334. Explaining Trump's Followers

It's not Donald Trump who needs explaining, it's his followers.  How can so many Americans go for such an empty entertainer?  Have they lost their minds?

No, no, they can't have, not after so many years of education, so many hours in civics classes, so much time reading history assignments, so much attention — oh God, the pain — going over writing that had to be logical and coherent and responsible enough to satisfy English teachers. 

Now those teachers can't bear to watch, and listen, and take in the roars of support.  Half of them in my retirement home are in tears.  Did the seed just all fall on stony ground?

No, there are other explanations, and I would like to offer one, but finding a welcome for it will require some doing.  Everybody with an axe to grind is jumping in now with an explanation that will sharpen his.  Mad at Republican elites? mad at the media? mad at liberals?  Blame them for producing Donald Trump.  There are so many columnists doing this that, according to Noah Berlatsky (LA Times, 3-10-16), there is now a "pundit genre" named "Trump-blame think pieces."  Some blame Clinton's open-trade policy, some Bush's tax cuts, some Obama's bank bailouts.  Among people blamed are John Boehner, Rush Limbaugh, John Kasich, and Al Franken.  All in some way responsible, directly or by backlash, for the Trump phenomenon.

Since the person I am going to add to that list cannot, without risk of immediate turn-off, be named, I want to begin my blaming at a distance, with your memories of a backlash.  Did you ever come out of Sunday School and right away hear somebody say, "Shit!"?  And did you ever feel a tingle at that?  And sense other boys feeling tingles?  Well, if you did, I think you were feeling what a lot of Trump's followers are feeling.  And if it's strong enough you'll run over and give him a cheer.

What is that boy lashing back at?  If you are a philosopher, tracing everything to its ultimate source, and indifferent to turn-offs, you'll say "Jesus Christ."  If you're a pundit, required by circulation levels to avoid turn-offs, you'll stop short and say "love," or, pushing it, "Christian love."  And if you're a reporter, less concerned with deep traces, you'll just say, "his Sunday School teacher."  In any case it's a voice for love, and the boy is sick of it. 

That sickness is what we're trying to understand, and in doing so we constantly need the reminder from the reporter: our responses to love depend a lot on how it's channeled.  It came to Huck Finn, for example, through the  Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, who put him on a chair and taught him how nicey-nice he had to be to other people.  He got sick of it and lit out for the woods.  Nietzsche's two maiden aunts taught him much the same way.  He got sick of it and wrote The Genealogy of Morals.  I know there's room for debate over what caused Nietzsche's indigestion, whether it was the food itself, Christ's beatifying of the weak, or whether it was the way of feeding, but certainly the way of feeding has a lot to do with it in Huck's case.  And, I think, the case of Trump's followers.

What, equivalent to what was delivered by Miss Watson and Nietzsche's aunts, have those followers been hearing?  No, not what is being delivered, but what a man of shaky education will hear as being delivered?  A lot of nicey-nice.  You don't just meet your responsibilities to the poor and the imprisoned and the enslaved, you've got to have affection for them, all of them, everybody you (or they) can call an Other, of whatever race, gender, class, mentality, or capability.  You've got to recognize how they can be hurt, and oh in so many ways you never thought of.

Consider how a man, sensibility undeveloped and testosterone flowing, will now be going through life.  There are unprecedented hazards all around him.  Stereotype here, offend there, accidentally code in front of this one, signal wrong to that one — oh my God she's going to faint — and he's in trouble.  What are those circumlocutions that keep the well-educated safe, the formulas that certify right thought and good heart?  He'll never learn them.  And up ahead so many Others.  Well, he'll try to tiptoe past.  Again.

All right, are you in that fellow's shoes?  Here's Donald Trump walking onto the scene, looking at Megyn Kelly, and saying, "You're a bimbo."  Then at Hillary Clinton and saying, "You're a total phony."  Then, pointing at President Obama, saying, "Our great African-American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.”  Haven't  you seen him before?  He's the kid who walked out of Sunday School, stuck a wad of tobacco in his cheek, and said, "Shit."  If you tingled then you'll tingle now, and just might join the roar for Donald Trump.