In Spite of the Election of Trump
Weeks have passed since Trump surprised the nation and won the election. Despite the endless pundit analysis, a key component seems missing from the discussions. Yes, I’m sure misogamy played an essential role. And yes, racism and xenophobia were significant as well. I don’t want to discount these core aspects in any way.
Many of my liberal friends continue to scratch their heads and characterize the rural, southern and conservative voting blocks as ‘too stupid to understand that they’re voting against their own interests’. Many of my peers believe that the fears of Islamic terrorists and basic racism and sexism among Trump supporters are more important to people than their own economic self-interests.
I disagree.
While it’s certainly true that there are Trump-voters who have little understanding of the implications of trickle-down policy in their lives, I believe many voted for Trump knowing quite well that the manufacturing jobs wouldn’t be coming back to their town. They voted for Trump knowing that they may pay much more in health insurance, or have no health insurance coverage whatsoever, as a result. They voted consciously against their own interests.
Why?
In a word — spite.
For decades, wide swaths of our population have been ignored. They’ve struggled and failed. They’ve fallen behind, and the system in place hasn’t worked for them. Many of these populations were previously firmly in the middle class. They believed they’d earned a place in the middle-class through their hard work and devotion to this country, and the hard work of their parents as well.
The prospect of any continuation of the existing long-standing economic policies could only mean more pain and suffering and embarrassment for this group.
Left with these options, they would rather throw a hand grenade into Washington than pursue their immediate short-term interests. In so doing, they see themselves inflicting disproportionate pain and damage to the establishment.
Spite is an evolutionary adaptation that operates due to two forces:
- Fitness is relative. When competing for limited resources, if I’m able to hurt my opponent substantially, even at the price of injuring myself, it’s worth it because I come out ahead relative to my competition.
- The threat of spite prevents free-riders from undercutting trust in a marketplace, and we evolved to interact with the same actors on multiple occasions.
So if the establishment has shit on me time and time again, and I have the opportunity to inflict disproportionate damage on those actors, I’ll take it. This is spite. Indeed, people are compelled to inflict spite — it is an uncontrollable urge. Just listen to Paul Bloom talk about the ingrained nature of our spitefulness.
But spite evolved within an evolutionary context. The emotion and the subsequent behavior may have been adaptive in small groups of individuals who lived in a context of the benefits of cooperation and reciprocity. Within the context of larger scale societies, the propensity for spitefulness may be less well suited.
I’m not convinced that Trump will actually create the dissonance he promised. And here, the large minority of the population that voted for him may have made a great error in their calculus.