On Donald Trump and Emotional Politics
September 17, 2020
A day or two ago our Idiot-in-Chief
Donald Trump kept saying “herd mentality” when he meant “herd immunity.” Even
when the reporter who was interviewing him corrected him he said no, I think I
mean herd mentality. As Hermione once said to someone in the Harry Potter
series, “What an idiot!” Still, what Trump said was a telling Freudian slip.
Trump’s political fortunes rest entirely on the herd mentality of his followers.
That is, they depend entirely on their emotional decision making. Donald Trump
is easily the most idiotic president this country has ever had. He doesn’t
think, he reacts. He doesn’t gather facts, he emotes. He plays to voters who react
rather than think. They find him appealing because he makes their idiocy seem
reasonable and acceptable. Neither I nor my friends and colleagues can
understand why so many people support him. How can any Christian think that
this grossly immoral man was heaven-sent to save us? The answer has to be that
they don’t think, they react. Trump supporters probably think they’re thinking.
What’s really going on is that they are acting and deciding things in a manner
I’ve recently seen described in a couple of science programs on PBS. The
programs weren’t about either Trump or his supporters. Still, they shed
considerable light on the question of how anyone can support Donald Trump. The explanation
that follows is mine. I trust that I’ve gotten it right.
From those programs I learned that
human beings have two quite different ways of making decisions. We can call one
of them the slow way and the other the fast way. The slow way is rational. It
uses facts. It carefully weighs options and decides on the basis of what is
best for the person making the decision or what is best for other persons’
reasonable desires and needs the person making the decision wants to support. The
fast way is more animalistic. It uses a different, evolutionarily more
primitive part of the brain. It decides on the basis of first impressions,
established prejudices, and most of all emotion. It functions on the basis of
feelings rather than facts. It decides quickly, instantaneously even, without
taking time for reasonable calculation of options, of the advantages and
disadvantages of any possible decision. It opts for what it wants rather than
for what it or anyone else needs.
Research indicates that almost all
humans make almost all of their decisions through the fast, more animalistic
decision making process. The first group of people to take advantage of that
truth were marketers. I have long wondered why so few advertisements give you
actual information about what the advertiser is trying to sell. Now I know why.
For the most part advertising doesn’t focus on facts because most people don’t
make most of their decisions on the basis of facts. They act far more on the
basis of emotion than on the basis of facts. Marketers figured out that they
need to appeal not to people’s rational facility but to their emotions. So
television advertising, which surely is the advertising most people see the
most, features bright shiny images and music intended to evoke certain emotions
that the advertiser wants people to associate with their product. Advertisers
don’t waste their time and money presenting facts to potential customers. For
the most part people don’t make decisions on the basis of facts. Advertisers go
straight for what works. They go straight for people’s emotions.
In more recent times politicians
have figured out how people, voters in this instance, make voting decisions. More
than ever they appeal to people’s emotions rather than to what people need or
want rationally. A classic example is Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential
campaign. Over and over again that campaign displayed signs and placards
displaying one word: Hope. Hope is not a political position. It certainly is
not a political platform. It offers no specific policies for addressing
national issues. It is so vague that when you stop to think about it you
quickly discern that it really doesn’t mean anything at all. Its appeal is
emotional not rational. A lot of Americans were feeling quite hopeless in 2008.
The economy had collapsed into the worst recession since the Great Depression
of the 1930s. We were bogged down in pointless and seemingly endless wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, which sadly is still true twelve years later. So the
Obama campaign came at voters less with actual proposals for how to address the
problems than with the emotional appeal “Hope.” It worked. Obama was elected president
in 2008 and reelected in 2012.[1]
Donald Trump has taken the
political campaign as an appeal to emotion not reason to a whole new level. Facts
mean nothing to Donald Trump or his campaign. Trump simply does not function
within the categories true and false. He lies so often that only a fool would
believe anything he says. Only a fool, that is, or someone reacting to politics
only on the basis of emotion. Trump much prefers to campaign in front of large
rallies of his supporters. He tells them lies they want to hear. He works them
up into an emotional frenzy. He gets them chanting his campaign slogans,
slogans that have nothing to do with reality. He shouts “Lock her up!” His mob
of followers chants back “Lock her up!” over and over again. He calls immigrants
rapists and murderers, promises to build a wall to keep them out, and stokes the
crowd’s enthusiasm for that worthless and environmentally destructive project
by saying Mexico will pay for it. There was never any possibility that Mexico
would do any such thing, but truth doesn’t matter in the Trump campaign. His
supporters love the idea of immigrant bashing at someone else’s expense, so
they chant “Build the wall!” “Build the Wall!” over and over again. Facts have
nothing to do with it. Reality has nothing to do with it.
Trump’s self-centered followers don’t
like wearing facemasks to protect others from the coronavirus that has killed
nearly 200,000 people in this country so far. Even more than they dislike
wearing a mask they dislike the idea of some government telling they have to or
even should wear one. So Trump models not wearing a mask. He contradicts his
own public health officials who say facemasks are our best defense against
COVID-19 though he has no credentials as a public health expert whatsoever.
Again, facts have nothing to do with it. Reality has nothing to do with it. It’s
all emotion not reason.
So Trump works hard at whipping up
emotion among his followers, or at least as hard as he works at anything. It
works for him because his followers operate only with their fast, emotional,
animalistic decision making process. They don’t think, they react. They don’t
reason, they emote. That they would vehemently deny that truth makes no
difference at all. One of the things that makes fast, emotional decision making
so dangerous is that people aren’t aware that they’re using that system as they
use it. Most people don’t even know that we have two different decision making
systems and that one of them produces far better decisions than the other. Trump’s
supporters, at least the ones who aren’t operating on the basis of political
expediency like Mitch McConnell, operate emotionally not rationally. Trump
stirs their emotions, they spout it all back to him, and love him for stoking
their emotions as if he were actually giving them sensible political
information, which in fact he never does.
There is a great danger in the way
around 40% of Americans buy into Trump’s political emotionalism. Fascist
demagogues like Trump are much better at whipping up the mob than truly
democratic politicians are. I’m sure Joe Biden has never whipped up a mob in
his life. He’s not that kind of politician, thank God. Trump burns hot. Biden
comes across as cool even when he is what passes with him for emotional. Biden
appeals to our slow, rational decision making process. Trump appeals only to
emotion. The problem is that far too many people make political decisions the
way they make all decisions, emotionally not rationally. Biden’s only hope of
winning this year’s presidential election is if enough voters are so turned off
by Trump’s lies and emotionalism that they will vote for the totally
uncharismatic Joe Biden despite how uncharismatic he is. We can only hope and
pray that they are and that they will.
[1] I
intend no political judgment in these remarks about Obama’s presidential
campaigns. I voted for him twice, but that fact doesn’t change the truth of
what I have said here.
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