Psychologists and or social scientists will eventually study Trumpism as a form of moral panic or hysterical contagion. Studies will encompass the Jan. 6th insurrection (and attempted coup) and the QAnon conspiracy. Someone will publish a paper and assign a name to it. Trumpophrenia? Trumpomania?
The panic among Donald Trump’s ovewhelmingly white Christian followers provokes risk-taking behaviors such as boat parades which send family after family into the drink and their boats to the bottom. They travel the country like Deadheads to Trump rallies where in the fullness of time they willingly exposed themselves to a dangerous contagion in defiance of medical authorities so they might display their fealty to their tribe and to their one, true political messiah.
Many equate Trumpism with racism or, more generously, with economic insecurity. But those answers are far too facile. This is lizard-brain stuff. Their fear is loss of social status for a dwindling (okay, white-Christian) majority in a diversifying society. Skin color is just handy shorthand for who is who.
“People weigh their well-being relative to those around them. There is strong evidence that whites often oppose actions against inequality because of ‘last place aversion,’ the desire to ensure that there is a class of people below oneself,” Sean McElwee wrote in 2015.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you,” President Lyndon Johnson told his press secretary Bill Moyers in 1960.
Fear of loss of status was behind the Redemption movement, the white backlash that followed Reconstruction. Fear of loss of status was behind the violent insurrection by white supremacists against Black men governing Wilmington in 1898 and behind the 1921 Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa that just saw its 100-year anniversary. It was behind the T-party that arose after the U.S. elected its first Black president. The backlash against that eventually turned violent on January 6th.
Maintaining their position in the social pecking order means more to Trumpists than money. More than the security of universal health care for them and their families. More than life itself. Story after tragic story surfaces of dying Trump believers who refused to wear masks and refused vaccination against COVID-19 in defiance of the the norms of an emerging society without them (and their political messiah) at its apex.
I have long suggested that the right is playing out “Banks of the Ohio” with their beloved country. If they couldn’t have it for theirs and theirs alone, they would murder it so no one else could possess it. But until COVID-19, I never saw them reimagining the ballad as a murder-suicide.