People vote with their hearts not with their wallets. They cast their votes to express their
emotions rather than maximize their economic interests. It is so, because unless they are businessmen
expecting kickbacks from supporting a particular candidate, the outcomes of
elections either have no impact whatsoever on the economic situation of the
great majority of voters, or the impact is so minimal, so removed in time from
the election, and so manipulated by political spin that the connection between
the two is lost for most people.
On the other hand, the emotional gratification from the
election outcome is real and instant. It
is the same kind of gratification as one provided by a football game. “Our” team won, so “we” can vicariously bask
in that victory. In the everyday life, “we”
may be nobodies living dull uneventful lives, bossed around at work doing
menial tasks, ridiculed by those with higher social standing, and derided by
the elite media. However, on that one
night “our boys” kicked ass, and that victory gave “us” a sense of pride and respectability,
a vicarious act of humiliation of those who humiliate “us” in everyday life –
the bosses, the snobs, the elites.
I realized that when a while ago I visited Ulaanbaatar, arguably
one of the least glamorous capitals of the world. Mongolia is dirt poor and heavily dependent
on the outside world. In the past it was
the Soviet Union, today it is foreign mining companies. Almost everything (save local cashmere) in the
stores is imported schlock and sold at outrageously inflated prices, even by
the American standard. The city itself
is pretty drab, a fine example of the nondescript Stalinist architecture built
on the cheap. And there is virtually
nothing outside the city, save the truly astonishing desert landscape.
The center of this rather depressing city is occupied by modern
government buildings adorned by statues of the national heroes, including a monumental
statue of Chinggis Khaan. In fact, the local
veneration of this historical figure becomes immediately apparent upon arrival,
as the Ulaanbaatar international airport is also named after Chinggis Khaan.
Understanding Chinggis Khaan is the key to understanding
Donald Trump. Chinggis Khaan may appear rather odious to a European traveler,
but he is a local boy who once kicked ass of those who today the Mongolians,
hat in hand, ask for assistance. The
image of the fearsome leader who once terrified Russia and Europe vicariously compensates
for the deficiencies and humiliations that the modernity dealt to this
impoverished desert country. Likewise,
Donald Trump may be a boorish troglodyte to the polite Ivy League educated
professionals, but for the unwashed ‘deplorables’ humiliated by the “new global
economy’ he is a local boy who outfoxed the ‘liberal elite.’
Unlike the Mongolians, the humiliation of the non-college
credentialed Americans is more symbolic than economic. Their standards of living may be stagnant,
but they are still decent by the world standards. Not as high as those in the “socialist” European
Union, but head and shoulders above those in Mongolia and, for that matter,
most “Global South” countries. What has
changed is the conditions of their work.
Gone are the days when a person with a high school diploma could obtain
a decent job for life that provided decent living standards for the entire
family. Gone are the days where children
were looking up to their working class parents as examples to follow.
Back in the old country, I remember my best primary school
friend Pawel, a son of a factory worker, who saw his father as his role model
and wanted to become a factory worker himself.
Upon graduation from the grade school, our ways parted – he went to a
trade school while I went to a college bound high school. But our friendship did not end then. We were still hanging out together, and I
pretty much envied his working class status, making things instead of pushing
paper, the ability to control heavy machinery, the shop floor action instead of
classroom boredom. At one point, bored
with high school drudgery, I decided to join my friend at the shop floor. My friend quickly taught me how to operate a
lathe, but soon the instructor became suspicious and asked if I was enrolled in
the school. I replied that I was a high
school student but I was contemplating transferring to a vocational
school. The instructor did not buy it,
of course, and ordered me to go back to my high school.
Years later I traversed central Pennsylvania with my ex who
was a social worker. We visited a number
of little towns – some, like Bellefonte, incredibly cute and catering to
tourists and the faculty of the Penn State University located in the nearby State
College, but most other were shitholes with no charm and no economy. Their occupants were mostly working class
retirees too poor to live elsewhere, while the young people either left or
worked a few menial service jobs that were still available. Altoona, once the “railroad capital of the
world” is now a sleepy small town served by one crappy Amtrak train per day
that few people ride. As a son of Polish
immigrants who grew up in one of those shitty working class towns near Pittsburgh
and later became a journalist explained to me, far from looking up to their working
class parents, the young people do everything to distance themselves from them
and escape the hopelessness of life in their towns. This situation is not unique to Pennsylvania,
of course, and one can see plenty of such places across the Northeastern rust
belt – Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia.
The electoral map shows that this is the inhabitants of
these shitty, hopeless towns who delivered Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio, and
with them the nation, to Donald Trump. Most
of the people whom I met in my travels to these places were not racist deplorable
monsters as the Clinton campaign portrayed them. To be sure, they did not have the eloquence
of college educated professionals, and what they said could be rather offensive
to the liberal sensibilities. But if you
listened to them instead passing a judgment, you would soon discover that it was
their fear and their despair that was talking rather than racism and
bigotry.
A West Virginia roofer, whom I once met in a laundromat in
Baltimore, started the conversation with a long diatribe denouncing Blacks, but
when instead of joining him I just shook my head, he opened up and told me his
story. He came to Baltimore from one of
those shitty working class towns looking for work, and what he saw scared him. At that time, Baltimore resembled a war zone –
you could hear shootings and police helicopters almost every day. I can only imagine what an uneducated person
from a sleepy small town, whose image of a big city is based on TV actions
shows, must have felt. At the end, he
felt ashamed of what he initially said, asserting that he was not a
racist. I believed him, but I also knew
that when he returned to his shitty West Virginia town, he likely used the same
racist language with his buddies.
Portraying Trump voters as deplorable bigots is no different
from portraying Mongolians erecting the statues of Chinggis Khaan as
bloodthirsty savages. It is based on a
profound misunderstanding of human psychology and the emotional function that
figures like Trump and Chinggis Khaan play.
This function is very similar to that played by religion. To quote Marx:
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real
suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
By erecting the symbols of the “glorious past” –or for that matter “glorious
future” – in which “our boys” kick ass of those who we think humiliate or inflict
pain on us today, we create a parallel universe, an alternative reality in
which our pain and humiliation is vicariously avenged and erased. From that point of view, voting for Trump has
the same emotional roots as women dressing in pantsuits and voting for Clinton
to vicariously avenge gender discrimination.
By the same token, people who live full and rewarding lives,
professionals who find their work fulfilling and their future bright, employees
who do not have to justify their existence to stave off being made redundant, workers
proud to be role models to their children – do not need such emotional surrogates
to alleviate their humiliation and suffering.
Work is not only the activity to which virtually all of us devote most
of our time (and increasingly so), but what also defines who we are and where
we stand in society, neoliberal identity politics notwithstanding. Give people decent and fulfilling jobs – and they
will identify with them. They will think
of themselves as writers, artists, doctors, professors, teachers, engineers, technicians
and skilled workers. Give them shitty,
meaningless jobs on which they are constantly bossed around and asked to
justify their existence, or take their jobs away altogether – they start
identifying themselves by whatever is left of their socially constructed
humanity – being Black, being American, being Christian, Muslim or Jewish,
being a woman, or even being a redneck.
Those who try to link the rise of populist reaction and
reverence of “strong man” figures like Trump, or for that matter Chinggis Khaan,
to economic hardship look in the right direction, but do not see the right
thing. It is not the economic conditions
per se, but the human conditions of producing economic output that have
degraded. In the era of unprecedented
economic prosperity, the work of most people has been degraded to meaningless
drudgery, menial tasks, uncertain, precarious status, bullshit performance
evaluations, and longer working hours.
And to what end? To enrich a few
entrepreneurial shysters who are not accountable to anyone and call people whose
work they exploit moochers. Unless this
changes, the dissatisfaction and humiliation of the toiling masses will find periodic
outlets in populist outbursts and seemingly irrational rejection of technocratic
managers in favor of charismatic leaders offering illusory promises of avenging
that humiliation.
