believed George W.
Bush’s argument the United States should invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had
attacked America on 9/11.
George W. “Is Our Kids Learning?” Bush, Number 43, was an abject moron who
thought “God” wanted him to invade Iraq. The depressing fact that a majority of
Americans believed Dubya’s bold-faced lie about Saddam Hussein’s culpability in
the 2001 jetliner attacks on U.S. soil was striking evidence for Shenkman’s
assertion that “ignorance of basic facts” reflects a “level of inattentiveness
that is unhealthy in a society that purports to be free and democratic.”
The problem didn’t go away just because the electorate responded to the Iraq
fiasco and the meltdown of the economy by putting enough of its longstanding
racism aside to place a former editor of the Harvard Law Review—an epitome of
the professional class’ education-based meritocratic worldview who happened to
be black—in the White House for eight years. The silver-tongued and deeply
conservative Ivy League creation and arch-neoliberal imperialist Obama did
facts and truth no favors by pretending to be something he wasn’t—a progressive
friend of social justice, democracy and peace—while he dutifully helped
preserve Wall Street’s control of the nation’s domestic and foreign policies.
(Orwell noted that form of pretense, too.)
Reflecting on the Trump phenomenon in early 2016, Shenkman recognized the
underlying U.S.-American disease of mass stupidity (though in truth the real
problem he was discussing was ignorance) was alive and well in Obama’s final
year:
“
[M]illions of [U.S.] people take sheer nonsense seriously. Their ignorance is
making them sitting ducks for politicians like Donald ‘I love the poorly
educated’ Trump. Election 2016 is turning into a civics teacher’s case study
from hell. … From the moment he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower … Trump
has been offering simplistic solutions. … Each proposal has been eviscerated in
the media based on the critiques of experts who have pointed out that his
proposed solutions barely withstand cursory analysis. … But his voters haven’t
cared. Nor have they worried when the media have caught him in one lie after
another. Politifact has called him out for lying more than any of the other
candidates, but to little effect. … It appears he can get away with saying
anything.
The rest, as they say, is history. With no small help from the horrific and
uninspiring candidacy of the ultimate establishment politico Hillary Clinton
(Yale Law, one notch above Harvard Law), the Orwellian falsehood machine and
lower-brain atavist Trump swept the Electoral College. The president has
continued his relentless war on reality with a remarkably durable approval rate
in the low to mid-40s, largely undented even by his former longtime lawyer
Michael Cohen’s recent identification of Trump as a co-conspirator in the
illegal payment of funds for the purpose of silencing two women with whom Trump
had had extramarital affairs.
What about Trump’s authoritarianism? It is evident in his cold disregard for
the rule of law and the power of Congress and his Cabinet, as well as his
recurrent habit of praising strongman leaders around the world.
Most liberals and progressives I know are stunned that Trump’s clear despotism
and taste for tyranny do not bother his base. But there’s no basis for their
astonishment about this. Leaving aside the fact Trump is more showman than
strongman, nobody who pays serious attention to the relevant survey data should
think that the president’s authoritarian inclinations would be a problem for
his supporters.
In December 2015, the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams surveyed 1,800
registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Employing
standard statistical survey analysis, McMillan found education, income, gender
and age had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate.
“Only two of the variables I looked at,” MacWilliams reported in January of
2016, “were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of
terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter.” Trump,
MacWilliams found, was the only candidate in either party with statistically
significant support from authoritarians. “Those who say a Trump presidency
‘can’t happen here,’ ” MacWilliams wrote in Politico, “should check their
conventional wisdom at the door. … Conditions are ripe for an authoritarian
leader to emerge. Trump is seizing the opportunity.”
A year and a half later, a poll conducted by political scientists Ariel Malka
and Yphtach Lelkes found that 56 percent of Republicans support postponing the
2020 presidential election if Trump and congressional Republicans advocate this
to “make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote.”
This brings us to Trump’s racism, evident from numerous statements of his
before and during his presidency. Is it a problem for Trump backers?
Know any other good jokes? Trump’s disproportionately Caucasian base is fused
by an embattled white racial identity. This Trumpian “make America white again”
heart- and mind-set holds that whites are becoming a minority targeted by
discrimination and “politically correct” liberal and leftists have been turning
the nation’s politics and policies against white values, culture, needs, rights
and prerogatives. This curious “reverse discrimination” victim whiteness
(devoid of evidence for its claims) informs the Trump base’s understanding of
the meaning of the word “corruption” in ways the liberal writer Peter Beinart
recently captured in the Atlantic. For Trump’s base, Beinart writes, the idea
of corruption isn’t so much about politics and the law as it is about racial
and gender purity:
“
Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Trump is
the least ethical president in modern American history. … Once you grasp that
for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of
law than the violation of established hierarchies [of race and gender], their
behavior makes more sense. … Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that
[Hillary] Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered
far more damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about
Clinton’s? Likely because Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional gender
roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist
agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption.
Cohen’s admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn’t
violate the law. But it doesn’t really matter. For many Republicans, Trump
remains uncorrupt—indeed, anti-corrupt—because what they fear most isn’t the
corruption of American law; it’s the corruption of America’s traditional
identity. And in the struggle against that form of corruption—the kind embodied
by Cristhian Rivera [the “illegal immigrant” accused of murdering the young
white woman Mollie Tibbetts in rural Iowa two weeks ago]—Trump isn’t the
problem. He’s the solution. [Emphasis added.]
But, of course, it’s not about racism, nativism, sexism or authoritarianism
when it comes to understanding Trump’s base. White racial and gender identity
and authoritarianism have long merged with and cross-fertilized each other.
Last May, political scientists Steven V. Miller and Nicholas T. Davis released
a working paper titled “White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for
American Democracy.” Their study found a strong correlation between white
Americans’ racial intolerance and support for authoritarian rule. “When
racially intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people
of color,” NBC News reported, citing the Miller and Davis paper, “they abandon
their commitment to democracy.”
The Trump base’s bigotry and its leanings toward authoritarianism are not
separate problems. They are inseparably linked. When Trump calls Mexicans
murderers and rapists, when he rails about the need for building a wall, when
he denounces the media as “fake news,” when he disses judges and the rule of
law and juries, and when he praises authoritarian leaders, he is appealing to
the same voters.
The most sophisticated and statistically astute analysis of the 2016 Trump
electorate produced so far has been crafted by political sociologists David
Norman Smith and Eric Hanley. In an article published in Critical Sociology
last March, Smith and Hanley found the white Trump base was differentiated from
white non-Trump voters not by class or other “demographic” factors (including
income, age, gender and the alleged class identifier of education) but by eight
key attitudes and values: identification as “conservative”; support for
“domineering leaders”; Christian fundamentalism; prejudice against immigrants;
prejudice against blacks; prejudice against Muslims; prejudice against women,
and a sense of pessimism about the economy.
Strong Trump supporters scored particularly high on support for domineering
leaders, fundamentalism, opposition to immigrants and economic pessimism. They
were particularly prone to support authoritarian leaders who promised to
respond punitively to minorities perceived as “line-cutters”—“undeserving”
others who were allegedly getting ahead of traditional white Americans in the
procurement of jobs and government benefits—and to the supposed liberal “rotten
apples” who were purportedly allowing these “line-cutters” to advance ahead of
traditional white American males.
Support for politically authoritarian leaders and a sense of intolerance
regarding racial, ethnic and gender differences are two sides of the same
Trumpian coin. The basic desire animating Trump’s base was “the defiant wish
for a domineering and impolitic leader” linked to “the wish for a reversal of
what his base perceives as an inverted moral and racial order.”
Is Trump’s narcissism a problem for his backers? Not really. As psychologist
Elizabeth Mika noted last year in an essay titled “Who Goes Trump? Tyranny as a
Triumph of Narcissism”:
“
The tyrant’s narcissism is the main attractor to his followers, who project
their hopes and dreams. The more grandiose his own sense of self and his
promises to his fans, the greater their attraction and the stronger their
support. … Through the process of identification, the tyrant’s followers absorb
his omnipotence and glory and imagine themselves winners in the game of life.
This identification heals the followers’ narcissistic wounds, but also tends to
shut down their reason and conscience.
If that sounds anything like “creeping fascism,” that’s because it is. As
political scientist Anthony DiMaggio recently observed:
“
There are too many red flags in public sentiment to ignore the threat of
creeping fascism. Ominously, one of the strongest statistical predictors of
support for Trump is the desire for a strong leader who will ‘crush evil’ and
‘get rid of the rotten apples’ who ‘disturb the status quo.’ Half of
Republicans say they trust Donald Trump as a more reliable source of
information than the news media—more reliable even than conservative media
outlets. Nearly half of Republicans think media outlets should be ‘shut down’
if they are ‘broadcasting stories that are biased or inaccurate,’ raising
ominous possibilities regarding precisely who will act on such allegations. …
The cult of Trump is not an abstract phenomenon, but one that has real
implications. … The danger of fascist creep is also seen in the support from
most Republican Americans for shutting down the 2020 election, so long as Trump
declares it necessary to combat fictitious voter fraud. Conservatives’
acceptance of this conspiracy theory continues, unfortunately, despite the
president’s own ‘voter fraud commission’ being disbanded after failing to find
any evidence of it.
Is Trump’s “creeping fascism” a problem for his backers? Leaving aside the
interesting debate among liberal and left commentators about whether Trump is a
real or creeping fascist, it is unlikely that more than a small number of
Americans could provide even the remotest outlines of a working definition of
what classic European fascism was or what fascism more broadly defined is in
the world today. It’s hard for people to reject something they know little or
nothing about regarding its existence and nature (even as they are thinking and
acting in accord with some of the phenomenon’s key characteristics).
As the dangerously declining superpower that is the United States moves at an
accelerating pace, under Trump, into a period that deserves to be called at
least pre-fascism, it is an even better time than usual to heed George
Santyana’s warning: “Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat
it.”
Paul Street
