US elections: In Caveman #1 They Trust

Trump is the perfect tribal chief for ‘palaeoliths’ in MAGA tees’n’ baseball caps

What explains the enduring popularity of Trump?

It’s difficult to find a leader manifestly more disqualified to lead the world’s largest military, economic and technological superpower than Donald Trump. Yet, there’s an even chance that he’d emerge victorious from the Nov 5 US presidential election. How do Trump and his team manage to distort reality so well?

A big part of the problem is what sociobiologist Edward O Wilson identified: humans have palaeolithic emotions, mediaeval institutions and godlike technology. Trump is tall, walks taller, talks loud, is rich, and projects power. That is enough to make him leader for 21st-century cavemen in MAGA tees and baseball caps.

He feeds fear of the outsider, with his charge that illegal immigrants are rapists, killers and drug peddlers, and promises to undertake the largest deportation of aliens the world has seen. The tribe, forever wary of strangers, rallies around this protector.

Millions of Americans subscribe to the QAnon conspiracy theory: Democrats are part of a Satan-worshipping paedophile ring, and Trump is the anointed saviour sent by god to quell this evil. Trump, when asked on TV to denounce this bit of crazy, refused to, and praised the believers’ opposition to paedophilia.

Satan, of course, strode across medieval Europe as a physical being with horns and a pointy tail, rather than as asymbolic representation of evil. Another medieval trope playing out in US politics is faithbased opposition to abortion. Evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics support Trump and oppose Democrats, and everyone else who believes that women should have the primary say on what happens to their own bodies.

Another medieval instinct working for Trump is ‘women’s weakness’. Fewer African-American men are voting for Kamala Harris than they had for Barack Obama, according to pollsters, because ‘Middle Eastern leaders would not respect a woman president’. A related prejudice sees women as fair game for sexual predation. Trump has been found guilty of sexual assault, without evoking mass revulsion.

Trump praises White supremacists, who return the love. Race as a determinant of mental ability and character was pretty standard ideology in pre-modern times. It lives on in much of the world, caste standing in for race in India, of course.

Twitter is not quite godlike technology, but remains a vital shaper of the public narrative. Its owner Elon Musk has been using Twitter to boost Trump and damn Harris, paint Trump as the saviour, who will bring back the era of US manufacturing might, when bluecollar jobs secured entry into the American Dream.

Social media, however, seems to be far less powerful when it comes to publicising the Joe Biden administration’s achievements and disseminating the truth, in general.

Most Americans have a dim view of Biden’s handling of the economy. Inflation had been high for much of his tenure, true. But unemployment has been at record low levels. Job growth has been spectacular, benefiting, in particular, traditionally disprivileged groups like African Americans.

Just last week, the first of several advanced semiconductor fabs the Biden administration’s policy and generous subsidies are setting up in the US, to bring the cutting edge in chip manufacturing back home, achieved a higher yield in Arizona than its twin in Taiwan. Biden’s steps to rejuvenate American manufacturing has been more significant than anything seen in the last two decades.

Generous subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act are encouraging heavy investment in climate-friendly technologies. For the first time, carbon dioxide removal (CDR), the only viable solution to prevent global warming tearing ahead to breach the level of 1.5° C above pre-industrial times, received serious funding.

Climate change is a hoax, says Trump, never mind extreme weather events, including drought, hurricanes, floods and forest fires, wreaking havoc across the US. His stock response to the climate challenge is, ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’. The Biden administration has technology-neutral funds to mitigate climate risk, whether through more RE, nuclear energy, CDR, electric mobility, or conversion of atmospheric CO2 into organic chemicals such as ethylene. This does not figure much on the campaign trail.

Huge American fiscal deficits, up to a quarter of GDP, under Trump and Biden cushioned Americans when Covid killed jobs, apart from people. Such deficits push up demand, which, combined with supply disruptions, translate into inflation. The war in Ukraine added to price rise in energy. No attempt has been made to explain this to the public.

Trump rants against illegal migrants. The reality is that immigrants have kept the supply of labour large enough to meet the surging demand from a robust economy, the healthiest in the rich world. In the absence of im migrants, legal or otherwise, wages would have spiked, and added another layer to inflation.

Trump’s promise of tariffs on imports across the board threaten higher prices for everything. He claims tariffs would be borne by the exporter. Few call out this falsehood. Trump’s tax policies favour the rich. Still, the poor see him as their saviour.

Democracy works when voters are politically engaged continuously, and across the board, on all aspects of their life as citizens. Such engagement calls for continuous effort, not an election-eve blitz on a limited range of topics. If the forces of democracy fail to exert themselves as required, toads will strut around in princely robes, and cavemen will applaud, and crown them king.