Trump and the transition to a post-industrial society

Trump and the transition to a post-industrial society

            Sam Vaknin a popular philosopher/psychologist, and a contributor to the American Thinker, a center-right website, describes Trump and his followers in very harsh terms. As he writes in one blog post, “The world is a hostile, psychopathic place and who best to deal with it than an even more hostile, narcissistic leader like Trump? We need a big bad wolf to navigate through the jungle out there. This is a form of collective regression to toddlerhood with Trump in the role of the omnipotent, omniscient Father. In abnormal psychology this is called ‘shared psychosis.’ The members of the cult deploy a host of primitive (infantile) psychological defense mechanisms as they gradually dwindle into mere extensions and reflections of their skipper. Theirs is a malignant optimism grounded not in reality, but in idealization: the tendency to interact not with Trump himself, but with an imaginary “Trump” that each fan tailors to suit his or her fears, hopes, wishes, and fervent fantasies.”

This is a vitriolic takedown of Trump and is followers, and in light of Trump’s self-declared disregard for civility in political discourse it feels partly justified. The question is however, whether such a blanket dismissal undermines our ability to understand the realistic bases for Trump’s strengths and successes, and leads us to treat his follower’s sensibilities as if it they are alien. Of course today, in a post-holocaust world, we are especially attuned to the dangers of totalitarianism and we are rightfully wary of politicians who appear as “strongmen.” On the other side, these same concerns may lead us to take mental shortcuts. While looking at history through the rear view mirror we don’t take account of what is in front of our noses. Can we first comprehend without judging and then only judge as a stimulus for our taking action? In the Art of War Sun Tzu writes, “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.” The danger of Vaknin’s stance is that he does not know himself. After all, his own prose projects a sense of omnipotent knowing, the very charge he levels against Trump. This suggests that he neither knows Trump nor his followers.  

In the following blog I try to “know” Trump by taking seriously what his supporters say and by trying to locate their experiences in situations that are in some degree accessible psychologically to all of us. This process takes me on a road trip through Trump’s unrestrained behavior, his followers anxieties about political correctness, the populist character of Trump’s movement, the link between populism and the our shared transition to a post-industrial society, and finally the Republican Party’s failure to understand the role of regulation and social policy in shaping that transition. I am interested in my readers’ responses to this trip on what is hopefully a not too long but certainly winding road.

Trump unrestrained, and political correctness.

          People who support Trump like his unrestrained and unrehearsed behavior. He appears to be acting impulsively, saying whatever comes to his mind without preparation and rehearsal. To his supporters this means that he speaks truthfully rather than censors his thinking to garner favor or support. This also means that he is independent, beholden to nothing but his own instincts. As one supporter said, “Lies are out, unrehearsed truth is in,” and as another noted, “What you see is what you see, all the cards are on the table, the words are non-rehearsed, flowing forth and engendering a sense of trust.” A third commented, “because he is 'crazy impulsive' he has no qualms to step on toes when he is on a roll, and correctness (neither political nor ethical) enters in his objective.”

As this last comment suggests, supporters also take pleasure in his aggressiveness in his “stepping on toes.” As one supporter writes, “So I love Trump. I fucking love him. I wish he were actually going to run all the way to the White House instead of just fart around until the primaries like he usually does. I wish he'd take shots and get on TV and give press conferences drunk off his ass. I wish he'd tell reporters to go fuck themselves. I wish he'd treat International diplomacy like it was an episode of what's his show where he got to say "You're Fired". I LOVE that he pisses off all the politicians on both sides, because he's different than the good old boys (and gals) that come up year after year after year.”

One question of course is why do supporters take such pleasure in his impulsiveness, irresponsibility and aggression? After all, it is also boorish. If we look at this psychologically, one reason we may take pleasure in someone else’s impulsiveness is because we ourselves feel unduly restricted and suppressed. This is a common and familiar feature of celebrity culture. We enjoy a movie star’s chaotic love life because it contrasts with what we may experience to be our own dull one. Identifying with a star, we share through fantasy in his or her exciting experiences. This is also why when Republican Party leaders such as Mitt Romney lambast Trump for his incivility and boorishness, they only underline why his supporters find him attractive.

But this pushes our question one step backward. Why do his supporters feel psychologically hemmed in? It is tempting here to turn immediately to an account of their hemmed in lives, but I think we are on surer ground if we listen to what his supporters actually say. One reason they advance is that they feel oppressed by the psychological injunctions associated with political correctness, by the degree to which it suppresses expression, and censors thinking.  As one supporter writes, “Political correctness is a main reason why America is in trouble because it is a grind and so draining to be so politically correct everyday in our personal and professional lives.” The images of “grind” and “draining” suggest that people feel burdened or exhausted by the work of suppressing thoughts and impulses associated with experiences of race, ethnicity and gender. By contrast, Trump bears no such burden. As one supporter suggests, Trump's speech is uncensored. “Every week, someone would dare to blurt out something un-PC, and the media would absolutely crucify them. Political correctness is the birthplace of disastrous, un-American policies that will destroy the country in a death by a thousand cuts. But here comes Trump, the first person who didn’t even blink when the machine turns its sights on him. He didn’t just fight back. He chewed it up and spit it out.”

We might suppose that people feel censored, because they wish that they could freely express racial or ethnic animosity, in others words to be racist in public as Trump appears to be. But I think that the issue is more complex than this. One scholarly study of Tea Party supporters notes that there was, “strong opposition to explicit racism in the Greater Boston Tea Party. When avowedly racist messages suddenly appeared on the Boston Tea Party MeetUp site, Massachusetts Tea Party members let the newcomer know he was not welcome. Andrea (a leader of the Party), posted: “This country is made up of people from all countries, that’s what made us what we are. . . . I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

Instead, I suggest that what white people find burdensome, are the psychological consequences associated with the prospect of giving minorities preferential treatment in the competition for jobs, promotions, or access to college,  , or as it termed more frequently, creating diversity. A Pew values surveys “asks people whether they agree that, “We should make every effort to improve the position of minorities, even it means giving them preferential treatments. “Since, 1987, as the New York Times reports, the gap on this question between the two (political) parties as doubled. 52% of Democrats support this statement,  (and 48% disagree!-LH) while 12% of Republicans do.”

It is customary to think that this antipathy toward preferential treatment is based on conflicts of interest between minorities and whites. This is why for example white students have sued state universities for failing to admit them, claiming that their qualifications were overlooked in order to admit minority students. But I suspect that when a large number of whites resent affirmative action they are responding less to such overt conflicts of interest, and more to the psychological contradictions imposed when considering racial preferences.

Let me suggest that racial preference programs stimulate the very racist thoughts they are designed to suppress. A good number of whites would wonder why minorities deserve special consideration, if they were not in fact inferior. I believe that this thought is aversive and horrifying for many, though not all white people, as indeed it should be, and creates in its wake considerable guilt. This is one reason, for example, why in the famous case of Jayson Blair -- the black New York Times journalist who filed false reports -- his superiors failed to act on their suspicions that he was unethical and irresponsible. Their own suspicions triggered the accompanying idea that they were racist to be suspicious. One way in which whites in such positions then manage their anxiety associated with this thought is to view the minority person as a victim who warrants special consideration. But this too is a demeaning thought. For example, it denies to Jayson Blair his own agency in creating the conditions that lead him to his unethical conduct. In other words, political correctness, when linked to the issue of preferential treatment, sets in motion a complex of discomfiting thoughts, feelings of wariness and guilt, and then resentment for having experienced these feelings. This is, I propose, one psychological account of the meaning of political correctness for Trump supporters. He has freed himself from this nettle of feelings, the draining impact they impose on the psyche, and behaves without guilt or compunction.  

The deserving worker

It is sometimes common to suppose that whites ought to understand that blacks in particular have been hobbled by overt and covert racism in the past, and should therefore be entitled to special consideration. But clearly, many whites reject this idea even after decades of its ascendancy in liberal discourse. Indeed, one reason Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996 is that he severed the links between the Democratic Party and its once historical support for the rights of welfare recipients. Moreover, in the study of the Tea Party I referenced, the authors note that Tea Partiers are more likely than other conservatives to agree with the statement, “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.” In addition, “Tea Party activists in Massachusetts, as well as nationally, define themselves as workers, in opposition to categories of non-workers they perceive as undeserving of government assistance. Concerns about freeloading underlie Tea Party opposition to government spending.”

It might be supposed that people with this viewpoint are simply being selfish. But this is a cursory conception. I think this commitment to the link between work and reward is first and foremost a moral one. It is an ideal, and seems to be a good basis for sustaining group efforts whether in a team, a company or an entire economy based on exchange. It addresses the most elementary demand we make on group life, that it be “fair.” It expresses a basic anxiety, that in any group there is always the risk that “free-riders” will exploit group members’ good will, by working less while sharing in the group’s rewards. It can also serve as a critique of tax evasion, cronyism, bribery and “pay to play” as much as it does of “welfare payments to the undeserving.”

But moral principles are two-sided. When fulfilled they provide self-esteem, but when violated they induce shame. This is why, for example, religious people are often ashamed before themselves, by their private sexual peccadillos, even when the latter are trivial or harmless. One hypothesis is that Trump supporters, and the white working class men they represent, are at risk of feeling ashamed before themselves, because increasingly they can’t get access to the opportunities for hard work that merit fair rewards. It is common knowledge that wages for high-school educated men have been stagnant, and that manufacturing jobs, which once secured them good living standards, have been declining in numbers for decades.  One way to cope with the resulting shame is to project it on to minorities, immigrants and others who live on the margins and have even fewer opportunities to do hard work. The “freeloader” becomes the social scapegoat, a symbol of a condition that threatens “us,” not just “them.”

Deterioration and pain

Consider the following. Anne Case and her co-author, The Nobel prize winning economist Angus Deaton, point out, that there has been a “marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround.” The authors link this trend to “drugs and alcohol, suicide, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis.”

Moreover, as Deaton and Case show, this same group reports increasing physical pain. “One in three white non-Hispanics aged 45–54 reported chronic joint pain in the 2011–2013 period; one in five reported neck pain; and one in seven reported sciatica. Reports of all four types of pain increased significantly between 1997−1999 and 2011−2013. An additional 2.6% of respondents reported sciatica or chronic joint pain, an additional 2.3% reported neck pain, and an additional 1.3% reported facial pain. This increase in pain is one reason that there has been a significant increase in the use of opioids which itself can be a trigger for suicide.

The question is, why has this happened? Pain lies at the intersection between the physical and the psychological. It is also what psychologists call “ego-alien,” meaning that we experience pain as an “other.” That is why we commonly call it an “It” as in, “It hurts.” Distancing ourselves from our pain is adaptive insofar as it allows us to treat “it” with measures that are in themselves painful, for example, in the extreme, amputating an injured limb. 

But at the same time, in distancing ourselves from our pain we are less likely to tackle those causes that are part and parcel of our experience.  For example, if stress leads to back pain, treating it as an “other,” we are less likely to confront those sources of our stress that are part of our lives, for example our low wages, or our children’s poor prospects. Instead we medicate “it,” accentuating our helplessness. This is also what Freud meant by psychological repression. We treat thoughts and feelings that are psychologically painful as if they are alien, not ours, only to discover that they continue to exert a claim on our unconscious attention.

By contrast, good social ties help us ameliorate pain by integrating us into a network of friends and loved ones who, under optimal conditions, buffer us from stress and help us cope with adversity. This is one reason a good working-alliance with a therapist helps people come into touch with their unconscious thoughts. We join a larger social “whole,” our personal network, or our helpful therapist, to undo the split within, between our ego and “it.”  We see this everyday among small children who happily receive our kisses to make their “boo-boo” feel better. Pain in this sense is a measure of social isolation.

This account of the psychosocial basis of pain also explains why Deaton and Case found that suicide is increasing. Ever since Emile Durkheim published his classic study of suicide, it is commonly understood that the social basis for suicide is social disintegration, that is, people no longer feel psychologically linked to their communities. Robert Putnam in his now classic text, “Bowling alone” indeed found that people in working class communities feel increasingly isolated.  They participate less in the panoply of settings, what sociologists call “mediating institutions,” such as labor unions, the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, Churches, the League of Women voters, the Elks, and Parent-Teacher associations, that once glued a community together.

For example, Putnam writes, “For many years, labor unions provided one of the most common organizational affiliations among American workers. Yet union membership has been falling for nearly four decades, with the steepest decline occurring between 1975 and 1985. Since the mid-1950s, when union membership peaked, the unionized portion of the nonagricultural work force in America has dropped by more than half, falling from 32.5 percent in 1953 to 15.8 percent in 1992. By now, virtually all of the explosive growth in union membership that was associated with the New Deal has been erased. The solidarity of union halls is now mostly a fading memory of aging men.”

This conception of social isolation fits with the understanding that Trump supporters feel as if they have no voice. As The Atlantic reports “If there were one question to identify a Trump supporter if you knew nothing else about him, what might it be? “Are you a middle-aged white man who hasn’t graduated from college?” might be a good one. But according to a survey from RAND Corporation, there is one that’s even better: Do you feel voiceless?”

The Tea-Party and populism.

The history of the Tea party is suggestive here. It was set in motion by Republican Party elites, gaining support and traction from FreedomWorks, “a multimillion-dollar conservative non-profit led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX). FreedomWorks is closely aligned with the Tea Party Express, a project of the Republican-run political action committee, ‘Our Country Deserves Better,’ which has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in support to conservative candidates.” In addition, Fox News provided the Tea Party with significant publicity in its early days. Yet Tea Party members soon used it to undermine the elites that started it. In an early foretelling, a Tea Party activist in Virginia, David Brat, defeated Eric Cantor, the Republic Majority Leader in the House of Representatives in a 2014 primary election for the latter’s congressional seat. The Tea Party, and the Trump supporters it helped galvanize is now the voice of its members, not its founders. After all, Trump supporters now threaten to undermine the Republican Party’s capacity to mount a legitimate party convention.

This phenomenon of a once voiceless group helps account for why analysts call Trump’s supporters “populists.” One trope that emerged early in the primary season was that Trump supporters were authoritarian.  But as two researchers, Wendy Rahn and Eric Oliver report in the Washington Post, Trump supporters are less authoritarian than Cruz supporters, and are decidedly much more anti-elitist than are Cruz and (were) Rubio supporters. In fact, Cruz supporters trust elites because they are religious and conservative. By contrast, Trump supporters are populist in the sense that they mistrust all social institutions. Thus as The Atlantic writers note, “White Middle Americans express heavy mistrust of every institution in American society: not only government, but corporations, unions, even the political party they typically vote for—the Republican Party of Romney, Ryan, and McConnell, which they despise as a sad crew of weaklings and sellouts. They are pissed off. And when Donald Trump came along, they were the people who told the pollsters, ‘That’s my guy.’”

This anti-authoritarian stance, this distrust of elites, helps account for some of Trump supporters’ nihilism, that is, their gleeful anticipation of institutional collapse. As one writes, “Like the joker from The Dark Knight, I just want to see the world burn,” 
or as another notes, “Hell, if Bozo the clown was running, I would vote for him,” or, “So, I will happily bide my time dancing foolishly under Mr. Trump's brightly-striped tents and festive lights. Drawn to the man and his message like a moth to a flame.” 


This anti-elitism also explains Trump supporters’ admiration for his unrehearsed performances during the primary debates. As ABC reported, “Candidates usually spend hours and hours preparing for a major debate -- reading up the issues, going through practice Q & A sessions or mock debates and practicing lines to use when the big moment comes. Not Donald Trump. ‘Trump doesn’t rehearse,’ a senior Trump advisor said today. It’s not that his political team hasn’t tried. Trump’s aides have prepared him memos on the issues and the expected lines of questions and potential attacks from the other candidates, but there have been no formal debate prep sessions, no mock Q & A, no practice debates.”

Elites try to exert control in politics, corporations and in large not-for-profit organizations by attending carefully to their strategies for communicating with their various publics and stakeholders. This is the heart of public relations work and may at times entail deceit or at least misdirection. Thus for example and most strikingly, the Tea Party’s origins, lay in, “Tobacco companies’ attempt to create the semblance of broad opposition to tobacco control legislation and to defend ‘smokers’ rights,’ against the charges associated with second hand smoke. These efforts failed, and in 1990 as several researchers note, “Tim Hyde, RJR director of national field operations, outlined a strategy for RJR to create ‘a movement’ resembling what would later emerge as the Tea Party by building broad coalitions around the issue-cluster of freedom, choice and privacy. (As he wrote), ‘Coalition-building should proceed along two tracks: a) a grass- roots, organizational and largely local track; b) and a national, intellectual track within the D.C.-New York corridor. Ultimately, we are talking about a ‘movement,’ a national effort to change the way people think about government’s (and big business’) role in our lives. Any such effort requires an intellectual foundation–a set of theoretical and ideological arguments on its behalf.’”

The dilemma with public relations is that it becomes less effective as it becomes institutionalized. People become inured to its claims, suspecting reasonably that messages cloak interests that are not truthfully revealed. Politicians are suspect as voters learn that their messages have been carefully crafted using focus groups, voter research and tests of advertisements. This creates cynicism, which is fact one emotional basis for nihilistic feelings. Cynicism is intellectualized self-pity, and is based on the experience of helplessness. The nihilistic fantasy reverses helplessness by helping the cynic imagine the prospective destruction of settings that are the seat of his impotence. The Trump movement goes one step better. It can undermine the Republican Party for real.

The post-industrial transition

The term “populism” has resonances in American history. Led by William Jennings Bryan, the first populist movement, representing farm families burdened by debt and deflation, took control of the Democratic Party, only to lose in the watershed presidential election of 1896 to the Republicans.  The populists’ defeat sealed the fate of rural America. It meant that the nation was irrevocably industrial. Cities and their elites were gaining power at the expense of rural areas. The Democratic Party ultimately came to terms with industrialism only when, under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the party legitimated industrial unions by affording them legal recognition. In this way the Party secured union members’ votes and support for the next fifty years.

Using the term “populism” today suggests that just as farmers once wrestled with the shift to an industrial society, urban workers, whose lives were built around steady jobs in manufacturing, are faced with the wrenching transition to a post-industrial society. The costs of this transition are evident in many large cities where depopulated neighborhoods are dominated by abandoned factories. Detroit of course is the most extreme example. This is one way to understand why Trump voters are in the main not college educated since the sine qua non for securing a living in a postindustrial society is to graduate from college. This is because increasingly, productivity depends on human rather than physical capital.  Thus Trump voters feel voiceless because the institutional framework, based on the industrial city, the urban neighborhood, the manufacturing plant and the union, has unraveled.

It might be thought that many of these voters, often identified as “Reagan Democrats,” once had a voice and home in the Republican Party. But of course, the most dramatic and unanticipated feature of the current primary season is the potential destruction of the Republican Party by these same Reagan Democrats.  Trump voters distrust the party’s elites, just as they distrust the media, large corporations, or government bureaucrats who give their tax money away to underserving people.

This is why Republican Party elites are supporting Ted Cruz even though his Senate colleagues thoroughly dislike and mistrust him, and he is likely to lose Hilary Clinton in a general election. While Cruz may lose, the Republican Party will be protected. By contrast, a Trump win in the primaries threatens the beliefs that Republican Party elites hold dear, such as free trade, unregulated markets, and a limited social safety net. Indeed, as the researchers on the Tea party note, “A substantial minority of Republicans—almost 30 percent—said they would welcome ‘heavy’ taxes on the wealthy, according to Gallup. Within the party that made Paul Ryan’s entitlement-slashing budget plan a centerpiece of policy, only 21 percent favored cuts in Medicare and only 17 percent wanted to see spending on Social Security reduced, according to Pew.”

The Republican Party’s weakness

This underlines a central weakness facing the Republican Party.  Marco Rubio, while a candidate, frequently referred to the Party as the “Party of Lincoln and Reagan.” One question this appellation raises is, what was the structural basis for Reagan’s power and charisma? After all in his character, he was quite detached from the role of president, and largely disinterested in policy. Let me propose the following. In the earlier phases of the transition to post-industrial society deregulation and the ethos of free markets were in fact developmental. They increased competition, decreased dependency on welfare, and helped create a climate of entrepreneurship. They gave substance to Reagan’s sunny disposition. These themes helped create an economic and cultural mechanism for harnessing investments in new technologies and for reordering labor markets.  Indeed, in many ways, Bill Clinton’s presidency rested on these very same achievements.

But this stance has come up against its own inherent limits. This is one reason that Reagan’s vision is no longer compelling to the Tea Party’s base, and why in fact Hilary Clinton, strongly identified with her husband’s presidency, faces strong opposition from the left. Most strikingly, the “production” of human capital is imperiled as students accumulate debt they cannot pay off, a central argument in Bernie Sanders’ campaign, while the social safety net is too narrowly conceived and constructed to help working class and underclass communities make the transition to a post industrial society. This is why Trump’s diatribe against free-trade has such resonance, even thought it violates a central tenet of the “Party of Reagan.”  It may be mistaken, in the sense that automation rather than trade has reduced the number of manufacturing jobs.  But restricted trade, and deporting immigrants are symbolic stand-ins for the social policies that are now necessary, but which Republican Party elites never understood nor advanced.  

Ironically, after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, the Republication party tried to “post-modernize” its message by embracing the new minorities and creating a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. This was to be Marco Rubio’s great legislative achievement, which the Republican Party quashed after the Tea Party defeated Eric Cantor, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives. But the Party could not anticipate that a part of its base was increasingly vexed by the elite’s mismanagement of markets, resulting for example in structural unemployment, low wage work, high indebtedness and diminished prospects for upward mobility.  This is one reason why Marco Rubio’s campaign, based on a post modern-identification with minorities, a conservative and religious temperament, and a commitment to free markets ultimately failed.

Coda: The working class

As extraordinary as Trump’s campaign has been, it is important to remember that he has never won the majority of votes in any primary. On average, he is has won about a third of the votes in each state election and of course this is counting only the Republican Party voters.  His supporters represent a relatively small fraction of the total electorate. Moreover, working class members of the Democratic Party have voted for Sanders. But his primary victories highlight the wider tensions we face as a society in transition to a post-industrial age.

Several years ago I saw a compelling photo on the Internet, which unfortunately I can no longer locate. It pictured a large group of United Auto Workers, with clubs and bats in hand, marching down a Detroit avenue in the great strike wave of 1948. It startled me to see this display of militancy and forcefulness.  The union workers were announcing that they could protect themselves. I thought at the time, that this moment, close to seventy years ago, but still within earshot of our current way of life, typified a period in which the American working class could represent itself and its interests without hesitation. It is striking to see Trump as an heir to this moment, and then to review the long and winding history through which unions withdrew from the primary task of organizing low-wage workers, in whatever sector they worked. Instead, they retreated to defending the privileges of their current members who worked in stable jobs.

Perhaps this development was inevitable. Could unions really have organized the large, sprawling and fragmented low- wage service sector of salesclerks, waitresses, fast food workers and janitors?  Instead, unions made their greatest gains among public sector employees, and unfortunately the scale of the pensions they have won in contract settlements with local and state governments have turned them into the taxpayer’s enemy.

In industrial society, politics gained coherence from its class structure; from the rough and ready distinction between workers and capitalists, manual workers and their foremen, finance and production. In a post-industrial society these easy distinctions elude us. Teams are self managing, learning is a part of work, the factory technician controls the computer console of the automated machine, and human capital begets financial capital as entrepreneurs raise money from venture capital firms. But in the resulting confusion a political moment can erupt and throw into high relief all the underlying conflicts that simmer below the surface. At that point the elites stand up and take notice, and we can as well.