The Republican Southern Strategy was rooted in grievance. Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Fox News, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Breitbart News, and more made hundreds of millions from grievance. They made grievance a bankable commodity, a ratings bonanza. Grievance has torn apart families. Grievance-made-politics led inexorably to the election in 2016 of President Donald J. Trump. Grievance-turned-insurrection led to the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol last week and to five deaths. It is not over yet.
James Kimmel, Jr. studies “the role of grievances and retaliation in violent crime.” Last month, the lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine reported in Politico that a brain on grievance (over an injury perceived or imagined) looks a lot like a brain on drugs. Brain imaging shows both illuminate the same brain circuitry as narcotics. Both have the potential for sliding into addiction:
This isn’t a metaphor; it’s brain biology. Scientists have found that in substance addiction, environmental cues such as being in a place where drugs are taken or meeting another person who takes drugs cause sharp surges of dopamine in crucial reward and habit regions of the brain, specifically, the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum. This triggers cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through intoxication. Recent studies show that similarly, cues such as experiencing or being reminded of a perceived wrong or injustice — a grievance — activate these same reward and habit regions of the brain, triggering cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through retaliation. To be clear, the retaliation doesn’t need to be physically violent—an unkind word, or tweet, can also be very gratifying.
Although these are new findings and the research in this area is not yet settled, what this suggests is that similar to the way people become addicted to drugs or gambling, people may also become addicted to seeking retribution against their enemies—revenge addiction. This may help explain why some people just can’t let go of their grievances long after others feel they should have moved on—and why some people resort to violence.
The connection to last week’s insurrection in Washington, D.C. is obvious. Ahead of last year’s impeachment proceedings against Donald J. Trump, former Trump Organization executive vice president Barbara Res predicted, “Once he gets through this, and he probably will,” Res said, shaking her head, “He will exact revenge on a lot of people. A lot of people.”
A lot of people got revenge for him as well as for themselves on Wednesday. (Emphasis mine.)
Like substance addiction, revenge addiction appears to spread from person to person. For instance, inner-city gun violence spreads in neighborhoods like a social contagion, with one person’s grievances infecting others with a desire to seek vengeance. Because of his unique position and use of the media and social networks, Trump is able to spread his grievances to thousands or millions of others through Twitter, TV and rallies. His demand for retribution becomes their demand, causing his supporters to crave retaliation—and, in a vicious cycle, this in turn causes Trump’s targets and their supporters to feel aggrieved and want to retaliate, too.
Historians and social scientists will be studying last week’s events for decades. Clearly, the social contagion is more complex than Trump, his grievances, and bundle of personality defects. But he took the decades of grievance stoked by everything from the Southern Strategy to right-wing media to another level. Globalization, immigration, the Great Recession, and other social shifts contributed, especially the browning of America and the election of the first Black president. Trump inspired a national cult of personality because the television celebrity came along at the right time with the right marketing skills and the right social media tools. He knew just where to poke. Or he didn’t have to. His grievances, his feelings of inadequacy, mirrored his followers’. “They’re laughing at us,” Trump has complained for decades. The cult identified immediately. The smoldering became a fire. Since their avatar lost reelection, it has become a conflagration.
After Capitol security shot U.S. Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt climbing through the door into the Speaker’s Lobby, 28-year-old Thomas Baranyi, a New Jersey resident, gave his account of the shooting to CBS affiliate WKRG. The video of that interview has disappeared, but a partial transcript is still online.
Baranyi had blood on his hand. Babbitt’s blood. She had fallen backwards onto him. But what stood out in the interview was his generalized sense of marginalization and anger at the world:
“Just make sure people know, because this cannot stand anymore. This is wrong. They don’t represent anyone. Not Republican, Democrat, Independent, nobody. And now they’ll just, they’ll kill people,” Baranyi answered.
When asked who is he referring to, Baranyi answered: “Police, congressmen and women, they don’t care. I mean, they think we’re a joke. $2,000 checks was a joke to them. You know, there’s people filming us, laughing at us as we marched down the street at the Department of Justice. There’s a man in the window laughing at us, filming us. And here it was a joke to them until we got inside and then all of a sudden guns came out. But I mean, we’re at a point now, it can’t be allowed to stand. We have to do something, people have to do something, because this could be you or your kids.”
Beneath superficial complaints, Trumpism is about the loss of white control in a diversifying country. Democracy is the greatest threat to white supremacy. That makes commitment to popular sovereignty as a principal disposable. The Republican Party has engaged in a decades-long propaganda campaign — the myth of widespread voter fraud — to undermine faith in elections to prepare for just this moment. A way had to be found for the coming white minority to continue to keep wield power while maintaining a democratic facade. Having lost a democratic election, and having run out of stratagems for undoing it, Trump & Cult simply took the next logical step: overthrow the government.
Storming the Capitol was an expression of vintage white rage, said Carol Anderson of Emory University, author of “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.”
“It’s entirely about the perceived loss of the power of whiteness,” said Bree Newsome Bass, the human rights activists known for taking down a Confederate flag at the South Carolina Statehouse in 2015. “People feel like they are losing something if whiteness no longer carries privilege and power. If there’s racial equality, they feel like they have been denied what the country was supposed to be.”
“Part of why Trump inspires this cult-like loyalty is because he embodies that grievance,” Newsome Bass added. “When he says ‘I have been robbed,’ he is speaking for the white supremacist cause. When there’s a perception that the power of whiteness is being lost, the act of violence is what reinforces and reassures it.”
[…]
“The lie of voter fraud says that ‘we are being victimized by those people in the city who are trying to steal our democracy,’” Anderson said. “When they’re storming Congress, they’re seeing themselves as the victim because that’s the narrative that’s been crafted for them.”
Many of the people who stormed the Capitol likely do not perceive defending whiteness as their underlying motivation. That would tarnish their “patriot” bona fides. But it is the water in which the metaphorical fish swims.
“Over time we will see these people humanized and described in a way that takes away from the fact that this is such a historic, violent moment in the U.S. Capitol that hasn’t happened in any of our lifetimes,” said Dana White, a D.C.-area speaker and facilitator on race and LGBTQ issues. “I think a lot of the emphasis will be placed on Trump inciting this overzealous behavior in people.”
Trump was not the cause of the conflagration, but the accelerant.