Motile bacteria, much like ourselves, strive to improve their conditions. That means swimming toward regions with more nutrients, fewer toxins, and more comfortable temperature. Bacteria, however, are too small to sense what the right direction is by comparing conditions on their front and rear ends. So they just swim and compare conditions over time. If things are getting better, they stay on course for a long time. If things are getting worse they more frequently “twiddle”- stop and head off in some new random direction. They choose change.
Ideally, voters would operate by different principles, able to directly sense what the best direction is, especially using long-range senses like vision. In practice, none of us are very good at that and many of us don’t even try. In particular, voters with little knowledge of history and little explicit information about the effects of big policies may decide based on the only piece of information readily available to them: whether local conditions are getting better or worse. In this election, many Trump voters explicitly said that they voted for “change”, without making the type of change explicit. So far, it appears that the best single predictor of a county-wide swing toward Trump (compared to Romney in 2012) is the basic indicator that one would expect: worsening age-adjusted mortality rates.
This is intended to be the first of a series trying to understand our current predicament in a broader context. Despite the broad and rambling content, each will have at least a small comment on urgent current activity.
Age-adjusted mortality is worsening specifically among uneducated whites, so it’s not easy to tease out causal factors from unimportant markers. The most likely people to switch their votes toward R were also those most likely to acknowledge explicitly negative feelings toward women and minorities. So perhaps worsening conditions were irrelevant to their votes. Maybe in talking about “change” they’re being euphemistic, and really mean something more like race war, with almost all the guns on their side. Many of them were, however, people who eight years ago twiddled their votes toward a black man with a strange name. So it’s also not as simple as “racism and sexism did it”.
More plausibly, the combination of large-scale political, local cultural, and individual factors that have landed these folks in worsening situations also led to the votes and the explicit nasty opinions. Rapidly increasing opioid and alcohol deaths in homogeneous rural white communities are not caused, to any significant degree, by the traditional racism of those communities, although traditional racists may be most likely to stay near home, where unemployment and boredom kill.
It would be nice to believe that a good economic program, focusing on useful infrastructure jobs, could have won these votes. That would require that people notice not only how they are doing, but pay at least a little attention what has changed and could change. Here we have only anecdotal evidence, including some people who say that is exactly what they were looking for, and others who say that their pro-Trump relatives and acquaintances live in a fog of superstition and hate that would not have been penetrated by any such program. I think it’s reasonable to expect that loudly emphasizing a good program along those lines would have won a few votes in the Iowa-Pennsylvania arc, enough to change the decision in three key states.
But something deeper is happening than ordinary politics. People voted for the guy who asked his goons to beat up protestors, who ran a completely fake university scam, stiffed thousands of contractors, bragged about pussy-grabbing, ridiculed a famous prisoner of war from his own party, tweated in the middle of the night about some sex tape of a woman he’d humiliated, staged a prolonged fight with the parents of a dead soldier, scarcely bothered to pretend to share the religion of his supporters, ridiculed disabled people, and so on down a long list. Steve Bannon is in the White House, minorities are being insulted and assaulted, and the Trump victory is openly hailed with the Nazi salute at large meetings. This is twiddling the basic course of civilization. As Trotsky wrote in 1933:
Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism.
We’ve been reminded about some ugly truths about ourselves. Although the “death instinct” of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents was among his weakest, most unscientific ideas, it is becoming all too easy to understand how it made sense as a poetic summary of something underlying the rise of fascism. Here’s Rebecca West’s summary of the idea:
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live till our nineties and die in peace in a house that we built, that will shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set life back to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundation.
We don’t know what it feels like to be a twiddling bacterium, but it can be an emotionally intense process for a person, particularly after a few failed twiddles wipe out hope. Remember, the core Trump voters are the groups improving their conditions with alcohol and opioids, to the point of death.
Many of us are surprised that so many people turn “deplorable” under economic and other social stress. We shouldn’t be. At its best, civilization kind of sucks. For starters, what young primate wants to sit still in school for years? It’s horrible, especially if you’re not one of the lucky ones to get something good out of it. How many people get to do what they like sexually? How many jobs are as fun as hunting or gathering? And so on. Although, for most of us, civilization is better than the alternative, the magma of discontent is never all that far from the surface. When smaller twiddles haven’t stopped the gradually worsening conditions, it’s tempting to try the big twiddle: just say fuck it all, vote for the smash-mouth fake-schooled race-war pussy-grabber.
Today’s tune.
My activity this week: Joining a well-attended MoveOn “resist” meeting (28 people there, many more told there wasn’t room but in email contact) , tracking down info on local effects of ACA for use by the group, providing summaries of key ACA provisions, stirring up turnout for Saturday’s local protest (looked like 2000+ to me, good for a small city). To do: LTTE re tying our R U.S. Rep’s vote to scrap Medicare to his phony rhetoric about “replacing” ACA. To do longer term: Help coordinate that old white MoveOn group with the much more diverse group led by our progressive State Rep.