Strange Bedfellows: Trumps Political Base

Details: Published on Friday, 23 October 2020 03:04; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2223 ... October 23, 2020
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Strange Bedfellows: Trump’s Political Base

Robert Chernomas

"Earlier in his career the world had watched him with amusement, that people refused to take him seriously, and as one action after another met with amazing success, this amusement was transformed into incredulousness. It was inconceivable that such a thing could actually happen in our modern civilization. A madman had become the leader. Having classified him in this way you might think that all we need to do is to eliminate the madman from the scene of activities, replace him with a sane individual, and the world will again return to a normal and peaceful state of affairs."

Then there was the cautionary note.

"Focusing on the individual’s madness begs the question as to the sanity of society that created him as its spokesman and leader, that a reciprocal relationship exists between the leader and the people who spawned him. Removing such a leader is simply removing the overt manifestation of the disease. Focusing on the madman does not take us very far in understanding... those who support him. What are the social influences, family patterns, methods of training and education, opportunities for development of his supporters? If a large section of a given culture rebels against the traditional pattern, then we must assume that new social influences have been introduced which tend to produce a type of character which cannot thrive in the old cultural environment."

The assessment above is from the group of psychiatrists who wrote a World War II report, "A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler," for the Office of Strategic Services of the United States Government.

Donald Trump is the object of a relentless 24-hour news cycle where he is adored by an enraptured base that sees an attack on him as an attack on themselves, and for his opponents he is often described as a narcissistic personality, an attachment-disordered, shameless populist demagogue with no regard for facts, law, morality, or humanity. The question raised by Hitler’s psychoanalytic inquisitors applies to contemporary America; is he really that idiosyncratic and anomalous or more the child of neoliberal capitalism in the United States?

I argue that Trump represents one class and one large subsection of Americans that rebelled against the politics of the so-called "Golden Age" and the "Great Society" that contributed to the transition from the "Golden Age" to neoliberalism, the effects of the which shifted the political economy of the US to the right and the resulting epic inequality, macroeconomic instability, and the social and health crisis that followed.