Editor’s Note: This article was written before Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, which makes its insights all the more remarkable.
It is easy and common to dismiss those whose political positions we disagree with as fools or knaves—or, more precisely, as fools led by knaves. Indeed, the inability of even the most experienced pundits to grasp the reality of Donald Trump’s political ascendency in this year’s Presidential race parallels an unprecedented assault on the candidate and his supporters, which went so far as to question their very grasp on reality. So it was that when a Suffolk University/USA Today Poll asked 1,000 people in September 2015 to describe Trump in their own terms, the most popular response was “idiot/jerk/stupid/dumb,” followed by “arrogant” and then “buffoon/clown/comical/joke.” Similarly, Trump’s followers were dismissed in some media accounts as idiots and bigots. Consider this headline from the Salon website: “Hideous, disgusting racists: Let’s call Donald Trump and his supporters exactly what they are.”
Such charges remind us of Theodore Abel’s fascinating 1938 text, “Why Hitler Came Into Power,” but first let us be absolutely explicit: We are not comparing Trump, his supporters or their arguments to the Nazis in any way. Instead, our goal is to expose some problems in the ways that commentators analyze and explain behaviors of which we disapprove. In 1934, Abel traveled to Germany and ran an essay competition, offering a prize for autobiographies of Nazi Party members. He received around 600 responses, from which he was able to glean why so many Germans supported Hitler. Certainly many essays expressed a fair degree of anti-semitism, and some a virulent hatred of Jews. In this sense, party members were indeed racists or, at the very least, did not object to the party’s well-known anti-semitic position. But this is very different from saying that they joined and remained in the party primarily or even partially because they were racists. Abel discovered that many other motives were involved, among them a sense of the decline of Germany, a desire to rediscover past greatness, a fear of social disorder and the desire for a strong leader.
We would argue that the same is true of those who supported Trump. Some, undoubtedly, were white supremacists. All were prepared to live with his racist statements about Muslims, Mexicans and others. But are racism, bigotry and bias the main reasons people supported Trump? Certainly not. We argue instead that we need to analyze and understand the way he appealed to people and why he elicited their support. Moreover, we need to respect those we study if we want to understand their worldview, their preferences and their decisions. The more distant these are from our own, the harder this task is, but also, the more important it becomes.
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