It became obvious a while ago that Donald Trump has some serious mental health issues, focused mostly on Narcissistic Personality Disorder. But one of the problems with our current mental health system is that it tends to focus on individuals, failing to take context into account. When it comes to understanding the election of Trump, a study by Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of London, started to fill in the gap.
“Political campaigns, especially those that use conspiracy beliefs as a tool to mobilize their electorate, are likely to mobilize collective narcissists. We found that American collective narcissism was linked to the conspiratorial mind-set and this relationship strengthened during the 2016 presidential campaign in the U.S,” Golec de Zavala told PsyPost.
“In another study, we found that collective narcissism was the strongest, after partisanship, predictor of voting for President Trump.”
So what is “collective narcism?” Here is how it was defined by Golec de Zavala:
Collective narcissism occurs when an exaggerated, inflated, and unrealistic view of the in-group compensates for creeping feelings of loss of dominance and declining importance, while also displaying a hypersensitivity to any out-group threats to the in-group’s image. Perhaps most relevant is the research showing a propensity for the in-group to aggressively retaliate and revel in the out-group’s misfortune when the in-group is criticized or feels insufficiently recognized or respected.
As Trump was preparing to run for president, white supremacists Richard Spencer tapped into how he was exploiting those “creeping feelings of loss of dominance.”
“Trump, on a gut level, kind of senses that this is about demographics, ultimately. We’re moving into a new America.” He said, “I don’t think Trump is a white nationalist,” but he did believe that Trump reflected “an unconscious vision that white people have – that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there. I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon.”
Keep in mind that collective narcissism doesn’t depend on an actual loss of dominance, but a fear that it will happen, as Peter Hall, a professor of government at Harvard, explained.
The people most often drawn to the appeals of right-wing populist politicians, such as Trump, tend to be those who sit several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder in terms of their income or occupation. My conjecture is that it is people in this kind of social position who are most susceptible to what Barbara Ehrenreich called a “fear of falling” — namely, anxiety, in the face of an economic or cultural shock, that they might fall further down the social ladder,” a phenomenon often described as “last place aversion.”
In other words, fear – not reality – is the culprit. That is precisely what right wing outlets like Fox News are promulgating with their embrace of replacement theory. As psychologist Nick Carmody explains, it is important to know about “the effect that fear……especially disinformation-induced fear……has on the collective human psyche.”
From a neurobiological standpoint, the more evolved, cerebral cortex is located the furthest from the primitive brain stem….and contributes to the functions that make us distinctly human such as reason, judgment, and perhaps even our conscience because of its role in awareness/consciousness.
But fear is a primal response that originates in the amygdala, which is located closer to the primitive brain stem. Fear is an evolutionary response that helps guarantee survival. An animal relies on fear to instinctively engage a “binary” fight or flight response to survive. If there is any delay in cognitive processing, the animal risks being defeated in battle if it hesitates to “fight”….or risks being caught in “flight” if it hesitates to flee. Fight or flight requires animals to react first, and then think later, if at all. This is what has been occurring in American politics.
Decades of fear mongering/demagoguery have conditioned people’s primitive fear responses to be in a constant state of “hyper-vigilance” (not unlike PTSD)….which causes them to see enemies everywhere…..and to view everything as a “threat” to their survival. Demagogues have incited people to fear minor “threats” to status…, wealth, and lifestyle…
As a result, “threats” to a white, Christian, unregulated gun-owning society is equated to a literal existential threat to survival.
That is precisely the response Republican politicians are triggering with statements like this:
“The left’s ambition is to create a world beyond belonging,” said Hawley. “Their grand ambition is to deconstruct the United States of America.”
“The left’s attack is on America. The left hates America,” said Cruz. “It is the left that is trying to use culture as a tool to destroy America.”
“We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life,” said Rubio.
Obviously, “the left” is the out-group that poses an existential threat to the in-group of collective narcissists.
All of this forms the basis of grievance politics, which focuses on how right wingers are victims, whose way of life is under attack from the left. Here’s the goal:
The reality is that it’s not about actual victimhood. It’s about perceived victimhood, and the need to keep 45% of this country in a “hyper- vigilant” state of perpetual victimhood…
The byproduct of this perpetual state of victimhood is that a number of otherwise decent people are incited into such an irrational emotional state that they not only tolerate intolerance….but, in some cases, they’re willing to embrace inhumanity.
That is where things get dangerous.
In our society, there is a belief that victims have a right to take extreme measures to defend themselves, up to and including, deadly force. In the law, there is a common law principle called the “Castle Doctrine” that allows people to use reasonable force (including deadly force) to protect themselves against an intruder in their home. This doctrine was codified by state legislatures with “stand your ground” statutes that expanded it to include public places.
As Lance Mannion once explained, Christian nationalists need to feel persecuted.
[I]t feeds their self-pity and sense of entitlement, and it gives them their excuse…If they are under attack, then they’re free to fight back.
According to these folks, victims not only have the right to defend themselves, they have the right to strike preemptively to protect themselves. That is precisely what the defense attorneys in both the Kyle Rittenhouse and McMichael/Bryan trials claimed. In the same way, the January 6 insurrectionists believed that they were the victims of a stolen election, which justified their attack on the Capital. So we see this mindset creeping in to our culture as a justification for the escalation of violence on the right.
All of this is frightening and I have no idea how the story ends. But one thing I do know: if Democrats simply focus on policies (an appeal to reason and judgement), it isn’t going to break through this fear-induced collective narcissism. To be honest, I don’t have a lot of answers about what will break through. It’s just clear to me that the place to start is to better understand what we’re dealing with.
Terrific piece, Nancy; thanks.
I don’t have any solutions either, but here are a couple of thoughts I’ll toss into the circle for discussion:
1) Fear not: in the Bible one of the most consistent signs of the presence of the Divine is fear; and God’s repeated response in those situations is “Fear not”. Acknowledging people’s fears (our own and others), and then reframing the situation so as to diminish their fear can be a useful political tactic. President Obama did this brilliantly in his speech at the Edmund Pettus Bridge (and on numerous other occasions), reframing the story so as to allow people to attach their feelings of patriotism to a changing America.
2) Consequences: we’re starting to see this among the rank-and-file participants of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Faced with actual consequences for their actions, many of them are (or at least, seem to be) changing. (Read Jacob Chansley’s (the Q-Anon Shaman) pre-sentencing statement for a good example.) A big part of Trump’s appeal is that he escapes consequences. Make him face consequences for his crimes (financial and political) and that will (I expect) change.
Indeed. Trump is always throwing crap at the democrats. Heard him the other day say how Antifa is a democrat terrorist organization. And not only that the dems want to change the name of thanksgiving. More lies, someone tell some lies about him,please.
The “I have no idea how the story ends” part is what is so distressing. I see no path to depowering the right wing media deluge of hate and fear, which seems to be the only way to stop this movement. Turns out the First Amendment might well be a suicide pact, that along with major media’s absolute failure to stop spreading disinformation. Case in point, Durham’s couple of hamfisted indictments that were designed to make the Russia investigations of Trump and his cronies appear to be entirely political have gotten enormous play in major media, which is all over the place apologizing for playing up the Steele Dossier, as if that formed the factual basis for FBI and Senate investigations (it didn’t) and as if Durham’s attacks indicate the Dossier was fatally flawed, which it wasn’t.
Yeah, it was pretty much flawed. See Marcy if you want to truth about it.
It’s a mistake to dismiss feelings of loss of status among white men. Drawing a line between ‘real’ and ‘perceived’ is nearly meaningless as people act on their perceptions, not your assessment of what their perceptions should be. In any event the fact is that white men have lost status. Status by its very nature is relative, and obviously in that situation X rising means Y sliding.
And there are a number of hard facts to confront: men are less likely than women to get a 4 year degree, more likely to be in prison, more likely to commit suicide, more likely to be drug addicted. More likely to be murdered. Every single occupation that was in earlier times the sole province of men, has been opened to women. The reaction from our side to this is to hand wave it away, to lecture men, to refuse to take their issues seriously, and chalk it up as, well, that’s how men are.
We are singularly focused on racism and missing the fact that MAGA is at least as much about masculinity as it is race. Look at the cos-play, it’s all about masculinity: body armor, guns, military style outfits, prodigious beards. Listen to the language, it’s all about defensiveness, phony nostalgia, feelings of impotence and loss of status.
We focus on racism because it’s morally clean. Black and white. (Heh.) Good guys, bad guys. We don’t want to talk about the problems of men, generally lower middle class, poorly-educated men, because then the morality gets gray and unsettling. It is a mistake to pooh-pooh it all for the very simple reason that men are dangerous. Given that there’s a slow but clear migration of Black and Brown men into the R camp, attention should be paid.
I agree that gender is a HUGE part of grievance culture.It is hard to cover all of the components in one article and this was probably already too long.
What we’ve witnessed for decades now is that men have had a harder time adapting to change than women. They are likely to continue to struggle as long as they view the changes as a zero sum game (X rising means Y sliding).
I know too many men who are thriving amidst these changes to ever suggest “that’s just how men are.” Being free to define their own masculinity free from patriarchy has been a godsend for them. That’s exactly what I hope for those who a clinging to retrograde notions of what it means to be a man.
I’ve been looking into the slow migration of some Hispanic men to the R camp. Here’s just one article that I found interesting on that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/03/22/latino-men-trump-2020/
Mind you, I have no idea how to fix any of this. At a sort of basic level this is the triumph of nerds over jocks writ large. Marty McFly coming back through time to find his nemesis Biff washing cars. Adaptability usually, in my experience, travels side by side with intelligence, so the smart ones make it, the not-so-smart, don’t.
If you’ve spent 20 years driving a truck or in a mine or working at a hot grill, what is there in your experience that prepares you for what feels like sudden change? We have lost the ability to relate to ‘those men,’ and they’ve never related to us. The problem is one of reality, not just perception. Men have lost their unique roles in society. Fine for me, I’m a writer, but I spent many years doing low-status grunt work – waiting tables, cleaning homes, painting houses – and I find very, very few of my fellow lefties have any emotional grasp of that life.
When you’re poor you’re afraid a lot because you know it takes only the smallest thing to screw up your life. When you lie awake at night, every night, year after year, wondering how you can pay the rent, buy a gift for your kid, manage a doctor visit, you really don’t want to be told you’re some kind of oppressive elite.
“When you’re poor you’re afraid a lot because you know it takes only the smallest thing to screw up your life. When you lie awake at night, every night, year after year, wondering how you can pay the rent, buy a gift for your kid, manage a doctor visit…”
That describes the experience of millions of women – especially women of color. Why do you think they’re not resorting to the kind of collective narcissism I described?
Because woman of color never felt that they were better than another group? They were not getting a “physic wage” because their condition was someone else’s physic wage, no matter that the recipient of that wage might actually be worse off materially than the woman of color.
What James Montgomery says below. A Black woman knows life is stacked against her. Poor women generally do. Loss of status is relative – when you already find yourself at the bottom, you’re not seeing troubling change, just more of the same old. I believe it’s the case that revolutions are generally sparked by change in the fortunes of one group or another, either a stymied aspirational group, or an established class that feels itself losing status.
In any event telling men that some other group is worse off is about as effective as when my mother would insist I eat everything on the plate because, ‘kids are starving in India.’ You’re feeling a sharp drop in status, but hey, you’re not quite at the bottom, so vote for us! is not the message that’s going to get us Ohio.
I wrote upstream that I don’t happen to have a handy solution (to this, or world peace, or FTL travel) but a start might be made by acknowledging that non-college men have legitimate issues.
You’re right to suggest that many non-college white men have legitimate issues. They are shared by a lot of women and people of color. If they could acknowledge that – rather than see women & people of color as a threat – solutions might begin to emerge.
Let me just add the obvious: reinstating the heirarchy where men dominate women and whites dominate people of color (iow, restoring the status white men enjoyed) is NOT an option.
Ok but we have to show some real support for white men not in a blog but some real words from our political class. Fail here and our fortunes get worse from now on,
Imagining explaining to my wife that I am now her master. Wondering which hotel I should move into five minutes later.
Not gonna work is it?
Thank you for this article. I’ve felt for a while that a lot of older folks need to die off. The demographic argument, the weakness of which is that it presumes people of color can’t be snookered in a similar manner. The truth is we know how easy it is to get light skinned blacks to hate dark skinned blacks and lighter Latinos to feel superior to those darker. As a result, whiteness just gets redefined to include more people. There was a time when Jews weren’t seen as white and, going back further, the same could be said of Italians, Germans and even the Irish and Scottish. I was born into a time (early 60s) and place (New York City) where those divisions still ran deep. People weren’t black, white and Latino (which are equally arbitrary designations) but rather WASP, Irish, Italian, German, Jewish, Puerto Rican, black (negro in those days), etc. The ultimate fight is not with people but with tribalism itself. How to get people to see beyond it or to define it differently. Like all of us as Americans, as might have been the case for a short time after the 9/11 attacks (and, going back further, to some extent in World War II).
Just linking to another great blog that I frequent. Former “Republican” who now basically sounds like a Progressive.
https://www.politicalorphans.com/
If and when you have time, read through some posts. His major argument is that white supremacy is what “held together” the US from before-US to very recently, and that we need a new myth to “unite” us, but which isn’t destructive like white supremacy. Great analysis and comments.
The problem with “demographics” is that conservatives, when cornered, will invite the most violent and most conservative “others” in to join them, ultimately to murder their true enemies, the liberals.
Thank you, Nicholas. I look forward to taking a look.
Well we are Irish heritage with some English and German for some good measure and we are about as white as you get. And I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens before you. We were all tribes back then but it seems we have moved beyond that now, I’d hate to tell you what my family said about the Italians, the Jews and the Blacks. But my sister married an Italian, a prince of a man. I loved him.And my granddaughter is serious about a Black man. Somehow we have to remain inclusive, it was a tough battle getting here.
Indeed. We’ve come a long way and yet clearly we still have a very long way to go.