Voter Motivations
What is it that calls American voters to vote against their own best interests and for a candidate that has more legal troubles than the entire Organized Crime Syndicate? A man who threw a plate of spaghetti at a TV on a wall in the White House, a once revered structure. A man who embraced white supremacists, openly laughed about, and proudly recounted his public sexual assaults, and even hinted at having thought about having sex with his own daughter. A man who was willing to let a crowd of people run through the hallowed halls of Congress, smearing excrement on the walls, beating police with American flag poles in the name of the Constitution, and constructing gallows to hang his Vice President and the Speaker of the House. Any ONE of these outrageous issues would, in the past, be grounds for treating him like the criminal and pariah he should be treated as, and yet, he is embraced by evangelicals as if sent by God Himself, adored by the very gender he has objectified and proudly assaulted, and embraced as the preeminent master of the universe by a once proud, law and order political party. In fact, a recent poll found that TWENTY PERCENT of voters who are claiming they will vote for Trump in the election are SURE that he has committed at least one FEDERAL CRIME. 1 in 5 GOP voters are willing to put someone in office they are sure is a criminal…not simply a misdemeanor crime but a FEDERAL CRIME. These same people wanted to impeach Bill Clinton for trying to hide an affair…a private matter that had no bearing on his Presidential duties and for which he was never convicted. The disconnect is insane on the surface…. but is it?
To answer this, we need to go back a few decades and, with the help of cognitive psychology, understand the events that caused the shift from a kinder, gentler nation, to this frenzied rat-race of weekly mass shootings, political polarization to the point of abject hatred of family and friends on the opposite side of our views, normalizing the mocking of the disabled and those in public service and even referring to our military as losers and suckers and warmly embracing Trump for doing it.
In 1976, William Glasser wrote a book titled: The Identity Society. Essentially, the premise of the book was his realization that the American Society was undergoing a shift from a goal-oriented society to a role-oriented one. He wrote that people no longer had to worry about survival as the primary driver in their lives and so now, they were looking to see themselves as an individual with a role…women with women liberation, African-Americans with the black power movement, etc. Cognitive psychology several years later would begin to look at “Intrinsic versus Extrinsic” values and motivations.
Intrinsic values include things like empathy, intimacy, and self-acceptance. People who are intrinsically motivated do things because they like to do them. They feel a certain sense of personal satisfaction in doing them and external motivators like fame, fortune, prestige, etc. mean far less to them. As such, they are more willing to be open to challenge and change, more interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of oppressed people and the environment. The writers of the Constitution and the Inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty bear witness to intrinsic values as our geo-political gestalt at the time.
In contrast, extrinsically motivated individuals desire fame, fortune, wealth, prestige and are less likely to be concerned about how they get it or on whom they must trample. The ends justify the means. They typically will objectify and exploit people, be dismissive of societal or environmental impacts of their actions or those of others and even behave rudely and aggressively. Additionally, they often suffer from dissatisfaction, frustration, anger, anxiety, stress, and compulsive behavior. Wealth, and the conspicuous display of same is the key to everything… fancy cars, opulent jewelry, etc. are good indicators of this mindset.
Trump is the epitome of extrinsic values. One need look no further than his building that bears his name in huge gold letters, his endless, vicious tweets against anyone with a different opinion than his own, his reported cheating on the golf course or his massive overstatement of worth which are now being brought out into the light through legal proceedings.
Our values are not innate, they are learned. When people live under a political system that they feel tramples on them or is more antagonistic, they internalize it, absorbing its dominant claims and translating them into Extrinsic values. This becomes a vicious cycle and, indeed, this legacy becomes an even crueler and more antagonistic political system. This is known as policy feedback or, more precisely, the “values ratchet.” This can easily be seen in the current Congressional dysfunction and the public’s 20% approval rating for same.
Ronald Reagan rose to power on a platform that ensured society would become sharply divided into “winners” and “losers.” “Trickle Down Economics,” as it was called was designed specifically to give massive amounts of tax cuts and corporate welfare to enrich the already rich, which was then supposed to trickle down to the masses below. Unions, once the champion for blue collar worker rights and wages, were demonized and marginalized. Between the loss of societal safety nets and the Union shield, and the trickle down of suffering and misery, many more people fell through the cracks as public assistance dropped concurrently and significantly. This caused large-scale insecurity and unfulfilled needs to fester as more people sought riches at others expense, and greed and lust for power and wealth at all costs became the new mantra of the American experience which, in turn, fostered the current bedrock of extrinsic values that now shape our politics and provide the fertile soil for those “values” to take root and produce our Trump-era political stage.
Whether we are speaking of the shift to the “right” in many industrialized societies over the past few decades, or the divisiveness and polarization within those same societies, or the mental health crisis and the path toward isolationism, we are talking about the shift in our values from intrinsic to extrinsic. It is that shift which bears a direct causal relationship to many of these societal dysfunctions. The rest are mere symptomatic manifestations.
So now we have a society that places high value on social status, wealth, power and being a “winner.” In, and of itself, this is not a bad thing.
Afterall, striving for success is fundamental to America’s prowess. But when it becomes all consuming and blind to the collateral damage caused by the pursuit of that success, it is not a recipe for anything good. In fact, it can ONLY result in frustration for a much larger segment of the population since simple math would dictate the impossibility of everyone being number one…and then, as the upper 1% takes more and more wealth out of the system, the other 99% fall farther and farther behind. They need to assert blame for their lot in life. In a society that adores wealth and status, it certainly cannot be the wealthy to blame since with wealth is the very definition of success now.. So it falls on those unfortunates even lower on the socio-economic ladder. Those evil idiots who believe in attaining a kinder world. A world where obscene amounts of wealth are redistributed through windfall taxes and such and people are not forgotten and the environment is protected. Those are the scapegoats for the failures, and the people who are indoctrinated into that mindset of extrinsic values over intrinsic ones will want to vote for someone who shares their views and seemingly represents them in their extrinsic pursuits, despite the fact that they have yet, and likely will never, attain the wealth they are aiming for, regardless of WHO is elected.
It will take a calamity of biblical proportions to snap people out of this blind allegiance. Even then, they will likely not believe they had a hand in their own demise. The great American experiment known as our Democracy is literally at stake. This is not hyperbole. Go to the Heritage Foundations website. Specifically, their Project2025.org site. They literally detail their mission to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 law to dismantle the federal government, making us vulnerable to attack as they use our own military as local law enforcement officers. This is the conservative think tank that supplies the “right” with their policy ideas. Read it. It is no joke and it is not far-fetched. Hitler took power legally in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and the plan is to try something very similar here in the US.
Whether one believes crimes were committed or not, voters still seem to ignore the facts about the economy.
GDP is 22% in Biden’s 3 years compared to 14% under Trump’s 4 years; Job Growth under Trump PRIOR to the Covid outbreak was an anemic 174,00 a month compared to 400,000 a month under Biden in his first 3 years; The stock market is hitting record highs consistently in Biden’s 3 years; Inflation caused by supply chain shortages during Covid has been easing and is now close to normal, but corporations are still gouging the public, using the inflation worries as an excuse and promulgating an addition to the American vocabulary, “greedflation” (of course, the right blames Biden for corporate greed); Unemployment overall went down to it’s lowest level in decades (3.1%) and is at the lowest level ever for black women; wage increases are outpacing inflation and providing increases in disposable income… and despite the fact that Biden’s policies have actually improved the lives of the average American and created well paying, full time jobs, AND have brought the manufacturing of computer chips back home, the media has done little to report on this, choosing instead to amplify the sensationalism of the absurd and inane.