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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Understanding Trump phenomenon requires empathy for his supporters

By David McElroy · November 29, 2015

Trump supporters

Donald Trump scares me. As long as he’s a private citizen, he’s just a narcissistic buffoon with money, but he could be uniquely deadly to the world if you hand him the power of the U.S. presidency. So how did we get to the point that this dysfunctional clown leads current presidential polls?

As this is written, 28 percent of likely Republican primary voters say they support Trump. For those of us who listen to the man and immediately realize that he’s at least borderline insane, this seems preposterous. When people first mentioned him as a candidate four years ago, I said it was an indication we had reached “Idiocracy.” As it became clear that he was being taken more and more seriously this year, I compared the situation to Germany’s 1932 election.

For many of us, it’s easy to see why he’s dangerous. It’s easy to see that he’s crazy. What’s not so easy to explain is why so many Americans passionately support this man.

Trump’s supporters are angry and they’re part of an ugly movement. Pretty much every ugly movement in history is an overreaction to something bad that’s happened in the lives of the people involved. Such groups tend to feel angry and marginalized. If you don’t understand their underlying grievance — whether they’re right or wrong — you won’t understand what’s going on — and you’ll have no hope of solving the problem without massive bloodshed.

The fact that Germans in the 1920s and early ’30s were angry, desperate and humiliated led them to turn to Adolph Hitler, a minor demagogue who promised he could fix their problems. How much grief could the world have been spared if the needs and fears of desperate Germans had been taken seriously by the world after the “war to end all wars”?

You don’t have to agree with people to understand their motivations. You don’t have to take their side. You just have to understand what the world looks like from their point of view.

Over the past few decades, I’ve frequently told my politically conservative friends that the legitimate concerns and fears of angry black Americans — especially those packed into disgusting urban ghettos — were going to have to be addressed or else there will eventually be an explosion of pent-up anger.

Most of my conservative white friends have no idea why so many blacks would be angry and feel as though they’ve been mistreated. Many of my friends assume — seriously assume, with the best of intentions — that most black men are criminals and are in prison (or should be). Really. Some educated and intelligent people honestly believe this.

These people assume that poor black Americans today are all poor and unsuccessful because of their own faults and behavior. They have no idea what it’s like to grow up in poverty or in schools which are no better than daycare centers — at best — in quite a few places.

My mother spent many years teaching in one such inner-city school in Birmingham, so I know her stories first-hand. She took early retirement because she couldn’t help her elementary school students and it broke her heart. For the most part, neither their parents nor the school administration wanted anything but to be left alone. They didn’t care whether the children were learning anything. They didn’t care that the classrooms were out of control. They just wanted to warehouse those children.

These white conservatives have no idea what it’s like to be treated badly by police just because you’re black. They have no idea what it’s like to grow up in communities where it’s normal for young girls to have babies and for young boys to learn how to become criminals — simply because that’s normal life.

If you put millions of people into such a situation, it’s eventually going to explode. There’s enough blame to go around, but that’s not the point here. The legacy of slavery is still with us 150 years after it ended. The legacy of Jim Crow is still here 50 years after it was (mostly) ended. Government social engineering by well-meaning progressives has created unintended consequences. Scheming and dishonest black political leaders have also played a huge role in fleecing their voters — lining their own pockets while teaching big chunks of the black voter base to blame the white man for everything. The list of problems goes on and on — but solving such problems or assigning blame isn’t the point here.

The point is that angry cities have been a powder keg. When there’s a flashpoint — as there have been in Baltimore and Ferguson in the last year or so — things can turn ugly quickly. Many of us understand why, but many others are confused and think it’s nothing but criminals looking for an excuse to cause trouble.

The truth is more complicated. Even when the specific people making specific demands are wrongheaded or ignorant, the truth underlying the problems deserves to be understood. I’ve been making that case for a long time, but none of my conservative white friends seem interested in listening.

Right now, I’d like to ask my progressive left friends to look at the opposite problem. Why are all these middle-class white Trump supporters angry?

Yes, Trump is a buffoon and he’s dangerous and his supporters are short-sighted, but why are they like this? Why are they so angry that they’re willing to follow someone who’s so clearly crazy? It’s an indicator that many millions of people know something is wrong — that their values and lifestyles are threatened — and they’re scared.

Trump’s supporters are a particular brand of white populists. They’re not necessarily racists, although a good many of them are. They call themselves conservatives, but that’s true only in the cultural sense. They’re not part of any conservative ideological tradition. They’re just people who feel marginalized.

These are people who have seen themselves demonized for decades by the liberal mainstream as dumb rednecks who are somehow responsible for all the world’s problems. They’ve seen the federal government intrude more and more into their lives. They feel as though every other group has been given special treatment by government. They feel as though politicians, courts, presidents and elite media people have thumbed their noses at them and made them the butt of their jokes.

They’ve seen the economy decline and they blame high taxes for taking more and more of their money and transferring it to people who they assume are lazy bums. They’ve seen government try to achieve racial quotas in hiring — in ways that force companies to hire less qualified people over more qualified people, based on skin color or sex.

They’ve elected Republican politicians who have told them they were going to fix all their problems, but who have changed nothing of substance. They’re angry and desperate to find someone who is strong enough to force their views to be heard.

In focus groups, Trump supporters don’t talk so much about the specific policy proposals Trump favors. They talk about supporting him because he’s saying the sort of “politically incorrect” rhetoric that they want to hear. They say it’s like listening to themselves talk. (Read this story. It explains a lot about this.)

To my progressive friends, you know how you and I have been able to realize that angry and marginalized inner-city blacks were eventually going to rise up in desperation if their concerns and needs weren’t addressed? This is the same way to a group who you’re not inclined to like.

You’ve spent decades belittling and marginalizing these lower middle-class white folks in media and in condescending conversation — and they’re angry about it. This turn to Trump is a small foreshadowing of what they’re heading toward in the future.

I’ve been arguing for many years that this country is heading toward social and economic collapse. The government-managed economy isn’t sustainable, because markets aren’t being allowed to function correctly. (People blame free markets for the mess we’re currently in, but we haven’t had a real free market for at least a century — and it’s gotten progressively more controlled and doomed.)

We have an elite that has done pretty well. Those who live on the periphery of the elites have done less well, but still live nice lives. Increasingly, though, there are growing numbers of people in this country who feel as though they’re being ripped off by the system, for one reason or another.

Many poor blacks feel they have no stake in the system. Many of those folks are ready to revolt at the first halfway legitimate excuse. Many poor and middle-class whites feel as though they’ve been marginalized and mistreated. Many of those folks are ready to follow the first strong man who claims he will “Make American Great Again.” Sound familiar?

You don’t have to agree with the political positions or proposals of any of these people — white, black, Republican, Democrat, whatever. I don’t agree with any of them, but I need to understand them.

Trump and his supporters are a natural result of what happens when you tell people that the majority get to rule and you have a lot of people angry and feeling ignored. They’re desperate to find a strong man who will make them heard.

The riots in places such as Baltimore and Ferguson are also a natural result of what happens when people feel they have no control over what’s going on in their communities. They’re desperate to make the rest of the world understand their plight.

As long as you believe that it’s moral for a majority to elect politicians to impose their will on everyone else, some form of this is going to happen. There’s no mechanism within this system for groups to have their own areas where they can set their own rules and live as they want to live. People of every group that feels somehow oppressed by the elites will eventually turn to more and more radical ways to get their own way.

The real problem is a “one size fits all” system that asserts a right to control everyone in the name of a majority.

We need a real conversation about how different groups can go their own way and live as they want to live, even if the rest of us disagree with them. It won’t be an easy conversation and the answers will lie in solutions that go far beyond the nation-state solutions that have been so common for centuries. But something has to change.

Honestly, though, there’s no chance things will change. The vast majority of people still believe in the idea of a holy paternalistic government controlling and “protecting” everyone — in patterns laid down by elites who think they’re better than everyone else. And because people still believe in that system, the conversation about a peaceful breakup won’t happen. When the end comes, it will be bloody and ugly. Nobody will be happy.

When it comes to young black men rioting over police treatment, you can choose to hate them and blame them — or you can take the time to understand why they feel and believe as they do.

When it comes to Trump supporters following an obvious lunatic, you can choose to just call them stupid and blame them — or you can take the time to understand why they feel and believe as they do.

You don’t have to agree with them — on either side — but if you don’t take the time to understand where they’re coming from and why they’re doing the things they’re doing, you’re going to come to the wrong conclusions.

I have great empathy for millions of black Americans who feel they’ve been marginalized and mistreated. I have great empathy for millions of white Trump supporters who feel they’ve been marginalized and mistreated. I don’t completely agree with what either group believes is the way out of their troubles, but I have empathy for them. I understand them.

Trump supporters believe that they have the right to elect a man to enforce their will on everybody else. They are using an electoral system that you’ve told them is holy and right.

But the supporters of every other candidate are doing the same thing. If you support Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Ben Carson or Jeb Bush — or any of them — you’re essentially saying that it’s your right to elect someone to force your will on other people.

The problem isn’t Trump or his supporters. The problem is a system that claims a right to force others to obey.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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