08-08-2017, 10:59 PM
(08-07-2017, 02:25 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Psychological Study Of Trump Voters Reveals Creepy Common Traits They Share
A psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz has put together a psychological profile based on other psychological studies, polls and demographics to really get a good mental view of what is inside the mind of a Donald Trump voter. What he's come up with are five common traits that we see throughout almost all Trump supporters in this country. Here they are.
The first one, authoritarian personality disorder. What this means is that people who support Donald Trump are people who support a very strong rule of law, at the expense of their own freedoms. Now this is something we have absolutely seen since Donald Trump took office. We have seen far too many Donald Trump supporters saying that they support his strong enforcement of immigration laws, and then, "Oh no, they deported my husband. They deported the rest of my family." That is the authoritarian personality disorder. They lost their own freedom, their family lost their freedom, all because they wanted that strict rule of law.
As a liberal I assume the worst with a right-wing, authoritarian regime. "Tough on crime" by a right-wing government friendly to elites and at best indifferent to the well-being of everyone else implies that the government will become a tool of enforcement of the economic and bureaucratic elites. Maybe the economy becomes more efficient in ensuring that people work harder and longer for less and that monopoly power gets the opportunity for a coldly-rational, if cruel, planning that ensures that certain people get the capital and that others get drained...
I have no problem with police enforcing the law against the street criminal who is the friend of nobody, especially those who must live in the domain of the violent, exploitative criminal.
The authoritarian personality is a well-recognized, if often controversial, construct.
Quote:Authoritarians are nearly always ethnocentric in that they have a certain, simple and unshakable belief in the superiority of their own racial, cultural and ethnic group with a powerful disclaim for all those in other groups. This can easily lead to brutality, aggression and naked open prejudice.
Whilst the idea took hold it has been criticized both because many other factors lead to the development of authoritarian thinking and behavior but also because prejudiced behavior is shaped by others for powerful situational factors. Social psychologist reject the fundamental attribution error concept of authoritarianism explaining every day prejudice. They believe group and situational factors are much more important in the development and maintenance of discrimination and prejudice.
Yet authoritarians have been shown to avoid situations that involve any sort of ambiguity or uncertainty, are reluctant to believe that ‘good people’ possess both good and bad attributes. However they often appear less interested in political affairs, participate less in political and community activities, and tend to prefer strong leaders.
There are a number of well-established measures of authoritarianism; the best known (and hence the most widely used) is the California F Scale which attempts to measure prejudice, rigid thinking. There are nine factors and statements reflecting each factor:
1. Conventionalism: rigid adherence to conventional middle-class values. (‘Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.’)
2. Authoritarian submission: uncritical acceptance of authority. (‘Young people sometimes get rebellious ideas, but as they grow up they ought to get over them and settle down.’)
3. Authoritarian aggression: a tendency to condemn anyone who violates conventional norms. (‘A person who has bad manners, habits and breeding can hardly expect to get along with decent people.’)
4. Anti-intraception: rejection of weakness or sentimentality. (‘The businessman and the manufacturer are much more important to society than the artist and professor.’)
5. Superstition and stereotypy: belief in mystical determinants of action and rigid, categorical thinking. (‘Some day it will probably be shown that astrology can explain a lot of things.’)
6. Power and toughness: preoccupation with dominance over others. (‘No weakness or difficulty can hold us back if we have enough willpower.’)
7. Destructiveness and cynicism: a generalized feeling of hostility and anger. (‘Human nature being what it is, there will always be war and conflict.’)
8. Projectivity: a tendency to project inner emotions and impulses outward. (‘Most people don’t realize how much our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places.’)
9. Sex: exaggerated concern for proper sexual conduct. (‘Homosexuals are hardly better than criminals and ought to be severely punished.’)
Of course this may not fully mesh with the conventional Left-Right division on the political spectrum. It obviously fits fascists extremely well, and right-wingers who claim to hold fascists in disdain (like members of the John Birch Society, Opus Dei, or cultists of Ayn Rand) slightly less well. But replace the conservative agenda with Stalinism or Trotskyism as a 'socialist' ideal or with either Ba'athist ideology or that of the Jihadist agenda of al-Qaeda or the Taliban of a culture offered as a rival to the West... and only ugliness can result. All cultures are prone to this authoritarianism, as with Aum Shinrikyo (Buddhism) or Kahane Chai (Judaism). The anti-homosexual crusade of the late Fred Phelps fits in well.
OK. People will try to go conventional no matter how they differ because being the odd-man-out is uncomfortable unless being such is a corollary of high achievement. Some authorities are benign and well-meaning (the typical schoolteacher), and part of maturity is finding out which authority is benign and needful (the traffic cop who sees me accelerating a bit early at the edge of town) and which is unacceptable (the cop who assumes that dark skins imply that someone is up to no good).
We had better show empathy with those in distress if we are to consider ourselves good people. (Surely you remember my tale of calling the cops on a situation that suggested that a child was in danger of brutality from parents). There are gentler means of exercising power than brutal command with harsh punishment for any deviance from the orders. We can all be rendered helpless, which suggests that we must limit the possibility of people being turned into helpless victims. Because sex is a cornerstone of much identity and is essential to reproduction, it is safest that we select what sex is acceptable because it is an inevitable and benign part of life (homosexuality) and what isn't (child sex abuse).
Quote:The second common personality trait, social dominance orientation. Now what this means is that Trump voters are far more likely than other people in this country to believe that we need some kind of societal hierarchy where the higher class, the upper class is clearly above and gets to oppress those below them. A little bit of irony here, considering the fact that many Donald Trump voters are not in that top 1%, they're actually down here in the bottom. But they believe that one day they will be at the top and they deserve all the power and they'll be the ones holding down everybody else.
The more virulent supporters of President Trump may be in miserable states of life, but they may see him as a hero for repressing what those wretches see as elites. Middle-class minorities who don't know their place under the comforting myth of white supremacy. The educated. Those in wretched economic situations (let us say the rural white unmarried woman with a child out of wedlock) may have a job in which they see incidences of spending beyond their dreams (short of buying the winning ticket of the Super-Duper Megabucks Lottery) in some middle-class person buying enough motor fuels, snacks, and beer in one transaction that adds up to more money than that convenience-store clerk makes in a day. That middle-class person owns a cottage at the lake where that convenience-store clerk swam as a child and is now priced out of the experience.
Life can be rough, and Donald Trump suggests that he can "make America great again". Never mind that 'great' really means 'easier'. Real estate alone was far less pricey when America had 150 million people than when it has 300 million people. White privilege used to be more of a reality... but America was clearly not better for blacks who have at least as strong a claim to being Americans as I do when Jim Crow practice made life miserable for most blacks. Add to this, the Manufacturing Era ensured that so long as there were shortages of manufactured goods, there would be good pay for working on an assembly line -- especially when the ownership recognized that workers needed a stake in the system. Better consumerism than communism?
The fault with Donald Trump is that he profiteers upon the economic competition of the middle class to be able to afford living in expensive housing -- housing expensive because the opportunities are in place in which Donald Trump collects exorbitant rents. He's as shameless an exploiter as any capitalist ever was (short of a slave-owning planter or a German industrialist exploiting labor in concentration camps). But he has a safe distance from the wretched white people.
Quote:The third, and this is probably one of the most important personality traits found, and again not found in all of them but found in most of them, prejudice. People who think they're losing their rights to minorities. People who believe that their whiteness makes them better than a Black person or a Hispanic person or anyone else or an Asian person. That is a very common theme seen throughout Donald Trump voters.
White privilege is a comforting myth -- and fraud.
Quote:Another one, inter-group contact, that's the fourth one. What that means is that Donald Trump voters are far less likely than their Democratic counterparts, or Libertarian or Green Party counterparts, to actually have interactions with people outside of their own race, outside of their own city and outside of their own country. They're very isolated. They're very insulated. They interact with only people who agree with them and are never exposed to differing viewpoints, differing world views or differing views of the world. Physically, geographically, they do not move around, they do not talk to other people. They don't expand their own horizons and that leaves them with this feeling that they are superior, that they are better, and that leads them to vote for Trump.
I think that they do meet fellow poor people, black or Hispanic, but they rarely develop any intimacy in those meetings. The work that such people do is not the sort to create any sort of solidarity. The business that they work for want workers atomized so that they do not try to form labor unions. OK, so the child out of wedlock might be by a black man -- in a relationship that went no further than a whirlwind fling that fit some fantasy. But figure that these people are told for all practical purposes
"Can't live on your full-time minimum wage wage job? Work another one!"
Quote:The fifth and final common trait he found, relative deprivation. This is the one. It's a little more controversial but it says that the deprivation is not that they're deprived of any kind of horrible thing, but that they feel like they're owed a better economic situation. They've been deprived of moving up the social ladder and they feel like they deserve that. That is one that is actually true. That is one that's been hotly debated among the Democratic Party. Some people say that we have to reach out to these disaffected Donald Trump economic voters, while others say that no, all Trump voters are racist.
Deprivation is real for many in the destitute part of the working class. But if one is black or Hispanic one knows who the Enemy is, and that Enemy is the distant, exploitative plutocrat. I'm guessing that the poor white woman in a super-cr@ppy job believes some Cinderella myth that few black or Hispanic women think applies to themselves. There is some prince out there, someone who will relieve all her hardships through marriage. (White males from the proletariat? They know from early on that they are not the princes).
Quote:Not all Trump voters are racist and not all Trump voters are suffering from a bad economic position. But both of these factors played a role in the election of Donald Trump and these psychologists have worked very hard to come up with these profiles. Hopefully, the Democrats can use this and understand it and find a way to actually work around these issues to convince these people that voting for Republicans is not in their best interest and that the Democrats hopefully, maybe, if they fix themselves, are the ones who can actually help improve their lives.
Look at the policies and connect those policies to personal consequences.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.