Demystifying Trump

I have been mystified by the Trump phenomenon for many years.  I was especially mystified by his successful run for the Presidency.  Since then, I have been mystified by the fact that his poll numbers have remained rock solid in the low 40's.  Every way I looked at it, it made no sense.  Then I had a breakthrough.

It was one of those "carom shot" things.  Something that was, for the most part, completely unrelated sparked an idea.  And the idea caused the clouds to part and it all finally made sense to me.  So my thanks to Ron Judd.  He writes for the local newspaper, The Seattle Times.

A month or so ago he wrote a piece for the paper on an, at best, peripheral subject.  The piece was called "Lunar Lunacy" and it was about conspiracy theories and why they are so persistent.  He covered many theories but spent most of his time on the one that posits that the Apollo moon landings were faked.

He confessed to complete bafflement about the zombie-like way that it and other similar conspiracy theories would not die.  He went on a some length about all the ways it had been discredited over the years.  Yet it nevertheless persists all the way down to today.

As I worked my way through the story I said to myself "wait -- I know what is going on".  Because his article caused  me to make a connection to a post from several years ago (I wrote it in 2014) called "Faith Based Conflict Resolution".  Here's the link:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/12/faith-based-conflict-resolution.html.  Please read it.  In it I provide quite a bit of in depth analysis supporting my thesis.  But I am going to summarize the principal finding here.

Modern religion ask their adherents to "have faith", not because of the facts, but in spite of them.  Science grew out of a growing belief that the old system was badly flawed.  The old system was an appeal to authority.  The path to truth had led people to the feet of the powerful.  Political, military, or religions leaders must know more or be able to understand better than the average person.  So find out what they think and go with that.

But authority figures get it wrong, at least some of the time.  Was there a way to achieve a better "batting average", to get it right more often, more completely, and with more confidence?  About four hundred years ago an alternative mechanism emerged that claimed to do just that.  It was what we now call science.  Since then it has racked up an impressive record of delivering on that early promise.

Science is fact based and analytical.  It accords extra weight to authorities in strict proportion to how closely they hew to the scientific method for finding and recognizing truth.  This was profoundly uncomfortable.  The old way had worked well for a very long time in a very wide number of situations.  It was the "natural way of doing things".

But science by every measure proved to just be better than the old way at finding reliable truth.  That should have been enough but it was not.  People still yearned to go back to the old way.  And this was particularly true in the field of religion.

Some of the biggest early triumphs of science had to do with showing that various religious beliefs were wrong.  The Catholic Church, the dominant religion in Europe at the time, had gotten heavily invested in what we now call cosmology.  I am not going to go into the whys of this.  But the Church decided as a matter of theology that the Earth was the center of the universe and that it was "fixed". It did not rotate.

Science convincingly showed that this was wrong.  After a few more tussles of this type religion, or at least Christian religion, adjusted.  They decided that the bible was not the literal truth.  Instead it was a metaphor.  That did not diminish its ability to be a font of reliable information about morality and how to lead a good life.  It just wasn't to be seen as the last word in these other areas.  That's the story they told.  If we look at mainline protestant churches in the US in the '60s, this is how they operated.

But many people found this profoundly unsettling.  It was just too indirect.  They yearned for "that old time religion".  And that led to a giant shift away from mainstream Protestantism toward a "fundamentalist" approach.

They went back to the idea that the bible represented literal truth.  And their approach to dealing with the contradictions science had uncovered was to put them to the side.  People needed to have faith in spite of these contradictions.  In their "faith life" they needed to completely ignore the factual basis on which science operated and hew strictly to their belief system.

I ended up digressing much longer than I initially intended but the historical and philosophical background is important.  For the purposes of our discussion the key take away is this demand to put aside facts and data and instead "go with your what your gut tells you the truth is".

Large numbers of people turned out to be willing to do this.  More, they happily did this.  And for these people a fact based argument is a complete waste of time.  It is not persuasive.  Once you have gotten into the habit of ignoring lots of facts, ignoring a few more is easy.

So if a conflict can not be resolved by resorting to facts, data, analysis, and logic, what's left?  What's left is power.  Who is the most powerful authority figure around and what does he (it's almost always a "he") have to say?

And that's why it was common in the middle ages to resort to war.  God is looking down on us, the argument went.  He would not be so cruel as to let the wrong side win the war.  So whichever side won the war must have had God on their side all along.  And whichever side God is on is, by definition, the right side  The end.

What's all this got to do with Donald Trump?  Everything.  I am a science type of guy.  I have repeatedly tried to apply the tools of science to understand why people support Trump.  It doesn't work.  What does work is to look at things the way they do and apply the kind of thinking they use.  When you do this, everything makes sense.  Let me show you.

Trump is not a religious person in spite of the support of the religious right that he has been able acquire and maintain.  And that turns out to not be important.  What is important is that he is definitely "faith based" in his way of thinking.

Many of his supporters are similar in that, whether they are or are not strongly religious, they do subscribe to a "faith based" approach to understanding the world around them.  And that leads them to seek out the person who displays the most leadership, who is the "alpha male", if you will.

Trump's successful Presidential campaign, and his leadership style since, boils down to "I am the alpha male".  He waged a campaign of intimidation against his fellow Republicans in the GOP primary.  The fact that he succeeded in spite of the fact that the "smart money" consistently predicted failure, just proves his bona fides.  The general election can be boiled down to a single image, that of Trump stalking Clinton in one of the debates.  That is a classic "alpha male" move.

To Trump's followers, leaders are special people.  They are different from the rest of us.  One way they distinguish themselves is by consistently getting away with things other people, even other politicians, can't get away with.  The more you get away with, the greater of a leader you must be.  With great leaders, the proper role for the rest of us is to get in line and follow.

Trump was repeatedly able to get away with lying, insulting his opponents, showing himself to be ignorant of all the minutia a "leading politician" is supposed to know, and many other things.  He repeatedly demonstrated his specialness by getting away with things lesser candidates couldn't.

This turns the way we should interpret a lot of the last three years inside out.  All the gaffs, blunders, illegality, stupidity, etc., that he and his close associates were able to get away with did not prove his unsuitability for the job.  Instead it demonstrated how high he stood above the pigmies he was surrounded by or was being compared to.  Instead of being unsuited to the job, he was super-suited to the job.

Remember, facts literally don't matter.  As long as he can convince his supporters that he is the alpha-est of alpha males then they will stick with him.  To them every new incident is just more proof that he deserves to continue to occupy the highest job in the land.  If you want to understand why his supporters stick with him, this is the reason.

Moving away from the specific and turning toward the more general, his supporters are not entirely wrong.  The most efficient and effective type of government is an authoritarian government headed by the perfect leader, what Confucius called roughly three thousand years ago, the "philosopher king".

"King" is a title denoting absolute authority.  The King leads and everybody else follows.  This results in everyone efficiently pulling in the same direction.  And this maximizes the performance of the country being led thusly.  But this system depends critically on the characteristics of the King.  If he truly is made of superior stuff them the country is efficiently led in the proper direction.   That's whaere the "Philosopher" part came in.

In modern parlance, the term "philosopher" has become associated the kind of person who is too smart for his own good, who spends all his time studying esoterica, and who is completely lacking in common sense. That is not at all what Confucius had in mind.  He meant something that is almost the complete opposite.

A Confucian "philosopher" is smart, experienced, educated, and grounded.  This lets him see the correct path ahead clearly and unerringly guide the rest of us lesser mortals down that path.  An authoritarian regime led by a Philosopher King, and administered by a large cadre of lesser but similarly inclined government officials is bound to achieve greatness.

The Chinese of Confucius' time did no better than the rest of us at elevating only philosopher kings to the position of Emperor.  But one place where the Chinese did succeed was in establishing and maintaining a cadre of bureaucrats in the "philosopher king" mold.  The system that produced these administrators persisted for a couple of millennia.  And it served China well.

A whole system was put into place to churn out the mid-level functionaries that kept the machinery of governance running smoothly.  As Emperors came and went, some of them good, some of them not so, the machinery of governance hummed along.

This was the actual secret behind the astounding success and longevity of China as a country.  It was only the persistent onslaught of various Europeans in the 1800s that packed a punch strong enough to destroy the Chinese bureaucracy and with it the ability of the Chinese to govern themselves well.

The resilience of the Chinese system in the face of insult from internal or external forces is proof of what in the best circumstances an authoritarian government is capable of.  At its best, it is unbeatable.  At far from its best, it is still very capable.  So it is not nuts for people to be willing to subscribe to the authoritarian model of governance over a democratic one.

But the authoritarian model has s giant weakness.  It is the leadership/succession problem.  So much depends on the quality of the person at the top.  How to you arrange thigs so that only Philosopher-class individuals ascend to the top spot?  No one has figured that out.  Not the Chinese.  There were a lot of piss poor Emperors in among the great ones.

Not Communist dictatorships or their close cousins, the publicly traded corporations.  Both say they use a "merit based" system of succession, but the facts often don't match the theory.  The process gets subverted routinely.  And certainly not Europeans with their blood line based succession rules.  But let's skip over how Trump got to be President and who should succeed him and focus on the here and now.

But first, it is important to point out that a "faith based" approach is the norm.  It is the "science based" approach that is the exception.  We consider the "science based" approach to be the norm only because of recent history.  What specific recent history?  Glad you asked.

The generals in World War I made a big mistake.  They underestimated the power of the machine gun to destroy a standard infantry charge.  This led to years of mass slaughter, slaughter that was on such a scale as to be beyond imagining.  Except, of course, for the obvious fact that it was actually happening.

In a fit of desperation the generals went to poison gas.  This just increased the amount of slaughter without changing anything.  Then there was the advent of the airplane and the tank.  One was not even a tool of war when the War started.  The other was literally invented in the middle of the War.  Machine guns, submarines, airplanes, and tanks all emphasized the critical importance of technology in war and in the newfound ability of war to perpetrate mass slaughter.

Then we had World War II, the "wizard war".  It demonstrated that the rate of slaughter could be raised to even higher levels.  Technology played an even more crucial part in this war and everybody knew it.  Anyone with an even passing interest in the period can list technological marvel after technological marvel that became closely associated with that War.

Then we rolled into the Cold War with hardly a break.  It is hard to get more "wizard" than intercontinental rockets and Hydrogen bombs, both likely controlled by computers.  And the casualty figures associated with even a small nuclear exchange, should the Cold War turn Hot, would have caused the losses of World War II to pale by comparison.

So the fear of losing present or future wars forced people to take the scientific approach to things.  The space race, the context for the moon landing hoax, was a way of saying at the time "our wizards are better than your wizards so we'll win the next war".  "Winning" would have resulted in horrific levels of death and destruction.  "Losing" would have been even worse.  And that forced people into a "whatever it takes" approach.  And "whatever it takes" meant science based thinking.

By the time Apollo program, the program that was a big hoax according to the "Lunar Lunacy" conspiracy theory in Judd's piece, spooled out in the late '60s and early '70s, this kind of thinking was already peaking.  As the Cold War ground on it seemed somehow less and less real.  This was coupled with the fact that a "science based" approach to war fighting in the nuclear era was so horrible to contemplate that people naturally recoiled from it.  And that opened the door to a reversion to the norm.

 The '70s were a time of flower power, pyramid power, "turn on, tune in, drop out", and other kinds of "alternative" ways of thinking.  All of them were a rejection of scientific thinking as part of a search for a different approach.  And at the time they were associated with the left.

Then the right came into ascendancy in '80 with the election of Reagan.  They quickly co-opted anti-science for themselves.  And they were much more successful at injecting it into mainstream society.  So the country as a whole continued to move away from science based thinking.

The Democrats, who started the change, never really completely abandoned it.  We now see this playing out in the "flower power"-esque candidacy of Marianne Williamson.  The fact that portions of the left are still comfortable with faith based thinking has had the effect of providing political cover for Republicans on the issue.

By the '90s the press had decided to join in.  They abandoned, for the most part, issues oriented political coverage and focused instead on "horse race".  "Horse race" tracks relative power, the alpha male-ishness, if you will, of the candidates.  This enabled politicians to move way from a need to have a familiarity with the issues of the day along with a competent strategy for dealing with them and toward more "warm and fuzzy".

It also led to character assassination and other dirty tricks as an important component of far too many campaigns.  In a fact-free environment, what you get when you turn away from science, this was much easier to pull off.  Why build yourself up, a hard thing to do, when you can tear your opponent down, a far easier thing to do.  These kinds of "negative" campaigns are facilitated by easy access to large piles of cash.  The ever increasing dominance of "faith based' thinking led us step by step to Trump.

So what now?  The argument that he is doing a poor job for his constituents is a weak one.  The great leader can't make everything great for everybody all the time.  Some groups will have to take a back seat to others in the short run.  It is only in the long run that benefit accrues to all, or at least most.  And sacrifices are sometimes necessary.  A rear guard in an army will sometimes be required to sacrifice themselves in order to protect the rest of the army.  It is "the long term greater good" that the leader must rightly focus on.

Thinking like that is why Trump supporters have stuck with him when clear eyed scientific types have predicted that it was past the time when his failures should have led them to behave otherwise.  Will they always stick with him if he continues to fail to provide for them?  No!  In the long run they will abandon him if he consistently disappoints them for long enough.  But how long is the long run?  And how much disappointment is too much?

It is important to remember that Trump is continuing to routinely display alpha male behavior.  Every time some attack on him falls short.  Every time he does something outrageous or unprecedented or frankly illegal, and gets away with it, is fresh proof that he is still the alpha male.  His supporters explain all this away as "just an alpha male being an alpha male".

There is a direct and quicker way to dislodge Trump, out "alpha male" him.  If someone can demonstrate that they deserve a higher position than Trump many of his supporters will quickly desert him in favor of whoever this new person is.  They are looking to follow "the leader", whoever this person turns out to be.

Clinton was not able to demonstrate the appropriate alpha male characteristics.  If she had publicly tried to do so, the press (and Republicans) would have jumped all over her for being "shrill" and "unladylike".

Of course, if she would have been able to get away with behaving like an alpha male in spite of this opposition then that would just have proved her fitness.  But she never believed she would be allowed to do so, so she didn't try.  And that left the field wide open for Trump.

I am old enough to remember when aggressive Democrats were easy to come by.  But at a certain point (the '80s) that kind of behavior led directly to losses at the polls.  So they stopped doing it and internalized the lesson.  As a result, aggressive Democrats have been hard to find for a long time.

The ascendancy of Trump may have changed that.  I believe it is possible to out alpha male Trump.  I am looking for a Democratic candidate that is willing to give it a shot.  Several of the current crop look up to the challenge to me.  Should they succeed Trump's support will evaporate quickly.  Or so I believe.  We'll see.