What’s Going on in the Brains of Trump Supporters?

A précis--with minor changes--from “The Psychology Behind Donald Trump's Unwavering Support" because I know that Trumpites wouldn’t read the full article.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The state of being under-informed or misinformed and being completely unaware of being under-informed or misinformed. In other words, one’s ignorance is completely invisible, so whatever you know makes you a self-realized expert in your nonfactual opinion about what you don't know. Or, in other words, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority that comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability.

Hypersensitivity to Threat

Science has unequivocally shown that the conservative brain has an exaggerated fear response when faced with stimuli that may be perceived as threatening. The fear response is automatic and not influenced by reason or logic. Many conservative brains will automatically light up when confronted with fear, like the fear mongering Trump induces by portraying Mexican and Muslim immigrants as imminent dangers. Trump supporters’ knee-jerk reaction is to seek safety in the one who promises safety. First you create the need for a hero, and then you pretend you are that hero. Donald Trump is the candidate who is offering the most extreme measures for protection. 

Terror Management Theory

Instilling meaning and value in life with religion, politics, national identity, et. al. without reason, logic, empathy, and compassion (fear is selfish) as a means to ward off the fear of death, an existential terror that resides mostly in the unconscious when threats are not imminent. When these people are unknowingly reminded of death, which happens after fear mongering, they will strongly defend those who have the same maligned worldview. When fears of death are aroused, people are more likely to embrace leaders like Trump who provide a false sense of psychological security by making their citizens feel like they are valued contributors to a great mission to eradicate evil. Hence, the Make America Great hat that sits atop the brains of Trump supporters.

High Attentional Engagement

Unlike Hillary Clinton, Trump is outrageously entertaining and his showmanship appeals to many Americans' addiction to entertainment, particularly reality shows. Trump supporters may even disagree with Trump’s message but will vote for him anyway because he’s fun. He's a clown.

What can reasonable people do about this?

Just vote Blue.

The Perils of Career

Although they swap around in our commercial soup, there are obvious distinctions between the modes—job, trade, profession, career—of how we earn our daily bread and some not so obvious distinctions, especially between profession and career where subtle differences can have huge and resounding implications in America’s most prized institutions: Government, Education, Finance, Health Care, Energy, and Justice to name just a few.

I have had jobs, jobs that I liked and jobs that I didn’t like although there didn’t seem to be much difference in their doing because my motive was to do the work, be paid accordingly, and live like hell on the weekends. I have never had a trade although at one time I wanted to be a plumber because not only did it pay well, it also seemed to pay, from what I could observe, even larger dividends in pride, independence, and ownership. I just retired from the teaching profession which I never regarded as work but as passion. I used to tell my students that the best part of my day was with them. Although I didn’t make much money at it, actually less than I made on the job, I absolutely loved it because it came with a spiritual resonance of altruism, that the endeavor was directed to the well-being of others (profession comes from the Latin professiō; the taking of vows upon entering a religious order, a public acknowledgment). I suppose doctors, among other professionals, must feel the same way in their service.

I have never had a career, nor did I want one, because career did not resonate with my character. It was just not me anymore than the job I did eons ago was me. Career seems to have a general and transitional quality about it rather than one of focus and steadfastness (career comes from the Latin carrāria meaning “road”). Even though career people may have come from a profession, the profession serves as the first credential rung in the ladder and a step to get past on the journey up. The principal of the school had to teach to become the principal but he or she is no longer a teacher. There is no “principal profession.” Professionals must continually practice their art to qualify. I would take no comfort in a cardiologist, who, while inserting a stent into my heart, ups and tells me “Jeesh! I haven’t done this in years,” no matter how high he or she perches on the career ladder.

Another more volatile distinction between profession and career is their respective degree of accountability. When the teacher, nurse, pro athlete, actor, et al slip up it is often the case that they are shredded by the public simply because they are visible. People quite naturally do not like to feel diminished by those around them and tearing professionals down, especially once blood has been drawn, is an American sport. I distinctly remember in public schools how some classified support staff often made concerted, furtive efforts to “get” a teacher and how students roared with laughter when I erred. Additionally, because professionals are in service to the public it logically follows that they are—and should be—accountable to the public. However, once a professional steps up on the career ladder into administration and the corporate elite, they not only disconnect from their profession but they disconnect from the public. Teachers, for example, receive—and rightly so—significantly more accolades from students, parents, and peers than do administrators. Careers, like it or not, are for the sake of the career, for the road up and, consequently, even though society benefits greatly from those upward dynamics, the price to society comes at the loss of a huge body of accountability—and therein lies the danger. Once an impropriety in an institution reaches the career camaraderie —or originates among their ranks— up the ladder it goes and then as far as you and I are concerned, which isn’t far: Nothing. Whatever the impropriety was gets lost circulating in the official loop like clothes on the spin cycle and outlanders, the public, are assumed to be none the worse off—until, of course, someone retrieves the laundry and then down the ladder it goes lickety-split landing in a back-alley dumpster too grimy and scary to rummage in or on some suitable and unsuspecting scapegoat (The Penn State Scandal comes to mind). Of course, once the impropriety hits the streets, the damage to real lives ends up as the shibboleth “scandal” that wafts into the blue like early morning haze. The elites know this.

Transparency and accountability of 21st century lexical vogue are carelessly tossed about catchwords used as palliatives for what ails America’s institutions rather than practiced as effective policy. It’s almost as if the words function as the career administrators’ Freudian yalps of pent up guilt for protecting career for its own sake. The way to keep and hold career administrators and the corporate elite transparent and accountable is the same principle that keeps the public-at-large honest. The consequences of exposure.

Deep Behind the Lovely Dark Eye

I am sitting with Fahed in one of the rooms of his palatial home reviewing his essay when his mother slowly winds her way downstairs and asks me timorously in broken English if I would come upstairs. I am confused because I am never invited outside this room where I meet with Fahed for tutoring sessions. I have met both parents who are kind and gracious to a fault. I follow Fahed’s mother upstairs and into an opulent room where a very large TV is playing. Fahed’s father, who is a high ranking official in the Kuwait Navy, rises to greet me and shakes my hand. He is stone-faced and when I turn to the TV, I see why. At first I can’t make it out, and then I see one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City billowing smoke out of several floors and then I see a plane swerve and deliberately crash head on into the other tower. I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing. Is this a movie? The scene is played over and over and the commentary and the rolling script is in Arabic so I don’t know what has really happened. Is this an accident? And then Fahed’s father translates the Arabic for me and I hear “America is under attack.” Fahed’s father in utmost respect and care says “This is very, very bad. Would you like us sir to take you home?” I tell him yes, I had better go, and they both avert their eyes from mine.

A group of teachers has gathered in the courtyard of the teacher’s residences that we have mockingly dubbed the Golden Palace. We stand in a loose circle around the school’s owner, a rotund Kuwaiti woman, and her accomplice, a Kuwaiti man who does not have a title. We shift our weight and shuffle our feet and look disconsolately at one another. No one speaks. I finally tell the owner in a sturdy and straightforward voice that we need our passports, that they should not have confiscated them in the first place. It’s against US law. She tells her sidekick to get our passports and then does what she can to console us but blows it completely when she blurts that really stupid administrator’s cliché used to mask self-serving motive: “We have to think about the students.” Her motive is profit. If we leave, there is no American School.

Most of my students are from Islamic countries: Kuwait, Jordan, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Bahrain and then some. They are wonderful and respectful young people and I enjoy being with them and I think they reciprocate those feelings. However, on this day after September 11, 2001, I am shocked at their behavior. They are jubilant. It’s as if school was suddenly let out for summer vacation. And then I am reminded that these are Muslim kids and they have an inborn hatred for Israel and for America by association and that monstrous hatred has emerged from its unconscious cave. They are in the halls cheering and they are oblivious to “American” in their school name and there are oblivious to me, their teacher, who they profess to honor and even love. They are hysterical from an inborn hatred that they feel licensed to fully express, a victory celebration for an inarguable criminal act. They file into class and become subdued once they cross the threshold although I notice sideways glances laced with smiles. Without compunction they ask me ad lib how I feel about the bombing of the World Trade Centers. I feel I have to say something but I want to fall back on “this is not the time nor the place for that discussion” but it is. It most surely is.

“At this point,” I tell them, “I only know that some three thousand innocent men, women, and children were incinerated and crushed yesterday over an ancient hatred between Arabs and Jews although I am relatively sure that most of the victims and their families and friends did not share in that hatred, and I am most certain that their deaths will not advance either side’s cause although I am certain that more innocent people will die before it is over, but it will never be over. Will it? It won’t ever be over because you cannot even identify your hatred and therefore you cannot rid yourself of it and it will grow fat within you. Did you forget that while you were out in the halls celebrating the deaths of nearly three thousand Americans that I too am an American? Yes, you look down at your feet now not in deserved shame but in sheepish embarrassment. Please note that it took me to remind you because you were too caught up in the jamboree of your loosed hatred to be considerate towards me and all the other Americans around you, your teachers, your principal, your counselor, and some of your peers. And by the way, there were three hundred seventy-one non-Americans killed in the attack, Arab nationalities among them.” A lovely sweet covered Egyptian girl raises her hand.

“Yes, Miriam.”

“But sir, people die every day. Why not Americans?”

I am stunned at first and then I realize that she has not framed her question the way she’d like and I understand her dilemma. She wonders why Americans in general are living lives of relative privilege, comfort, safety, and autonomy while Palestinians live lives of dispossession and squalor and suffer and die needless barbaric deaths. But I can’t answer her question in a way that won’t just add to her quandary and I don’t want to risk being glib or sarcastic. What I really want to tell her is that once the smoke clears from past conflicts that arose from America’s unwavering defense of its ideology--right or wrong--what emerges is an America that has a unique, unspoken creed of humanity that has forgiveness at its center and where a never-ending suffocating shroud of hatred cannot form. In spite of charges of imperialism, the Marshall Plan in Europe and SCAP (Supreme Commander of Allied Powers) in Japan helped those countries, onetime foes not far removed, rebuild and become US allies and economic powers in their own right. So I am honest in another way, which always works. “I cannot answer that satisfactorily, Miriam, but I wish I could,” and I flash a smile. “Okay, so please take out the review questions that are due today and let’s go over them.”

While students are flailing with notebooks and rustling papers, I am thinking about what Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp said in the movie Tombstone: “Run! Tell all the curs the law is comin’! You tell em I'm comin’—and hells’ comin’ with me, you hear?”

Texan George W. Bush is the US President. And that scares me.

A Teletubby Cabal

In America, at least, I do not think the powerful and wealthy elite—the leaders, the politicians (democrat or republican), the CEOs, the media, et al—are out to defraud, dispossess, and delete the proletariat and the righteous. I just don’t think there’s some kind of scarlet-robed and hooded cabal that meets in candlelit Gothic catacombs to plot our ruin—although I’ll have to admit it does play well like a Dan Brown novel (You’ll understand if I don’t say a “good” Dan Brown novel). I remember how fun it was to get all shivery when I heard scary urban legends in the dark, and I swear I too saw the “thing” flit by the window in the old boarded up house over on Willow Street, although now when I think about it, I suspect it must have been headlights playing across a darkened window. 

Many people, of course, never quite grow up or they are just really, really bored or more likely a little of both. Of course the whole good and evil dichotomy plays perfectly into the hands of the Christian Right, The Moral Majority, The Tea Party—Oh hell, pretty much the whole Conservative base—because it mirrors the Bible story in so many mythical, mystical, hysterical, and ridiculous ways. If you can believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old (How do dinosaurs figure in?), the big bearded guy on the Sistine Chapel ceiling fashioned us all from a deluxe set of Play-Doh, some old guy selected two of all the animals (That would almost certainly have to include insects, microorganisms that are not water borne, and birds that could not stay aloft for 150 days) and loaded them onto a boat that couldn’t possibly accommodate all of them, and another old guy parted a sea with a wave of his staff (If he could do that, then why couldn’t that old Hebrew sailor do it, too), then it’s a short hop indeed to believe wholesale that guns, the death penalty, war, inequality/discrimination (of anyone who you are not), creationism, and sexual abstinence are righteous ideas--for everyone. However, I am almost certain that those who believe that the anti-Christ (Which Teletubby is it this week?) and a plethora of perceived evil factions—Democrats, Muslims/Palestinians, LGBTQ, Pro Choice Advocates, Evolutionists, Environmentalists, et al—are out to get them are in no wise interested in the welfare of, to them, a populace-apparition (See Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”), an abstraction, outside a small congregation of like-minded and immediate family and friends, nor do they wake up every morning agonizing over thoughts about the demise of a grand idea of America (that star-spangled blazing victory thingy in the national anthem), or thoughts about the 25,000 children who will die from starvation before sundown, or about rising sea-levels and receding ice and the wholesale destruction of 6,000 square miles of rain forests—the lungs of the globe—annually. No, actually, the Moral Majority wake up every morning mother f---ing all the “liberal commie leftist” who do because the Far Right is generally afraid they’re just not going to get enough (Isn't their chief gripe always about taxes?) although their loudest mouths—Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, Santorum, O’Reilly, Bachman— seem to have more than enough.

 

If Conservatives cared at all about America, they’d all be on PTA, attend parent/teacher conferences and all civic forums, and question why America lags behind the civilized world in education, and if they cared at all about the globe and its inhabitants—their god’s sacrosanct creation—they’d send food rather than prayers to the starving masses (not tithes to the likes of Jimmy Swaggart to spend on whores) and quit relegating the destruction of the globe and its resources to that anybody’s guess “God works in mysterious ways” crap but rather to stupid people who work in really stupid ways (and using the U. of East Anglia debacle as proof against global warming is like saying all Christians are like Jimmy Swaggart). Inequality, urban decay, poor education, starvation, crime, and a dying planet are not abstractions. They’re tangible problems that have real solutions that you won’t find on Fox and Friends. All you’ll find there is fear in a glitzy PTL (à la Jimmy and Tammy Fay) package.

 

Come on, though, isn’t it really just that big American political “refrigerator” bluff and bluster when kith and kin are over after church for burgers and booze before the big game? I’ve knelt at that barbecue, too, but for some reason once it got quiet and I was left with “my own” thoughts, I felt fraudulent and ever the fool, even evil. So I left (double entendre intended).

Ferretic Nitrocarburizing

My wife, who had to wait in line all night to get food during Poland’s 1981 to 1983 martial law, becomes enamored with America but I am disillusioned because I became enamored with the close-to-the-bone deliberateness and soberness of East European life. After two years there, I cannot find my place in the materialism, superficiality, comfort-at-all-costs, provincial mindset, and the violence that seems to define much of byway America’s character.

"The idea that poor education is related to crime is pretty intuitive." I find this pitifully evident in the mainstream school where I teach.

A new and promising teacher does not change the star football player’s grade and is not offered a contract. She is angry with me because I advised her to hold her ground. Teachers squabble like hyenas over who gets a TV and a VHS player because they have resorted to entertainment rather than negotiate the minefield of effective teaching where students may get grades they don’t like in this product oriented Walmart culture. Our students can’t manage above a composite fifty percent in state mandated English and math tests, which is really no surprise when the US ranks 27th out of 34 countries in education because the public, by and large, is apathetic, at best, towards education—but citizens blame teachers for dismal results. Who else? Teachers are publicly humiliated and pilloried over half-truths and outright lies from hysterical adolescents (and administrators) who believe that education is a right rather than a privilege. Good and promising teachers leave--or stay and become bad teachers under the weight of the Sisyphus stone while administrators brush their shoulders and smooth their skirts and remodel their offices.

Student and teacher hit lists proliferate and I imagine taking a bullet between the eyes while announcing a vocabulary quiz. Christ! I won't even hear the "thwap" from the little meteor zipping through my skull just above the right eye and scattering my brains out all over the whiteboard like so much Crazy String. And here I am, crucified on the podium and dumb agape while Vocab Quiz 5 adheres to the coagulating blood dot on my forehead. This is pastoral Central Oregon for Christ’s sake, not East LA’s Hollenbeck or the South Bronx’s Tremont.

On my way to the store for milk and Pampers some drugged-up nutball tries to hijack my car but I speed off as soon as he grabs the door handle. I stopped at an ATM one evening back and an emaciated black-toothed tattooed character knocks me out of the way and proceeds to use the machine. The guy didn’t even have the decency to tell me to “Get the fuck out of my way.” I think the unthinkable.

I swore off guns decades ago but maybe it’s time to lock and load. My wife and I talk it over and I cannot believe what I’m saying: “Well, the Glock is the official NATO gun and it has ferritic nitrocarburizing.” My wife's eyes twinkle. That does it. What, we’re both going to start packing heat to go grocery shopping? We sell out, pack our toys, and head back to Poland, although I turn sharply south to take a teaching job in Kuwait where I will watch a rocket sizzle over the rooftops three years later and where I will feel significantly safer I kid you not.