What causes Trumpism?: A different account

The 2016 U.S. presidential election caught a lot of people by surprise, including me. What caused its outcome? As the disaster unfolded, news commentators described it as a cry for help from the working class or an act of low-information voters. It quickly became apparent that those explanations didn't hold water. Trump voters were on average richer than Clinton voters, and Trumpism always had been and continued to be a saturation bombing campaign on the minds of Americans. Later, political scientists tried to find better characterizations of the Trump voter, using concepts like status threat.

But with hindsight, I don't think it makes sense to try to analyze the phenomenon by looking at its supporters and trying to find some personal characteristic they tend to share.

If the characteristic is one of the characteristics of Trumpism, then this is vacuous. People have brown hair because their hair is brown in color. People support an illiberal (or racist, irrational, authoritarian, ...) political movement because they're illiberal (or racist, irrational, and so forth).

Or if the proposed characteristic is some thing that preexisted Trumpism, then we're guaranteed not to find anything of interest. Trump gained power in 2016 by winning 46% of the popular vote in a big, diverse country. You can't stitch together that kind of vote total using only votes from men, the uneducated, or some other restricted category. The education factor may seem to have spectacular predictive value (in 2016, Trump won among non-college whites by 40 points), but actually this seems to be mainly a proxy for racism and sexism. Controlling for racism and sexism reduces the effect of education on Trump voting so much that the 2016 election looks like previous elections.¹ Evidence doesn't seem to show that college cures racism or sexism; rather, people who are less racist and sexist are more likely to go to college.

Washington, DC, January 6, 2021. A QAnon hashtag is displayed on the sign.

It does make sense to investigate the life stories of individuals who are Trumpists and make sense of why a particular individual went down that road, but this is not methodologically accessible to objective scientific or statistical study. I know Trumpists who are clearly that way because they're religious fundamentalists, and some who are clearly that way because they have a sense of (non-economic) grievance. I'm confident of those assessments, but that doesn't convert into a statistical study or a way of explaining a vote count. E.g., my personal sample of Trumpists is almost 100% male, but that's probably because few women are the kind of people who would get in my face with their racism and conspiracy theories, even if that is what they believe in.

For these reasons, I think it's probably not helpful here to think of people as individuals who have characteristics and make choices. They are, but that doesn't help us to explain a vote count. What seems productive is to consider wider cultural forces like the internet. The result is an impersonal picture reminiscent of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Or "The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded." Critical thinking is hard, and most people can't do it. No democracy can trust itself to the hope that most of its voters are critical thinkers.

We used to have Walter Cronkite to tell us what to think, but most people these days get their news from social media. If we want to turn the tides on populist authoritarianism worldwide, maybe we should focus more on just preventing the internet/media ecosystem from becoming an even worse cesspool of disinformation. For example, we could try to stop political actors from using AI bots that pose as human beings on social media.

Charlottesville, August 12, 2017

There are also demographic reasons to hope that if we can hold out for another decade, things may get better. White evangelicalism, which in the US has closely allied itself with Trumpism, has been in rapid decline. And many people who have lost family members to QAnon describe them as Baby Boomers who were not digital natives.²

Thanks for reading!

Ben Crowell, 2023 May 21

other blog posts

This post is CC-BY-ND licensed.

Images

QAnon shirt: Marc Nozell, CC-BY, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QAnon_vendor_(48555556067).jpg

MAGA Jesus: Tyler Merbler, CC-BY, https://www.flickr.com/photos/37527185@N05/50826699171/

Nazi salute: Evan Nesterak, CC-BY, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nazi_Salute_(36543229556).png

Notes