A Sticky Trump Addiction. Won’t You Please Help?
I’m as politically gullible as the next guy. But I’m also part of a medically underserved population struggling to cure itself of a Trump addiction. It takes over our lives and there’s no rehab available. If we don’t kick it, we’re doomed to more seizures of sputtering rage and driving away more friends and families. They are as tired of this as we are.
Clinicians are rightly preoccupied with COVID-19 and its after-effects, so we are left to fend for ourselves.
We’ve all had moments when we thought we’d made the turn. We swore we’d get clean, be less politically gullible and stop taking his lies seriously.
There’ve been a few encouraging signs of recovery, too. His recent sightings mercifully lack audio. And my races to the news to see the outrage that happened in the 15 minutes since I last checked have slowed to a trot.
But there’s little guidance for what to do after an autocrat leaves office or to figure out how we were gullible enough to have an autocrat in the first place.
And this one won’t go away. There are rumors of 2024. Yet another absurd lie—election fraud—has become an accepted truth and a rationale for doing harm. He threatens to use the money his followers still donate, sometimes willingly, to defeat his enemies in 2022. Hordes of people still flash weapons and use them sometimes. They spit fury about invisible threats and swear to eliminate them by any means necessary.
Getting snookered by politicians is an inherited trait, I suppose. We have a long history of venerating – even risking our lives for or letting ourselves dislike to the point of obsession – dishonest, odious and definably unbalanced leaders.
Odious leaders do the same thing every time.
Requirement #1: Loudly and repetitively assert, preferably in three-word chants, that our lifestyles, jobs, freedoms, finances, children and, recently, ballots are under mortal threat.
Requirement #2: Claim to be the only, lonely one among the Earth’s billions who can save us from whatever he or she is lying about.
It sounds crazy. And it probably is crazy. Back in the 19th century, there was a brilliant British polymath named Frances J. Galton, a master of a good half-dozen difficult sciences. He measured literally everything from authority to behavior to head sizes (really). From those studies, he concluded that “men who leave their mark on the world are very often those who [are]… within a measurable distance of insanity.”
Requirement #3: All troubles are someone else’s fault.
We are a lively people and, in our history, we’ve conjured vast populations of toxic Others. Among them: Native Americans, abolitionists, and Black and brown and Asian people. We’ve targeted the Irish, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, gay and lesbian and trans people, immigrants, random powerless people, secret clubs of inscrutably manipulative (ingenious, although invisible) conspiratorial rich people and, needless to say, liberals.
Experts and celebrities have become the latest. They’ve apparently created a Deep State, which is also invisible. From there, they rig elections and conspire to overwhelm us with confiscatory taxes that we can’t pay because we soon won’t have jobs.
Requirement #4: Believe nothing.
And #5: Followers enjoy bonus insights that the rest of us don’t.
Seeing the world through the leader’s eyes makes them smarter and braver than us, who still have no idea what they’re talking about.
In 1963, the historian Richard Hofstadter’s research left him struck by “how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.”
Why are we – okay, why am I – so politically gullible?
Finer minds than mine have been debating it ever since rabid human followers’ first unprovoked slaughter of unjustly vilified innocents.
Gullibility of any kind, they say, is an enduring personality trait. We’re “intrinsically gullible.”
Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman contended that our brains just work that way. Thinking that might otherwise lead us to reject foolish information is frustratingly “slow, analytical, rational and effortful.”
And as we make our 35,000 decisions a day, the late psychologist Scott Lilienfeld adds, slow, analytical thinking often takes just too much time and energy. We’d never get anything done if we stopped to think through every evaluation we have to make.
“Even when we ‘know’ we should be drawing on facts and evidence,” writes cognitive psychologist Eryn Newman, co-author of a University of Southern California paper on the same subject, “we just draw on feelings.”
Consulting facts is time-consuming. We default to ideas that are similar to what we already believe.
“If you happened to distrust the FDA and the government,” she told one interviewer, “the thought of a cover-up would fit neatly into your world view.”
Other theories: politically gullible people don’t detect when they’re being gamed because they lack a full tank of “social intelligence.”
An Economist/YouGov poll released April 7th found that 74% of the Republicans surveyed might still need a fill-up.
But Hugo Mercier of the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris, citing some of the same research, says the “longstanding association between lack of intellectual sophistication and gullibility” is just wrong.
His is a rational world. People learn by embracing information that is “well-informed, competent, well-intentioned, part of a broader consensus, or if they offer us good argument Make them think more,” he says, “and [give] them grounds for trusting us, reasons to think we’re right.”
But I especially warm to the relatively plain-spoken Alessendra Teunnisse of Macquarie University in Australia.
The most workable explanation of accepting whatever even lunatic leaders tell us, she says, is that gullible people are “highly responsive to persuasion tactics, such as the pressure of a charming and convincing salesperson.”
The guy, in short, was a colorful snake-oil salesman. He’s sold enough people to fall for a classic snooker; faith, Reason, compassion or Republic be damned.
