"Trumpism" Doesn’t Exist, and Why It’s So Terrifying (Part 2)
[THIS CONTENT WAS WRITTEN BEFORE THE 2024 ELECTION, AND YET IT'S MORE RELEVANT TODAY THAN WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN.]
Narrative Mistake #2: Conservatives Are NOT Mere Destructionists… They see themselves as heroes!
Back in 1964, Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater, in part due to the “indelible impression of savagery” Goldwater voters created at the GOP convention, which repulsed the nation.[i] Yet in 2016, the never-before-elected Donald Trump—who was arguably kookier, cruder, coarser, and just as extreme, not to mention an intellectual featherweight compared to Goldwater—solidly beat Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College and lost the popular vote by only two percentage points.
Furious, seething fringe politics may have repulsed voters in 1964, but by 2016 they had become a recipe for victory. This multi-decade transformation cannot in any way be attributed to Trump, even if it propelled him to the presidency.
Johnathan Chait, writing in The New Republic, called that transformation a “long-term political swap,” a slow-rolling overthrow of moderate Republican traditions starting in the Nixon era:
“The moderate Republican tradition had always leaned heavily on elitism, which abhorred demagoguery and the crude appeals to self-interest…Nixon’s re-branding of the party helped set in motion a long-term political swap, in which Republicans slowly lost support among white voters with a college education while gaining traction among the white working class.”[ii]
The purported drivers of this long-term “swap” are numerous and varied (e.g., economic dislocation, exploitation of white grievance, a growing urban/rural divide, a backlash against political correctness, etc.), but the most important driver gets little to no attention at all, even though it alone holds the whole enterprise together.
The main driver of this swap—the catalyst that enabled the GOP to convert sentiment into votes—was narrative.
Here, we don’t mean “narrative” in its narrow political sense (e.g., the “invasion” narrative Trump spins on immigration, or the “law and order” narrative that GOP politicians have leaned on since Nixon). Narrative is not just a framing device used to spin an issue, create an impression, or bolster an attack. The term “narrative” is offered here in a much broader sense.
In his book, The Stories We Live By, psychologist and researcher Dan McAdams explains that:
“Human beings are storytellers by nature… The story is a natural package for organizing many different kinds of information. Storytelling appears to be a fundamental way of expressing ourselves and our world to others.”[iii]
Professor János László, of the Institute for Psychology at the Hungarian Institute of the Sciences, tells us that, “social knowledge and social thinking are characterized by some sort of distinct type of narrativity.”[iv] [emphasis original]
To be more specific, the stories underlying identity—our identity narratives—are so integrated into the way we operate in the world, it’s barely possible to distinguish our stories from ourselves. Psychologist John Holmes, a professor at Waterloo University, puts it this way: “Storytelling isn’t just how we construct our identities. Stories are our identities.”[v] [all emphases original]
From the mid-century onward, conservatives executed a long-term *narrative* swap, exchanging one identity story for another:
Reframing what it means to be a conservative in America, manufacturing a new kind of emotional and psychological logic, an entirely new take on reality, which in turn has reset conservatives’ identity and engagement with the world, political and otherwise.
For conservatives, an identity story that had previously integrated the mid-century Liberal Consensus—with its political mores of bi-partisanship, compromise, pluralism, and the like—was exchanged for an identity story that is, instead, unipolar, anti-pluralist, and hegemonic.
Unfortunately, most political and media commenters misunderstand what that identity story is. They see it destructionist, rather than what it is: a revanchist, heroic mythology.
Sam Tanenhaus, former NY Review of Books editor, observed in The New Republic:
“The story of American conservatism is best understood as a continual replay of a single long-standing debate. On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America’s pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and time again, the counter-revolutionaries have won.
The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society, but rather weakening it through a politics of civil warfare… Many have observed that [conservative] movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but what it longs to destroy – ‘statist’ social programs; ‘socialized medicine’; ‘big labor’; ‘activist’ Supreme Court justices; ‘tenured radicals’ on university faculties; ‘experts’ in and out of government.”[vi]
Too often, discussions of “Trumpism” (as a proxy for right-wing extremism) focus on conservatives’ destructive impulses without taking seriously their underlying revanchist quest.
Psychology professors Stephen Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam identify exactly this restorative impulse at Trump rallies they have attended:
“… the relationship [between Trump and the crowd] is translated into a vision of the world in general: ordinary Americans have fallen from their rightful place in the world because of attacks from without and betrayals from the political class within, but they have the power, united behind Trump, and the will to employ it to restore the American people to this place.”
If one were willing to see the world as his voters do, Reicher and Haslam argue, one would plainly see that a Trump rally was, “an identity festival that embodied a politics of hope.”[vii]
This is the second key mistake that conventional analyses make about the Trump phenomenon:
Right-wing destructiveness is, when inverted, a hopeful exercise of political power, one based on a heroic identity myth of the embattled conservative restoring America to its pure, original state.
This identity myth traces back not to Trump, but to outsider conservative activists of the 1950s. Nicole Hemmer, in her book Messengers of the Right, details the birth and evolution of “the right’s oppositional identity,” and how “conservatives fashioned a narrative not of a political faction attempting to change policy, but of an epic, high-stakes struggle between the coordinated forces of oppression and the embattled, noble right.”[viii]
She explains that conservative media activists and their industrialist backers of the 1950s accused their Republican party of selling out to big-government, internationalist types—furious that voters could only choose between “New Deal Democrats and New Deal Republicans.” They pined and raged and schemed about how to build a movement:
“There were two national parties, both riven with ideological factions. The trick was to scrape the conservatives from one party, purge the liberals, and effect an ideological realignment—to create, in effect, a party of purists.”[ix]
From Jonathan Chiat, writing in the New Republic:
Fifty years ago, the conservative movement, far from holding a monopoly on acceptable thought within the GOP, was merely one tribe vying for power within it, and not even the largest one. The conservative movement… took control of the party in large part due to an imbalance of passion. The rightists had strong and clearly defined principles and a willingness to fight for them, while the moderates lacked both. Meeting by meeting, caucus by caucus, the conservative minority wrested control of the party apparatus.
Bit By Bit (Over 70 years) Extremists Engulf America’s Conservative Movement — Launch It on a Hero’s Journey
Over many decades, election by election cycle, right wing extremists built a party of purists by selling half the country on a fabulist identity myth of avenging heroes saving America—the BIG “Big Lie.”
The BIG “Big Lie” goes something like this:
Conservative outsiders who represent the one true America, having been pushed to the sidelines of national life by the tyranny of consensus Liberalism, must vanquish their domestic enemies to save and restore the nation.
This enormous lie is actually a romantic myth, in literary terms: “the most important constituent is adventure, the test of strength… the protagonist often makes risky journeys but eventually he comes out the winner.”[x]
It also conforms to the “hero’s journey” storyline, which follows a predictable sequence of events, from the call to adventure, to encounters with helpers and mentors, to facing an ordeal that often amounts to an existential threat, and finally to the hero’s emergence, reborn, back into a redeemed world.
Marketers deploy these kinds of hero myths in something called Empowerment Marketing. Marketing expert Jonah Sachs writes in his book Winning the Story Wars, Empowerment Marketing worlds because:
“Recognizing one’s own hero potential is what the journey is all about…. A hero is simply someone who is boldly pursuing higher-level values… and is willing to make sacrifices in service to these ideals.”[xi]
Its opposite is Inadequacy Marketing, which sells products by creating anxiety about something you need to fix about yourself: I smell; My car is old; My hair is frizzy; My democracy is an imperfect union.
From a psychological standpoint, Empowerment Marketing works because hero stories are central to the formation of identity. According to Dan McAdams:
“Through our personal myths, each of us discovers what is true and what is meaningful in life. In order to live well with unity and purpose, we compose a heroic narrative of the self that illustrates essential truths about ourselves.”[xii]
We need to see ourselves as the heroes of our own life stories, and seen in this context, the J6 insurrection was, quite literally, a coup of Empowerment Marketing.
The narrative principles at work in the mythology of the BIG “Big Lie” work because they harness powerful psychological forces at the heart of identity. These kinds of narratives are more akin to what psychologists call “schema,” or are patterns “imposed on reality or experience to help individuals explain it, to mediate perception, and to guide their responses.”[xiii]
In some schools of psychology, schema are the building blocks of cognition and identity, and in the form of stories, they hold “a privileged status in the cognitive system,”[xiv] providing “an abstract cognitive plan that serves as a guide for interpreting information and solving problems.”[xv]
Heroism in the War Against Domestic Enemies Is a Mythology Deeply Embedded in Today’s Conservative Identity
In today’s world, heroic conservatives believe they are continuously facing down entrenched domestic enemies, battling for the restoration of the true, original (i.e., conservative) America.
Goldwater’s “extremism in defense of liberty” is now a living storyline in which all the narrow political narratives of the right—from racism against whites, to immigrants stealing jobs, to guns-are-freedom, to battles over election integrity, to fighting a deep-state conspiracy, to Liberal persecution of Christians, to leftists destroying America’s “free markets”—are all merely sub-narratives, deployed in support of one great, heroic identity myth and one great heroic mission: conservative heroes must restore the one true America, or die trying.
Conservatives’ fundamentally anti-pluralist identity narrative has been carefully built over many decades, within and outside the GOP, plank by plank, starting when Donald Trump was barely out of training pants.
The narrative, however, poses serious threats to the American democratic project. In his first inaugural address Ronald Reagan proclaimed that, “We have every right to dream heroic dreams.”[xvi] Yet, to live out their heroic storyline, conservatives needed an enemy against which they would be justified in waging their revanchist “politics of civil warfare.”
As conservative activist William Rusher said, “Every movement needs a villain.”[xvii] One of Barry Goldwater’s chief strategists said of GOP voters: “We want to just make them mad, make their stomach turn, take this latent anger and concern which now exists, build it up, and subtly turn and focus it.”[xviii]
So, over the latter decades of the 20th century, conservatives rhetorically stitched together an enormous complex of world-ending, diabolical, catastrophic threats—enemies everywhere—featuring a wild collection of isms: communism, fascism, collectivism, unionism, consumerism, feminism, pacifism, civil rights-isms, secularism, moral relativism, statism, among others.
At least since Nixon, the modus operandi of GOP politicking has been to reverse engineer lemonade back into lemons.
In the 1990s, under Gingrich, the GOP’s enemy-based attacks came to be known as “wedge issues,” and over the past several decades, the list of enemies and wedges has gotten so long that conservatives can’t seem to find an end to it:
brown immigrants
BLM
the Blacks
the Gays
trans people (especially athletes)
all higher education (non-Christian)
secular public schooling and public school teachers (for indoctrinating children)
all journos and news media (non-conservative)
woke Hollywood
feminazis
abortion
Liberals
Commies
the Muslims
humanists
evolution
climate change
environmentalists
all discussion of racism and diversity (for denigrating America and victimizing Whites)
gun control
NATO-lovers
all regulators and regulations
global bankers
French fries
hyphens
RINOS
Feds (any and all)
New World Order types and their globalist tools like the W.H.O. and W.T.O.
George Soros
This being only a tiny list.
The Narrative Imperative of Enemy Politicking
The power of all the right’s electoral strategies – even the Southern Strategy and its white backlash politics — lies exclusively in the narrative imperative of the BIG “Big Lie”: validating the sacred mission of the avenging hero by creating a vast web of enemies who are bent on the hero’s destruction.
That same narrative imperative still powers GOP politics today. Shortly after his election to the House Speakership, Mike Johnson sent out a fundraising email in which he warned:
“Patriot, America is in a tough spot right now, with no clear path forward. Our way of life is under assault every day from the Radical Left and their anti-family, anti-God, and fundamentally anti-American agenda.”[xix] [emphasis original]
In a similar vein, Josh Hawley has claimed that, “The left’s grand ambition… is to deconstruct the United States.” Ted Cruz has warned that the left is “trying to use culture as a tool to destroy America.” And Marco Rubio believes that “We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life.”[xx]
Calmly sit and listen for it, and you will hear the same narrative imperative in every conservative talking point, on just about every issue.
But don’t obsess over the enemy part, listen for the revanchist, heroic motivation, and you will hear it in every dysfunctional GOP stare-down with the Democrats, their defenses of extremism, their Orwellian twisting of facts, truth, and language. It’s all done in furtherance of their one foundational, heroic myth: fight to defeat domestic enemies and restore the real America.
The forces of democracy and pluralism make a strategic mistake by thinking that the main targets of their political resistance should be individual attacks by the extreme right on just about everything and everyone, from abortion to books to climate change, to the rule of law, the judiciary, the justice system, and the very idea of government itself.
Each of those attacks is merely a narrative flourish that breathes life into the right’s heroic origin myth of the BIG “Big Lie.”
Today’s biggest political challenge isn’t any single instance of right-wing dysfunction, it’s the underlying hero myth itself:
Besieged conservatives who are marginalized by the consensus politics of pluralism must defeat un-American, tyrannical domestic enemies to restore the original, real America.
Such a corrosive, heroic mythology—no matter how false—will never be dismantled by waging tactical battles against its innumerable manifestations. That’s just shadowboxing.
FOLLOW LONG TO THE NEXT CHAPTER… IT’S A DOOZY…
“Trumpism” Doesn’t Exist (Part 3): Sanity Will NOT Be Restored Any Time Soon
[i] David Corn, American Psychosis: A historical investigation of how the Republican Party went crazy (New York: Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2022) p. 70
[ii] Chiat, J. (2012, October 5) How the GOP destroyed its moderates (https://newrepublic.com/article/108150/the-revolution-eats-its-own)
[iii] Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal myths and the making of the self (New York: The Guilford Press 1993) p27
[iv] János László, The Science of Stories: An introduction to narrative psychology (New York: Routledge, 2008) Introduction p2
[v] Dingfelder, S. (2011) Our stories, ourselves, Monitor (A publication of the American Psychological Association), 42(1), p42
[vi] Tanenhaus, S. (2009, February 18) Conservatism is dead, The New Republic (https://newrepublic.com/article/61721/conservatism-dead)
[vii] Reicher, S. and Haslam, A (2017, March 1) Trump’s appeal: What psychology tells us, MIND (a publication of Scientific American) 28(2) p.42
[viii] Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative media and the transformation of American politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2016) p.124
[ix] Hemmer, ibid, p.137
[x] László, ibid, p.19
[xi] Jonah Sachs, Wining the Story Wars: Why those who tell—and live—the best stories will rule the future (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press) p.149
[xii] McAdams, ibid, p.11
[xiii] Jeffrey Young, Janet Klosko, Marjorie Weishaar, Schema Therapy: A practitioner’s guide (New York: The Guilford Press 2003) p6
[xiv] Arthur C. Graesser and Victor Ottati, Knowledge & Memory: The real story – Robert Wyer, editor (New York: Psychology Press, 2009) p123
[xv] Young-Klosko-Weishaar ibid, p7
[xvi] Ronald Reagan (1981, January 20) Inaugural address, Ronald Regan Presidential Library (https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/inaugural-address-1981)
[xvii] Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The downfall of moderation and the destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the present (New York: Oxford University Press 2013) p.84
[xviii] Corn, ibid, p.72
[xix] Fundraising email 11/27/2023
[xx] Brooks, D (2021, November 18) The terrifying future of the American right: What I saw at the National Conservatives Conference, The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/scary-future-american-right-national-conservatism-conference/620746/)