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Psychology
The Psychology of the 48 Percent
Understanding those who voted for Donald Trump.
Posted November 7, 2020 Reviewed by Kaja Perina
The current president has been fired.
Yet the jubilation of 50+ percent of the population contrasts with the angry denial of some members of the 48 percent who voted for him. Why?
To many of his opponents, it would seem that in a rational election, this ex-president should have lost by a large margin. Instead, he goes out with a likely large electoral vote loss but may trail by only a few percentages of the popular vote.
In a terrible pandemic in which we are approaching 250,000 deaths, many public health experts believe that his lack of action had devastating consequences. He perhaps even spread the disease in his large maskless rallies. Yet some of those who were infected, and even some who died, still supported him.
He was ultimately repudiated in the election. But not by the 48 percent. Why?
In my view, it's not about liberalism versus conservatism; it's not about tax cuts; it's not about China policy, or Russia. It may be, indirectly, about the Supreme Court, immigrants, Muslims, and African-Americans. And these factors point to the role white lower-class men play in society. Rachel Bitecofer, a professor of political science and campaign specialist, expresses this matter clearly, if a little crudely.
A simple number: about 2/3 of non-college-educated white males voted for the soon-to-be-ex-president. If they had been the sole voters, as was mainly the case in the first 150 years of this nation's existence, he would have been re-elected. He was voted out by an alliance of about half of the nation's white women, and most of the country's people of color. This likely explains the opposition to immigration—and the attacks on Muslims and Black Lives Matter—on the part of this candidate and his party. It's possible that they know that the less white this nation becomes, the more they will lose.
Other numbers: About 2/3 of America is white. But only 44 percent of America is white without a college education. Most of them voted for the current president, but that only added up, with a minority of other voters, to 48 percent.
In my view, this is a cultural conflict now, not a political debate. It's not about liberalism versus conservatism on policies (abortion, economics, taxes, foreign intervention); it's about whether the white male Christian power hierarchy of the past will continue its control, or whether it will share power with women and non-whites and non-Christians and non-heterosexuals.
There are two different visions of America: the America of the past, and the America of the future. Making America great again meant reclaiming that past. Opponents of that view argue that for anyone who wasn't white and male, America was never great. Their goal is not to make it great again, but to make it great someday. That's still a future event, should it ever occur.
The psychology of the 48 percent may be partly about false consciousness, as I described previously—not realizing what's in their own best interest. For instance, they and their political leaders objected to Social Security in the 1930s and to Medicare in the 1960s, calling it socialism, but now don't dare criticize either benefit. Instead they object to Medicare for All, calling it socialism....
Another aspect to the psychology of the 48 percent, though, may relate to a psychological commitment to maintaining the power of the male gender and of the European-American ethnicity, which has been called "white" for centuries in contrast to those it enslaved as "black." In Europe, those "whites" were just peasants and workers; in America, they were socially exalted and placed in contrast to slaves. For some, the psychology of whiteness has persisted: even when poor and uneducated, some of them feel superior to non-whites and may believe that continued immigration threatens their majority.
The polarization of America will likely persist, not because we fail to try to bridge it, but because America is changing. And some members of lower-class white America may struggle to adapt to the multiethnic America of the future.
Bitecofer notes that education is the primary definable dividing line of the electorate; it's not race or gender or class; it's education. Some parts of white America have recognized that change is happening and have decided that it should be engaged, not rejected. Education helped them to learn about this change. Other parts of white America reject such a change partly because, if they never attend college, where they might have a Middle Eastern roommate or an ethnic girlfriend, they are exposed to little else.
Hence the 48 percent.
This number may change over time, but it will not be because people change their minds. It will be because generations change. In the next election, the older population of Baby Boomers will give way to a larger voting bloc of millennials and generation Z. The 48 percent may become 46, then 43, then 40.
In the intervening decade or two, it may be wise for us all to continue sending everyone to college (even for free, as it is in most of Europe and as Bernie Sanders, for instance, advocated for the US), to extend education beyond one's parents and high school, in order to move America closer to the greatness of its original goals.
A final anecdote: Read what Thomas Jefferson put in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. This section was deleted in revision by objection of delegates from South Carolina and Georgia. Jefferson felt strongly enough about it that he published the draft again in his memoirs around age 70, highlighting the deleted sections and the process of its removal by those delegates. Here's what the Declaration of Independence originally said (grammatically uncorrected):
"...He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, and murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another..."
In other words: Black Lives Matter.
The departure of the current president is not the end, but it may be the beginning of the end of resistance to that idea, an idea that the greatest founders of this union envisioned would lead to its perfection.
