No one factor describes Trump’s supporters. But an array of factors – many of them reflecting five major social psychological phenomena can help to account for this extraordinary political event: authoritarianism, social dominance orientation [SDO], prejudice, relative deprivation, and lack of intergroup contact.
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Though found among left-wingers ..., authoritarianism is more numerous among right-wingers throughout the world. Trump’s speeches, studded with such absolutist terms as “losers” and “complete disasters,” are classic authoritarian statements. His clear distinction between groups on the top of society (Whites) and those “losers” and “bad hombres” on the bottom (immigrants, Blacks and Latinos) are classic social dominance statements.
In the United States, Republicans began averaging higher on authoritarianism than Democrats before the rise of Trump. And the party began to learn how to appeal to this segment of the American electorate in various ways. The Republican Party’s opposition to virtually everything proposed by the African-American President Obama helped. But it remained for Trump to break the unwritten rules of American politics and appeal directly and openly to authoritarians and those who score high on SDO [Social Dominance Orientation].
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SDO is closely related to authoritarianism but clearly separable. It features an individual's preference for the societal hierarchy of groups and domination over lower-status groups. It represents a predisposition toward anti-egalitarianism within and between groups. Individuals who score high in SDO are typically dominant, driven, tough-minded, disagreeable, and relatively uncaring seekers of power. They believe in a “dog-eat-dog” world, and they report being motivated by self-interest and self-indulgence.
Many outgroup prejudices characterize dedicated Trump’s followers, not just anti-immigrants, but anti-outgroups in general. Since Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” the Republican Party has employed strategies that appeal to bigotry with “dog whistles” – somewhat subtle code words for race and other minorities designed to be heard by racists but not by non-racists. Nixon opposed racial school desegregation by claiming to be against the “bussing” needed to achieve interracial schools. Ronald Reagan began his campaign in 1980 by giving a “states’ rights” speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi quite near where three civil rights workers had been lynched earlier. George H. W. Bush in 1988 ran a campaign ad of an African-American murderer that his opponent had released from jail – an ad for which his campaign manager later apologized.
The 2008 presidential campaign witnessed recurrent Republican slips that betrayed traditional racist thinking. One Republican club issued false ten dollar bills with Obama’s picture accompanied by stereotyped African-American food - a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried chicken. The McCain campaign ran an advertisement claiming that Obama had been “disrespectful” to Governor Palin – the old Southern term recalling sanctions against Black men interacting with White women. Republican Representative Lynn Westmoreland described Obama and his wife as “uppity.” And Republican Representative Geoff Davis called the then-47-year-old Obama, “Boy.”
Trump is less subtle. He has repeatedly made unconcealed use of prejudice against outgroups ranging from “dangerous” Muslims to Mexican “rapists.” His dedicated followers loved it; breaking with so-called “political correctness,” he blared openly what they had been saying privately.
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… pre-election publicity that minorities were planning to vote in large numbers for Clinton undoubtedly stirred Republicans to turn out too. In fact, the African-American turnout fell below that of 2008 and 2012 – a key factor in Clinton’s narrow losses in North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
A major means of reducing intergroup prejudice is through optimal intergroup contact. So it is noteworthy that there is growing evidence that Trump’s White supporters have experienced far less contact with minorities than other Americans. For instance, Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016, p. 14) found that “...the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” This finding remains true for both non-Hispanic Whites in general and for the smaller subset of White Republicans. And this lack of intergroup contact result emerges while controlling for dozens of other variables.
Consistent with this finding, these researchers also found that Trump support increased as an area’s distance from the Mexican border increased. Throughout the world, intergroup contact has been shown typically to diminish prejudice by reducing intergroup fear and inducing empathy. Its extreme absence for most Trump fans is an important factor that has been virtually ignored in the post-election analyses.
The principal media explanation for explaining Trump’s followers involves economics. Trump loyalists were assumed to have lost their jobs to Mexico and China and to be understandably angry. Little mention was made of the major reason for massive job losses – the accelerating pace of automation.
Mass media writers, reading each other and non-randomly interviewing a few unemployed workers, latched on to this too-simple theory as the primary explanation for the Trump victory. Single-factor theories are always dubious. The claim was that economically-deprived and often unemployed, angry working-class voters in basic manufacturing areas switched political parties and voted for “change.” This argument ignored the fact that the greatly depleted power of labor unions (by 2016, down to only 10.7% of wage and salary workers) to help turn out the Democratic vote was a significant factor – especially in key industrial states.
Undoubtedly, this media caricature fits some followers, especially in the swing states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But this contention does not provide the major explanation for Trump’s support. The argument lost much of its credence when estimated that the median annual income of Trump supporters was a solid $72,000. The most impressive and extensive study of voting intentions later provided an estimate of $81,898 for Trump backers’ mean household income. Instead of being far poorer than Clinton voters, this figure was slightly above the $77,046 for those who had an unfavorable view of Trump.
Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016) analyzed in detail the individual and geographic data of 125,000 American adults who had answered Gallup survey phone calls during the long election period. Many of their results challenge the widespread view of Trump supporters. Trump followers were less likely than others to be looking for work, unemployed or part-time employed. And those voters living in districts with more manufacturing were actually less favorable to Trump. Nor were his followers largely living and working in postal areas where employment in manufacturing had declined since 1990. Underlying these results is the fact that blue-collar Trump supporters tend to work in occupations that are largely shielded from Chinese and Mexican competition – transportation, repair, and construction.
To be sure, social mobility has been declining in the United States. Contrary to the popular too-simple theory, however, people who live in areas with greater mobility voted more Republican. This was even true in the crucial “swing states,” and it is a trend that can be detected in other recent elections.
But these findings do not mean that social class and economics played no role whatsoever in this tight election. Instead of absolute deprivation, social psychologists stress the importance of relative deprivation. Disappointing comparisons to relevant referents is often more significant than factual changes. What voters think is true is more important in elections than the actual truth.
Trump adherents feel deprived relative to what they expected to possess at this point in their lives and relative to what they erroneously perceive other “less deserving” groups have acquired. Rapidly rising costs of housing and prescription drugs have aggravated their financial concerns. Their savings may not allow the type of ideal retirements they had long envisioned. And hopes for their children advancing beyond their status and going to college are being dashed by rising tuitions.
Building on the research of Chetty and Hendren (2016), Rothwell and Diego-Rosel (2016) found that Trump actually did better in some low mobility areas (e.g., Raleigh, Indianapolis and rural areas generally) where children are having difficulty just reaching the status of their parents. Working-class families had previously depended on low-tuition state institutions of higher learning for educational and employment mobility. But largely Republican state legislatures throughout the country have sharply reduced funding to these schools, forcing rising tuitions. Thus, Trump adherents are typically not personally economically destitute; but they are, as Thomas Edsall (2016) phrased it, “falling behind the Joneses.” In short, they were often feeling deprived relative to their hopes and expectations.
Trump exploited this sense of relative deprivation brilliantly. He articulated issues snugly within the authoritarian worldview of his admirers. His words and claims appalled many Americans, but he knew his target audience well. In their insightful analysis, Reicher and Haslam (2016) describe Trump’s carefully staged rallies in detail. Calling them “identity festivals” that embodied a politics of hope, they note how they were choreographed to bind the attendees into a populist movement with the media (forced to sit in a cordoned-off back section), immigrants, and the so-called “elite” as enemies. Criticism of Trump by the media and other sources (such as Clinton calling some of his followers “deplorables”) only enhanced the movement and served to confirm Trump’s assertions against their common “enemies.”
Trump’s oft-repeated slogan, “Make America great again,” augmented the movement’s thrust. It represented a brash reactionary call to return to an earlier time when America’s position in the world was unchallenged, when American presidents and Supreme Court judges were all White males, when immigration was restricted and widespread racial segregation persisted, and when the government’s affirmative action programs largely helped White males (e.g., the G.I. Bill of Rights, Federal housing loans). And his cabinet heads suggest that Trump plans to return to that long-ago scene as much as possible.
All five of these tightly interconnected phenomena – authoritarianism, social dominance, prejudice, lack of intergroup contact and relative deprivation – make people vulnerable to an intense sense of threat. Authoritarian leaders have long understood that they can attract followers by enhancing the perception of dangerous threats to the society and offering simple solutions. Sometimes the threats are real (Hitler with massive Weimar inflation), but often they are imagined (Trump with patently false claims of a declining economy, massive voter fraud, enormously increased crime, and unvetted immigration). With a background of genuine terrorist threats, Mideast conflict, and a recent great recession, even imagined threats seem plausible – especially to citizens who are already easily threatened and who have witnessed rapid change in their localities.
… London and other major English cities had had long experience with immigrants, and had increased their diversity relatively gradually. Time had reduced the sense of threat and enhanced positive intergroup contact. But for small towns and rural districts with a sudden and rapid entry of immigrants, perceived threat prevailed and optimal contact was as yet minimal.
A quite similar process occurred in small Midwestern towns with rapid increases in Latino immigration. … areas whose diversity index rose by 150% witnessed a 67% vote for Trump. Consider Arcadia, Wisconsin, that had job growth – not restricted jobs. Arcadia’s plentiful jobs attracted rapid in-migration from below the Mexican border – roughly 1,500 miles away. The resulting perceived threat, unalleviated by a period of intergroup contact, made many rural and small-town White Midwesterners respond positively to Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric. …
No one factor describes Trump’s supporters. But an array of factors – many of them reflecting five major social psychological phenomena that form the tinder and the spark -- can help to account for this extraordinary political event.
These social psychological factors are not unique to the United States. We have seen throughout the paper that many studies of Europe’s far-right-wing voters show results strikingly similar to these data on the 2016 American election. Authoritarianism and social dominance attitudes have been routinely found to correlate significantly with far-right voting in nations throughout Europe. These voters share with Trump supporters similar views of women, minorities, immigrants, and free-market economics. … (Pettigrew (1-8).
I have included below the viewpoint of a letter writer printed in my local newspaper, the Siuslaw News, July 11. 2020. The author is clearly a devoted Fox News viewer. All the themes that Sean Hannity and company are currently, relentlessly pushing leap out at you from the text. Fear, fear, fear is the unifying message. Change and those who advocate it are the enemy.
As I sat with friends and family watching our safe and sane fireworks and celebrating the birth of our nation, I couldn’t help but wonder if this would be the last time we would ever be able to celebrate this holiday.
We the people of the United States of America are living in a time of much civil unrest. Our nation is at a tipping point, being torn apart by those who hate our country and its history.
There are people who want — in no uncertain terms — to tear it apart and divide us. It is no longer about what political party you belong to; it is about what the future of our nation will be and its ultimate survival as a free country.
Do you really want Marxist groups like BLM, terrorist groups like Antifa and far left Socialists in the government like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to completely defund and dismantle the police and leaving millions of vulnerable people unprotected?
Do you really want our country to be a Socialist country?
Socialism has already been tried and failed in 52 other countries, What makes anyone think it would actually work here?
Do we want them telling us what we should say, what we should believe and what is right and wrong? Do we honestly believe that defunding, demonizing and vilifying law enforcement is the answer?
Make no mistake about it, these groups are no longer asking; they are saying that, if we do not meet their demands and give them what they want, they will burn our country down.
They do not believe in individual sovereignty but, instead, want collective subjugation which, by definition is the action of bringing someone or something under domination or control.
They have hijacked the peaceful protesters and taken over with their own agenda. Those of us who love our country didn’t ask for this. I do not believe that this is what the majority of us want for our family’s future.
It is time to open our eyes, draw a line in the sand and decide if we are going to stand with the Marxists, the mob, anarchy, political correctness, socialism, cancel culture radicals and the “progressives” who hate America.
We are the greatest nation ever created and a gift from God that gives us liberty, freedom and the pursuit of happiness for everyone.
It comes down to what your principles and values are and what you believe in. Either you support liberty, all of the founding documents and all that this country has been through for over 200 years, or you want to see our nation fall and be ruled by Socialism.
It is up to each of us to make our own decision of how we want our future to look. I stand with America as it stands, even with all of its faults. At least for now we will still have the right to work on making things better for everyone of every race, color and creed (Worley 5).
Woks cited:
Pettigrew, Thomas F., “Social Psychological Perspectives on Trump Supporters.” Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Vol 5, No 1 (2017). Web. https://jspp.psychopen.eu/article/view/750/html
Worley, Lois, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” Siuslaw News, July 11, 2020. Web. https://thesiuslawnews.com/article/united-we-stand-divided-we-fall
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