I think one of the primary mechanisms of the Trump Era and how it’s affected Republicans can be partially understood in terms of traumatic stress. Trump isn’t a gentle leader. He doesn’t make it easy to exist in the fringes. He’s a “get behind me or get out, punish anyone who cross you, lack of loyalty is the worst sin” sort of person. Both his work and personal relationships are fundamentally defined by this approach. If you follow him, there isn’t a lot of space in the room for you. You need to be an extension of him if you want to survive and succeed. And if you fail at that task, you get pushed out, often quite violently. The result, in his immediate workspace, is a constant exodus of colleagues and employees and appointees within his administration, as well as a general exodus of large numbers of his colleagues in the legislative branch who are unable or unwilling to survive in those conditions (mass retirements of senators and representatives, as well as the alienation of candidates within the party who aren’t good at aligning behind him).
So he has a profound effect, not just on those outside his community, but an immense one on people within his comminuty. And when you see that a structure (the Trumpian political power structure) has a defining feature that is consistent across its top ranks, you can know that that affect applies all the way down. It has that effect from top to bottom. The example, the approach, the tone, are all set from the top. The manager defines the work culture, because they wield the power to define it.
So, setting aside his effect on groups he largely dismisses as insignificant or nonexistent or malignant, groups outside his social structure, which at least have a competing social and value structure to fall back on that validates and explains their position and provides support and solidarity and reward, what effect is he having on people within his own structure who find themselves at odds with their own society?
And I think the answer is that it’s catastrophic. And it’s most catastrophic for those people who in many ways represent the best hope for conservatism and the best guard against pathological conservatism.
Before we go much father, we need to dispose of the idea that there’s something fundamentally evil about either side or approach. Political parties largely represent differences in personality and survival strategies. And they’re both pretty valueable, and we need those different perspectives represented to keep us alive and thriving. You can’t get rid of a party whose defining modality is personality without getting rid of that kind of people. There’s some inherent value and utility in open and agreeable people, and there’s some inherent value and utility in conscientious and disagreeable people. The world is an unknown to us largely, and it’s hard to know at a glance whether the stranger among us is bringing valuable goods to trade or dangerous diseases to spread. You need people who are able to recognize both possibilities and are gifted to respond appropriately to both possibilities.
So value and utility and goodness aren’t reducible merely to group identities. And conversely, it’s a dangerous mistake to assume that danger and sickness and malevolence are a monopoly of any particular group either. There’s an equal potential for catastrophe in all people, it will just find different paths to that end. And it will always be easier to see how the other type of person’s approach will lead to disaster (and you are likely to be at least partly right) and it will always be easier for them to see how your approach will lead to disaster (and they’ll be at least partly right).
The mistake both sides make is in using their awareness of the value of their own approach and the danger of the other’s approach to antagonize the other side and use it as an excuse to not see the value in the other’s approach and the danger in their own approach. So if you go into either side from the opposing side or manage to flip between them somehow (difficult but possible, because it requires a certain split perspective that is hard to maintain or a personality reversal), you’ll notice that what seems to be going on, the attitudes, the results and expressions at an individual level, actually looks pretty similar. You’ll see a similar pathology being played out in a different structure.
One of the curious effects of this dyadic relationship is that the closer each side gets to the pathological version of their ideology or personality or perspective (because in a way that’s what a personality is, a particular perspective and a particular approach that responds to that perspective, and an ideology is just that idea written very large, often at low resolution, in a way that simplifies it and makes it into something more like a basic universal maxim), the more similar they actually become. Or the more similar the results become. And also, the closer each side gets to the healthy, balanced, nuanced version of their ideology or personality, the more similar they actually become and the results become! Because reality is actually complex and because humans actually have an equal fundamental potential for good or evil, health or pathology, no matter where you’re coming from, the results of driving too deeply into the tyranny of our personal identity will be almost identical. Because we’re more united in that capacity for evil if we embrace our own godhood, our own selves as the limit of value and utility and reasonability, and united by the capacity for good if we can learn to than we are divided by any difference. We’re more united in our tendency to end up in dire straights from solipsism and better straights from collaboration and objectivism (which maps closer to the actual structure of the world and is especially necessary for a complex society with safe versions of cooperation and competition, both of which are needed to survive and thrive). One problem, of course, with pointing this out, is that no matter what side a person is on, their response will be “yes, that’s what we’re trying to do!” And both sides are actually right! And also wrong! Within their side, there’s a good version and a bad version of that approach, and generally the good version is one that sees its own value but also see the value of the other perspective and learns from it and respects it and adds it to the whole understanding, creating more nuance and detail and a more accurate, more universal picture of reality and the ways it needs to be responded to. Both sides are actively engaged in trying to save the world, and both sides are actively involved in trying to destroy it. And because of the way that reciprocal responses tend to develop, often they’re both doing both at a similar rate. And you’re quite likely to see the best and worst versions of things co-develop in response to one another (to either their dysfunction and threat and extremism that needs a more extreme response to attempt to balance it, or positively in response to attempts by the other side to reach across and collaborate in a common endeavor and understanding, which provokes a reduction in threat and an increased ability to learn and share and trade).
Making Nobody Happy 