Make America Great Again Flag Butts

Despite his authoritarian tendencies, President Donald Trump's supporters have stayed with him considering of a circuitous interplay of economic, cultural and racial factors, resulting in a fierce, nigh cult-similar loyalty, said scholars at the University of California, Berkeley. (Photograph by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons | CC BY-SA 2.0)

More than a calendar month has passed since the fiercely contested U.Southward. presidential election, and the nation'south institutions are moving day-past-mean solar day toward acceptance of the outcome that made Democrat Joe Biden the winner over incumbent Republican Donald Trump. But Trump is neither conceding nor moving on — and, information technology appears, the same is truthful for millions of his supporters.

The numbers, presumably, don't lie: Results certified by officials from both parties bear witness Biden defeated Trump past more than seven million votes. Since the polls closed, however, Trump has blitzed the nation with unproven claims that he was robbed of victory by widespread fraud, and today but 15% of his 74.1 million voters say Biden's win is legitimate.

"Nevada Court Hears Of USPS Witness Obstruction, Flawed Machine Inspections, And Deceased Voters" https://t.co/wuwzplRyFY

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Dec iii, 2020

How do nosotros explain this seemingly mass rejection of autonomous processes — and the rejection of verified reality? In a serial of interviews, Berkeley scholars beyond a range of disciplines suggested that this is a story not just of numbers, just of a complex interplay of class and racial animosity, aggravated by despair and social drift and amplified by new communication platforms, converging to what some see equally a troubling psychological phenomenon.

Some suggested that generations of creeping economical insecurity have inspired deep anger, compelling many voters in the white middle and working classes to embrace Trump, flaws and all, because he challenges the American status quo.

Adam Jadhav, Ph.D. student in geography (Photograph provided past Adam Jadhav)

Adam Jadhav, a Ph.D. educatee in geography, traveled to rural Henry, Illinois, where he lived every bit a child, for research that explored the dynamics of rural populism. While the picture in that location is complex, he said, one hard-line conservative was blunt:

Votes for Trump were "a manus grenade for the establishment," he told Jadhav. "Trump does some stupid ass things, says a lot of stupid donkey things, doesn't keep his oral fissure shut when he should. [Merely] information technology was worth information technology to attempt to shake the system."

Others meet a loyalty to Trump that is and then intense, and so unshakeable, that it exerts a cult-similar gravity.

Jennifer Chatman, associate dean for learning strategies at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business organisation (UC Berkeley photo)

"Trump has claimed that he'south the 'chosen one,'" said Jennifer A. Chatman, an influential researcher on leadership and organizational cultures and acquaintance dean at the UC Berkeley Haas Schoolhouse of Business. "He's said he's super-smart, a genius. … He has established his paradigm as the leader who is cleaning upward Washington and the savior of the mutual person and then convincingly that none of his supporters are looking beyond that to come across that, in fact, many of the things he'due south doing are exactly the opposite."

How 'rational ignorance' shapes our politics

To understand why so many voted to re-elect Trump afterward four years of celebrated political turmoil — featuring a failed pandemic response, a devastating economic shock and a crisis in racial justice — it'southward necessary to understand the forces that propelled him to victory in 2016.

In recent publications, Berkeley scholars have suggested that Trump won with an unconventional coalition of white working grade and middle-class Americans who were motivated by resentment: The culture and economy gave them no recognition and no respect for their work. Their industries were changing, their jobs were shifting overseas or lost to automation. They perceive that Black, Latinx and Asian people, and immigrants, are advancing at their expense.

Trump supporters massed for a rally in Washington, D.C., days after Democrat Joe Biden emerged as the winner of the U.S. presidential race. (Photo past Geoff Livingston via Flickr | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

But some Berkeley scholars suggested that for many voters, support for Trump — or any leader — is a more passive choice that takes shape in a subrational sphere.

Gabriel Lenz, an expert in political psychology, is the author of Follow the Leader? How Voters Reply to Politicians' Operation and Policies (Academy of Chicago Press, 2012). He sees political opinion shaped past a force that is almost prosaic: an apathetic lack of awareness.

Many people follow a political political party as they would a football game squad, researchers say. Values may be less of import in shaping allegiance than family tradition or the shared identity and social pressures of a community.

Gabriel Lenz, UC Berkeley political scientist (UC Berkeley photo)

Most low-date voters only follow the cues of their preferred party leaders. If a popular leader fans partitioning, they polarize. If the leader appeals to emotions such as sadness or anger, their passions are aroused.

Lenz and other political scientists telephone call it "rational ignorance."

"Information technology'southward hard for political junkies to believe," Lenz said, "but nearly people have much meliorate things to practise with their lives than pay attending to politics. If you lot ask, 'How, after the terminal four years, could people want more of this?', well, people are partisan. The country is polarized. And information technology's not clear that people are paying much attention to the details."

Despite reams of journalism exploring the impact of Play a joke on News and the correct-fly media ecosystem, Lenz said, relatively few people actually tune in. In fact, people often don't sympathise politics or policy well at all.

He points to 2018 research co-authored by Douglas J. Ahler, a quondam Berkeley Ph.D. student at present on the faculty at Florida State University. The research concluded that many voters don't grasp fifty-fifty the basic character of Republicans and Democrats.

"People make big, systematic errors when judging party composition," Ahler wrote with co-author Gaurav Sood, an independent social scientist. "For instance, Americans believe that 32% of Democrats are gay, lesbian or bisexual (only 6.3% are, in reality), and that 38% of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year (just 2.two% practise, in reality)."

Further, they wrote, Republicans essentially overestimate the proportion of Democrats who are Black people, or atheists; Democrats significantly overestimate the number of Republicans who are over 65. Such basic misconceptions can amplify Democrat-Republican tensions, driving politics that may exist guided more by dislike of the other team than reasoned evaluation of issues.

"The autonomous freedoms and values that we accept in this land — that'southward non something that people think about on a daily basis," Lenz explained.

The QAnon conspiracy cult imagines a far-flung "deep state" effort to traffic children and impose tyranny, with President Donald Trump equally the leading defender of freedom. (Photograph by Tony Webster via Wikimedia Eatables | CC BY 2.0)

'Was I stupid? Was I blind?'

When a popular leader continually employs division and misinformation to promote his goals, loyalists can drift from autonomous standards — and from fact-based reality.

Chatman, the Berkeley Haas leadership skillful, trained every bit a social psychologist. Enquiry, she said, has shown that people can be persuaded by the stories that leaders tell. If a leader makes an appealing promise, people will remain loyal, even if the leader doesn't deliver.

Trump, Chatman explained, "has framed a narrative that says, 'I'chiliad the turnaround guy. I'm going to drain the swamp. I'thou going to accident Washington upwardly.' And so anyone who was disaffected virtually government, which turns out to have been a lot of people, likes that narrative."

How far does that influence extend?

Exhibit A: QAnon is a bizarre conspiracy cult united in the belief that Trump is defending the world against a vast network of Satanic pedophiles — including Democrats, Hollywood stars and others in the "deep state" — who are attempting to traffic in children and generally to threaten freedom. Trump has welcomed QAnon support and sometimes retweets their communications.

1 contempo poll found that 56% of Republicans now believe that the improbable QAnon conspiracies are somewhat or entirely true. Simply 4% of Democrats agree.

In Chatman's view, Trump is a narcissist — his actions are principally devoted to advancing his own popularity and power. And psychological processes called "habituation" and "escalation of commitment" bind the followers to their leader, she said, giving Trumpism itself some qualities of a cult.

"A person'southward immense loyalty to a cult is a result of pocket-sized escalations of personal commitment," Chatman explained. People begin to place with the grouping and feel answerable to its members and specially to the leader. They fear that defection would let others down, or that they could be rejected by this group with which their identity has become deeply connected. So, when Trump doesn't release his taxes, or has a dalliance with a porn star, or abuses his ability, his allies develop a supportive rationale and remain ardently loyal.

"Every time a person stays after one of those infractions, information technology'south harder for them to pull out the next time," she said. "They accept an increasing gear up of commitments, and if they pulled out, they'd have to say to themselves, 'Was I stupid earlier? Was I blind?'

"Information technology'due south much easier and more cognitively consistent to stay in and say, 'Oh, the media, the Democrats, they're not giving him a fair shot.' …. That'southward why we don't see any movement in the Trump base."

In his enquiry, Berkeley Ph.D. student Adam Jadhav establish that economic and social transformation are forcing residents of Henry, Illinois, (pop. two,200) to confront sometimes painful change. (Photo by Farragutful via Wikimedia Commons | CC BY-SA 3.0)

American heartland: the shock of existence left behind

In 2017, when Adam Jadhav returned to his sometime abode town of Henry, Illinois (pop. 2,200), his research establish some of the maladies described by Lenz and Chatman. Some people longed for amend days gone by. Some younger men were "seething" considering they no longer had a place in the local economy.

But in an article published recently in the Journal of Rural Studies, he described something more subtle: a quiet despair in subcontract country.

Not then long ago, Henry was an economic hub in primal Illinois. There were healthy family farms, and industries associated with the farms — Caterpillar Inc. machinery factories, tire factories. And the town was 99% white, which immune an unchallenged racism. Jadhav was harassed because his begetter, the United Methodist government minister, was an Indian immigrant.

In contempo decades, modify has swept through Henry like a prairie storm. The economic system has devolved. Opportunity, wealth and people — specially young people — take fled to bigger cities. Shops accept closed. Churches have closed. And the people left behind mourn for what's been lost.

When Donald Trump ran in 2016, Jadhav said, the slogan "Make America Keen Again" found an audience. Information technology'south not that Trump was pop — to many, Jadhav said, he seemed "a horribly flawed candidate." Yet, Trump spoke to their values and insecurities, and Hillary Clinton didn't.

"Rural voters who accept been told for generations that the urban 'other' is getting ahead of them, unfairly taking their hard-earned opportunity — those folks," Jadhav said, "probably spent the last four years feeling like their guy was under assail, even if they didn't like their guy."

What comes next, at present that Trump has lost? Jadhav is of two minds.

He talks tentatively of "battle lines being hardened," and says: "I think nosotros should see this now every bit a new phase in a low-grade civil war."

Simply at the same time, his research in 2017 plant that people were welcoming, though wary, as Mexican, Indian and Filipina residents brought new economic life to Henry. And today, the Facebook pages of Henry contacts advise they're turning the page on Election 2020.

"The latest posts have been of Veterans Day photos and Thanksgiving photos and duck hunting photos," he said. "It seems off-white to say most people are getting on with their lives."

President Donald Trump has generated intense, almost cult-like loyalty, one Berkeley scholar said, despite almost daily infractions again conventional American values. (Photo by Michael Candelori via Wikimedia Commons | CC BY 2.0)

The road to renewal is economical, and spiritual

Steven Hayward speaks at a UC Berkeley event in 2017. (UC Berkeley photo)

Conservative author Steven Hayward, a Berkeley Law lecturer and visiting scholar at Berkeley'due south Institute of Governmental Studies, looks to the past for a guide to the futurity. The tardily 1960s and early '70s were a time of upheaval in the U.S., he said, and the nation was shaken past assassinations, bombings, riots and campus unrest. Eventually, though, much of the fury burned itself out.

Hayward believes that many working class people embraced Trump because he seemed to understand their sense of existence left behind. Only like other scholars, he suggested the Biden assistants will be more conventional, bringing a calm that could reduce the "exhausting" polarization and conflict of the Trump presidency.

Several scholars, however, suggested that Democrats concord some responsibility for the repairing the cultural carve up — because they helped to cause information technology. They have increasingly lost a sense of alliance with people in rural America and the failing industrial regions, said Berkeley sociologist Neil Fligstein, and as a result, they're seen equally afar, big-headed elites.

Neil Fligstein, UC Berkeley sociologist and manager of the Centre for Culture, Arrangement, and Politics. (UC Berkeley photo)

"People are concerned near having a job and paying their rent," said Fligstein, a specialist in economic folklore. To restore the connection, he said, Democrats might accelerate a national $15-an-60 minutes minimum wage and infrastructure investment that creates jobs and ecology benefits.

"We need to rebuild our entire electricity system," Fligstein said. "Nosotros need to invest in putting upwardly windmills and then retrofitting homes and buildings for energy efficiency. Nosotros need to rebuild the highway arrangement. Trump said he was going to do that, and it's nonetheless very popular. And all of that is labor-intensive."

Jadhav, meanwhile, goes beyond the political and economic to something nearly spiritual.

Rural America — Trump's land — must reflect on its ain problems and the path to renewal, he said. To do that, it has to cast off its faith in unregulated capitalism, its reflexive hostility to government and its white supremacy.

At the same time, he sees an essential need for date betwixt coastal people and heartland people, metropolitan people and rural people.

Without that, Jadhav sees "a slow-rolling catastrophe," with conflicting American cultures battling nonstop through 1 election bike afterwards another — and losing the opportunity for progress.

"I hate to apply cancer metaphors," he said, "but American politics has a deep-rooted metastasis. You can't ignore it. And pretending it's not cancer will not make information technology go away."

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Source: https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/12/07/despite-drift-toward-authoritarianism-trump-voters-stay-loyal-why/

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