US culture is an incubator of ‘extrinsic values’. Nobody embodies them like the Republican frontrunner
Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics.
Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.
People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour.
Your second point is far more important than many people realize. I was born, raised, and now live in “flyover country”, and I totally get the appeal of Trumpism to people here. The sense of abandonment is real and pervasive. It feels at times like we’ve been turned into a caricature, a punchline for city-dwellers on the coasts. Just a bunch of dumb, racist hicks whose opinions and agency don’t matter because “LaND DoeSN’t vOte”, as though there aren’t millions of us living here, many of us even (shockingly) in cities of our own. Those cities don’t apparently don’t matter though because they’re not NY or LA.
The amount of hypocritical elitism I see from supposed leftists who turn their noses at desperate blue collar workers in the rust belt hurts my heart every time I see it. The right’s biggest recruiting tool here is not the racism, or the homophobia, or the crazy batshit christo-fascism. It’s the ever-present messaging that “the left doesn’t want you”. If you want to belong somewhere, join the Trump train. These people used to be the leftists in North America a century ago. Now it’s all been beaten and ridiculed out of them, and all that’s left is populist rage and a list of enemies who have “wronged” them. When I bring this up in leftist circles though, more often than not the response I get is some variant of “lmao fuck off”. I am still a staunch leftist, but it’s through gritted teeth that I stand by some of my coastal comrades.
The land doesn’t vote thing is about disproportionate representation, that somehow your opinions matter more because you’re from a state with less people, not that “we” dont consider you worthy of having a say. It’s just frustrating that tens of millions (costal state) = hundreds of thousands/single digit millions (think: Dakotas) in terms of representation and therefore control of the Senate/Presidency.
That is an issue with our current system, and you’re correct in that it’s not fair to people in more densely populated states. The flip side however is that without this disproportionate representation, people in more rural areas might not see any of their issues addressed as politicians no longer need their votes to win. There is no perfect solution, certainly not with our current FPTP system. My objection to the argument is that it’s often used as a thought terminating cliche to justify ignoring “flyover” voters.
Are there social welfare programs the left has proposed like single payer healthcare, UBI, etc which are designed not to help people in rural/rust-belt areas?
Leftist policies would absolutely help rural america, and may be the only thing that can now. What annoys me is the unwillingness to actually try and convince people to vote for it. The attitude is one of “we’re right, our policies work, all you dumb hicks are just too busy fucking your sisters to see it”. A lot of magats are already socialists, they just don’t realize it anymore. They’ve lost their faith in the federal government and no longer have to vocabulary or the safe spaces to explore those concepts. I’m not saying they didn’t bring a lot of this on themselves, but a lot of them were so close to figuring it out before trumpism took over and the rest of the left just let them go and said “good riddance”, and that frustrates the hell out of me.
I get that, but at a certain point - you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. If we succeed in getting UBI or Single Payer Healtcare, we will do so without them, and they’ll hate us for it even as their quality of life improves. At a certain point (and IMO we’re several years past it) why is it on me to subject myself to that? I’m no spring chicken. I’ve been talking to people who disagreed with my viewpoints on social issues and politics for about 30 years. Only in the last 10ish did the folks on the “other” side of those discussions become what they have become.
My neighbor has a rotating array of hand-drawn signs in his yard proclaiming that various groups I’m either a member of or supporter of are idiots and morons who are destroying the country. He isn’t targeting me personally, but he’s got no reason to think I’m not in one of those groups, nor does he have any reason to think most of the rest of our neighbors aren’t. What conversation am I going to have with that sort of guy that will heal the country? How is that one-sided article from Cracked going to help make that better? Is there a part of the country where Democrats have yards full of signs about how much they hate Republicans? I don’t live in nor have I seen pictures of that part of the country if so.
I know that’s a lot of rhetorical questions there at the end, I don’t intend that to be as confrontational as it might sound. That cracked article pissed me right off though. If I’m being generous I’ll call it misguided.
I think you and I might be more closely aligned than we realize. I agree that there is nothing we can do now. The fascists have been too radicalized for too long. What irks me, and what pissed me off enough to write multiple walls of text yesterday, is the attitude I see from progressives that “these people are all just stupid and immoral, their beliefs and motivations are inherently evil so it doesn’t matter what they think or why they think it, there’s nothing we can do”. Like, yeah, that may be the case now, but it wasn’t always so. If the left had made more of an effort reach out to rural americans, say 30 years ago, before the mega churches and republican party had such a firm lock on the area, many of them could have become valuable allies. What we are seeing now is, in my opinion, the metastasization of a cultural disease that was left untreated. When people like myself tried to suggest that we do something though, the response was always the same “eh, fuck 'em, they’re just a bunch of assholes, what could they possibly do other than bitch and moan?” Well, now we know.
That cracked article is nearly a decade out of date now, and I admit it’s not the most helpful. I like to use it because it loosely illustrates the point I’ve been trying to make for years. Namely that what we’re seeing now is not evil for the sake of evil, but the end result of a long process of alienation and radicalization of a group that was once firmly rooted on the side of democracy and, in some cases, leftism. Thanks for reading my word salad.
Well I have to agree. I think we’re just lamenting different aspects of the same thing. I can’t argue with the meat of what you are saying here.
Not at all, thank you for expounding!
So build something worth visiting? The French and Italian countryside is mainly populated with uneducated conservatives, because most smart people understandably leave. They are still amazing places to visit that attract people the world over.
When your biggest draw is “the world’s largest ball of yarn”, why should people care about you? People in cities don’t ridicule you; they never even think about you. You think about them and how they live in an amazing place, constantly downplaying the benefits of living in a place that has no tourists making everything crowded and expensive.
I’m going to break this down because it seems like you’re coming at this from a place of honest ignorance.
There are lots of things worth visiting that you would find if you bothered to look. For example:
The world’s oldest and largest collection of military aircraft is in Dayton, Ohio
The largest cave network in the world is in Kentucky
Indigenous earthworks all throughout the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys
Plenty of small, charming, non-trumpian towns
These are just a handful of things off the top of my head in and around my home state of Ohio. It ain’t Hawaii, but we do have lives. You should come and visit sometime, maybe stay for a while and help push us back toward the left. Plus, you get rust belt prices on everything ($100 for 2oz of weed in Michigan).
How about starting with the fact that there are tens of millions of your fellow countrymen living here and oh, by the way, THEY GROW YOUR FOOD. If you truly believe that the only value a person or community has comes from their ability to attract tourists, then I suggest you try not eating for a week and see if that changes your mind. Believe it or not, I don’t sit around all day begrudging all those awesome coastal cities out of jealousy. I don’t think about you much at all to be honest. What does irk me is the fact that, when people do talk about us, it’s almost always dismissive and condescending. There’s east coast, west coast, the south, the southwest, and that big flat nothing in between. In shows, memes, and movies, the midwest frequently either doesn’t exist, or serves as some far-off no-mans-land that the character is trying to escape. It’s all tornadoes, children of the corn, and naive or racist simpletons. It doesn’t have a culture, it is the absence of culture.
But who cares anyway? Ok so there’s some nature and generic museums, it’s nothing you couldn’t find in Philly or Fresno, and the racists are still really off-putting. Why should you care? I’ll tell you why; because we need your help. The midwest, and in particular the rust belt, used to be a hotbed of leftist politics. In the span of less than a century, these people have turned from ardent secular socialists to rabid christian fascists. What we’re seeing now isn’t just the same old assholes being assholes. Many of these people are honest-to-god fascists, and it’s spreading like a plague through the center of the American continent. I’m sorry for the wall of text but this is a really personal issue for me. I’ve lost a lot of friends and one of the first symptoms, before the cult worship, before the authoritarianism, before the capital storming and mass violence, is “the left doesn’t want me, the ‘coastal elite’ don’t want me, the corporatist republicans won’t help me, I have been politically abandoned” (obviously not literally).