The Great Revolt by reporter Salena Zito and Republican strategist Brad Todd documents why so many voters in small cities and counties in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa voted for Donald Trump in 2016, despite having supported Barack Obama and other Democrats in previous election cycles. The book was based on the authors' interviews with many such voters. The interviewees fell into seven quasi-distinct categories, but I feel they all embodied at least this one common characteristic in their Trump support: the notion that they were no longer getting recognized here in the country of their birth.
These were all middle-American white voters. They didn't fit the oft-repeated stereotype, though, of being racist, bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic, or anti-Semitic. Nor were many of them out of work or simply voting their pure economic interests.
But they all railed against what they perceived as a culture that had turned against them. The standard run of politicians, whether Democratic or Republican, no longer knew what they were all about. The powerful elites ignored or despised them. The purveyors of multiculturalism and tolerance didn't respect their culture or feel inclusive toward them.
I interpret this as a failure of recognition. We all, every one of us, want to be recognized by other humans as who and what we are. Recognized, that is, in the sense of being known and accepted as fellow human beings.
All of us humans have the same basic instincts and fundamental energies. From the point of view of certain psychological theories, these can be seen as inbuilt archetypes. For example, we all (whatever our gender) contain a Mother archetype that powers our ability to relate to our own mother and to be (actually or conceptually) mothers ourselves. We all have an inbuilt archetypal understanding of the Child, the Trickster, and (see the Bible story in Genesis) the Flood. (Yesterday at my location in Catonsville, Maryland, we had such a long, torrential downpour that nearby Ellicott City suffered severe flooding for the second time in three years.)
The list of archetypes that are built into the human unconscious goes on from there. Held in common by all of us, they undergird our conscious modes of belief and behavior. Yet they express themselves differently in different individuals and among different communities.
When our various modes of archetypal expression get too far apart, we tend to lose the ability to offer recognition to those whose archetypal energies express themselves differently than they do in our own individual lives and among our own accustomed communities. We act as if "we" and "they" exist in different "silos." And we may come to feel as if we ourselves have become "strangers in a strange land": as if the people in the other silos fail to encounter us as fellow human beings.
These were all middle-American white voters. They didn't fit the oft-repeated stereotype, though, of being racist, bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic, or anti-Semitic. Nor were many of them out of work or simply voting their pure economic interests.
But they all railed against what they perceived as a culture that had turned against them. The standard run of politicians, whether Democratic or Republican, no longer knew what they were all about. The powerful elites ignored or despised them. The purveyors of multiculturalism and tolerance didn't respect their culture or feel inclusive toward them.
I interpret this as a failure of recognition. We all, every one of us, want to be recognized by other humans as who and what we are. Recognized, that is, in the sense of being known and accepted as fellow human beings.
All of us humans have the same basic instincts and fundamental energies. From the point of view of certain psychological theories, these can be seen as inbuilt archetypes. For example, we all (whatever our gender) contain a Mother archetype that powers our ability to relate to our own mother and to be (actually or conceptually) mothers ourselves. We all have an inbuilt archetypal understanding of the Child, the Trickster, and (see the Bible story in Genesis) the Flood. (Yesterday at my location in Catonsville, Maryland, we had such a long, torrential downpour that nearby Ellicott City suffered severe flooding for the second time in three years.)
The list of archetypes that are built into the human unconscious goes on from there. Held in common by all of us, they undergird our conscious modes of belief and behavior. Yet they express themselves differently in different individuals and among different communities.
When our various modes of archetypal expression get too far apart, we tend to lose the ability to offer recognition to those whose archetypal energies express themselves differently than they do in our own individual lives and among our own accustomed communities. We act as if "we" and "they" exist in different "silos." And we may come to feel as if we ourselves have become "strangers in a strange land": as if the people in the other silos fail to encounter us as fellow human beings.
No comments:
Post a Comment