A May 2016 poll shows that two thirds of Trump supporters think Barack Obama is a Muslim. The same poll showed 59 percent believed he was not born in the United States. There is no evidence for either of these assertions, of course. The second has been comprehensively debunked by Obama’s long-form birth certificate. And while it may be impossible to know for sure what religious beliefs Obama (or anyone else) has in his heart, there is no evidence that Obama practices Islam, while there is plenty of evidence that he has worshipped at Christian churches as president.
Of course, these are far from the only Trumpian transgressions of reality. Trump has claimed many bizarre things that have not hurt him with his supporters. First, he claimed that climate science is a Chinese conspiracy intended to damage the American economy, a total absurdity given the overwhelming weight of evidence for man-made climate change. He continues to rail against free trade in spite of the large weight of evidence that free trade is beneficial to the entire world (and has made society much richer). He claims crime is very high when it is near record lows.
And these are not just anecdotes. In fact, in the first Trump-Clinton debate, he made 34 false claims compared to just six made by Clinton. And Politifact data shows that Trump was the most dishonest candidate in this election cycle, and Clinton the most honest:
Why would Trump supporters support a candidate who stands behind these outrageously false and unreal things? Why are many Americans rallying behind a candidate who is promoting unreality and falsehood? And why — in stark contrast to the data — do Americans see Hillary Clinton as more dishonest, and Donald Trump as more honest?
The modern world has become increasingly reality-shattering. We have seen massive globalization and decentralization in terms of finance, in terms of media, in terms of commerce, in terms of transportation infrastructure, and even in terms of government with the rise of free trade blocs like the European Union, ASEAN and NAFTA. Vast quantities of Western manufacturing has been redirected overseas to places like China, where the labour is cheaper and where supply chains are more concentrated, shattering traditional industries and industrial communities. Vast quantities of immigrants have flooded in, to do the jobs that Westerners won’t. The things we buy from superstores and online marketplaces like Amazon come from complex, distant and impersonal supply webs. Components and subcomponents criss-cross the globe on container ships. So we don’t see the people who make our stuff so much anymore. Very often, we don’t even speak the same language or live in the same country. We deal with corporations that sell us things via distant call centres, and in sprawling and impersonal malls and superstores. We deal with governments mostly through reams of complex and impersonal bureaucracy and paperwork.
On top of all this, the financial crisis of 2008 hurt many people in terms of the financial collapse itself, and in terms of subsequent job losses and government spending cuts and tax hikes. But it did something more than that. It made a world that had become increasingly reliant on experts and technology look fragile. Meanwhile, the economic recovery from the financial crisis benefited those who were doing well—who owned large quantities of stocks, and who had access to government stimulus spending— much more than the wider public.
So it’s easy for any downtrodden person in the street to say: “these experts who are telling me that Trump is a lying megalomaniac didn’t predict the financial crisis! They didn’t realize the Iraq war would be a disaster! They don’t have to live side-by-side with all of these immigrants I’m seeing nowadays! They’re not really experts at all!”
Most importantly, the dissemination of misinformation and speculation has become much easier via decentralized social networks where retweets can easily and quickly send a falsehood viral, and sensationalistic news services that reward their writers for baiting their readers into clicking on stories with juicy headlines. Anyone with a computer can become a newscaster. And while this inarguably is democratizing, it also allows extremely biased and dishonest people—as well as racists, and xenophobes who would typically be outside the Overton window of normal political debate—to drive the political agenda and spread and normalize their ideas.
I believe that the rise of Trump, the rise of the Brexiteers, and the rise of the alt-right are a direct result of these large-scale and frightening changes to the social fabric. Trump—a familiar celebrity face in an increasingly unfamiliar world—offers simplistic folksy solutions to complex problems, as well as large doses of incoherent rage. The incoherent fury of Trump is reflecting the incoherent fury of large chunks of the population in the face of an unpredictable and messy modern reality.
And Trump’s traditionalism, his anti-politically correct attitude, and his patriarchal chest-puffing are a countercurrent to a world where white male dominance of society is starting to wane, with female and minority representation on the rise across virtually all industries and with females taking the lead over males in some areas, including educational attainment.
So stop the world. The Trump supporters want to get off.
In my view, modernity is undoubtedly a good thing. Global free trade and its impersonal and fractured supply webs have brought us amazing utilities like iPhones that our ancestors would have considered magical. And they promise to do vastly more in the coming years. Global living standards and incomes are rising steadily. Infant mortality is falling worldwide and lifespans are rising across all the continents. Thanks to birth control, contraception and feminism, women are free to play a more active an equal role in society. Global communication and transportation systems give us—particularly in the West— an unprecedented opportunity to travel and work across the world.
And most of the Trumpian fears—of crime, of terrorism, of immigration—are hollow. Crime is falling. Immigrants commit less crime than native-born citizens, a statistic which in spite all of the bluster is even true for Syrian refugees in Germany. More Americans die as a result of being crushed by furniture and are killed by toddlers than are killed by terrorism. And there is fairly clear evidence that the authoritarianism that Trump—as well as his ideological stablemates like Vladimir Putin and the Chinese communist party—promotes is harmful to a nation’s interests.
But these facts are easily drowned out by noise and by the fears of living in our increasingly fractured, culturally mixed, and bureaucratic modern societies. People who are killed as a result of being crushed by furniture don’t make the headlines on the news, or the trending topics on Twitter. Terrorist attacks do.
There are, of course, unique aspects to Trump. His pathological tendency to lie and get away with it through a veneer of superficial directness is quite unique. But ultimately he is only drawing off the irrational and incoherent rage of a large and increasingly authoritarian segment of society.
Of course, the real antidote to this dishonesty and nonsense is for his supporters to realize that Trumpism is much worse than modernity. I was once opposed to a Clinton presidency, on the basis that electing the spouse of an ex-president is nepotism. But it only took a little of Trump’s authoritarian incoherence—his blithe disregard for the dangers of nuclear weaponry, his blithe disregard for the Geneva conventions, his enthusiasm for war crimes and torture, his indifference to Vladimir Putin’s persecution of journalists, his vast ignorance of the Constitution— to convince me that there are far, far worse things than nepotism, far worse things than giving highly-paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, far worse things than accepting charitable donations from Arab autocrats.
My conversion to anti-Trumpism came before I tasted the consequences of a Trump presidency. But it is quite possible that the public’s taste for incoherent rage and muscular traditionalism may only abate when they get a taste of quite how bad things get under an incoherent authoritarian. We live in a very privileged world. In the West, and America, the vast majority of people have access to food, shelter, medicine, gadgets. America has been so successful that Americans don’t really have any idea of how bad life can get under a regime of incoherent rage. That doesn’t mean that the rage is any less real. It does mean that it may take a taste of real chaos for sobreity to kick in.
If that is the case, I hope that he doesn’t do too much damage in the mean time.