Why I thought Trump might win

Why did I think it was likely that Trump would win?

This will be really quick, and, if folks are interested, I’ll try expand later, but I thought a Trump win was likely (by which I meant 45/65, but then in the last week it became 50/50). Here’s why:

As I think y’all know, I periodically crawl under in the dark side of the interwebz, and I’ve been spending a lot of time lately wandering through pro-Trump FB pages and various evangelical websites. Folks in those places aren’t low information—they’re high misinformation.

What you see in an entire world of information is that Clinton:

1. 1. personally murdered or had murdered a lot of people;
   2. is prone to seizures;
   3. laughed at a rape victim;
   4. told the families of Benghazi victims that they should “move on and get over it;”
   5. supports “abortion” up until five minutes before birth, so she thinks a woman should be able to kill a perfectly healthy fetus until the moment of birth;
   6. subverted the constitution because the DNC tried to get her the nomination;
   7. and a bunch of other stuff.

Just to be clear, I wouldn’t have voted for Clinton had I thought any of that was true. None of it was, of course, but they didn’t know that.

Meanwhile, the main problem with American politics on these pages–pro-Trump and more or less secular and fundagelical–are slightly different. For the pro-Trump secular pages, it’s what’s described by the Stealth Democracy folks. Commenters on those pages believe that the solutions to our problems are simple. Politicians don’t go for those simple solutions because they want to keep their jobs by making things complicated and they’re corrupted by “special interests.”

“Special interests” are any interests other than the person making that criticism. So, since I’m a normal person, and I am a ferret rancher, the government should do lots of things to promote ferret farming. I’m not a special interest; I’m American. But, my neighbor, the lynx farmer, gets things—THAT is special interests.

So, there is a profound rejection of the pluralism of our world, and a normalizing of experience.

Why, then, don’t politicians do that obviously rational thing and support ferret farming? Because they are professional politicians, who get a lot of money from lobbyists to promote special interests like lynx farming.

Here’s what those folks believe about Trump:

1. 1. He’s an amazingly successful businessman;
   2. He has incredibly good judgment (thank Celebrity Apprentice for that);
   3. He isn’t beholden to anyone;
   4. He isn’t smart or subtle or well-educated: he doesn’t bullshit;
   5. He never lies; he engages in hyperbole, but he never deliberately manipulates anyone else;
   6. He’s like them. He isn’t a member of the cultural or intellectual elite.

On the evangelical side, it’s more complicated. To be fair, they resisted him much longer than the secular GOP did.

But, still and all, they accepted all the claims about Clinton, and they have made a nasty deal with their consciences about being so oriented toward killing. The fundagelical right thoroughly supported segregation, has never complained about police brutality, never met a GOP-supported war it didn’t like, loves it some death penalty (despite what Christ said), is all in favor of indiscriminate killing because some bad people might die, and supports social services policies that kill people.

There are lots of studies out there about doing a single good thing gets unconsciously interpreted as a “get out of guilt” free card for a far larger number of douchey behaviors. For instance, people who buy organic in a grocery store are less likely to be nice to the people collecting money for a good cause just outside the door. (This explains why drivers in the Whole Foods parking lots are unmitigated shitheads.)

Fundagelical Christianity in the US has been damaged by an attachment to sloppy Calvinism in the form of prosperity gospel. Unhappily, fundagelical Christianity has come to preach that we should not treat outgroups as we insist on being treated. (Making Christ’s golden rule a non starter.) We can help them, but only if help is associated with trying to make them part of our ingroup.

Government assistance is bad, not because it’s assistance, but because it’s secular.

All assistance should be connected to conversion. (Hence, people say that slut-shaming “abortion information centers” are more appropriate than giving women birth control.)

Basically, a lot of fundagelicals believe that the government is the problem, not the solution. And they believe they should contribute a lot to their church and not to the government.

Therefore, they’re drawn to cheap stances. Wanting to prohibit abortion costs nothing.

Actually reducing the number of abortions would cost a lot and it would involve giving women autonomy over our bodies. But claiming to be opposed to abortion, while also opposing the policies that would actually reduce abortion, reduces the cognitive dissonance created by the very death-oriented policies of the fundagelical right.

It’s a “get out of guilt free” card.

Finally, fundagelical Christianity has bought into imparted justification—that a saved person is a good person, with good judgment. So, for them, all arguments are identity arguments: is this person saved. And, unhappily, that comes down to: does this person claim to support the positions I think are necessarily associated with my view of being Christian.

So, there’s an analogy to the ferret farmer. The ferret farmer sees her interests as universal, and the basis of Americanism, and the lynx farmer as a corrupt special interest. Similarly, fundagelicals see their (quite specific, and even problematic) notions about religion as “Christian” and will not admit that people who don’t share their agenda on homosexuality or abortion are Christians. They’re special interest lynx farmers.

Anyway, I started to worry when I realized that the National Enquirer effect was in place for Trump supporters.

The National Enquirer is always wrong, in that it spends all the time saying this celebrity couple is breaking up. When, as sometimes happens, the couple does break up, the audience takes that outcome as proof that it was on to something, as opposed to admitting it was wrong far more often than it was right. Paradoxically, that fundagelicals have been predicting the end of the world for over a hundred years and have always been wrong has strengthened, not weakened, many people’s beliefs that the end is nigh.

All of the “scandals” about Clinton turned out to be wrong (and far less important than Trump’s) but they got better play. The moment I thought Trump would win was when, for the third week in a short period of time (maybe four weeks?) the National Enquirer had a headline about Clinton being ill or corrupt or whatever. Wandering in Trump pages, I learned that people were operating on a kind of “no smoke without fire” premise.

In other words, Trump’s appeal was to people who are living in a world excessive (and thoroughly false) information and a denial of difference as a value. They also hate complexity. And there is an odd kind of epistemic narcissism—their beliefs are the basis of all truth. But that’s a different post.