How Did He Possibly Get So Many Votes?
By: Meghann Mcniff
Tags: Culture, 2020 Presidential Race, Racism, White Supremacy, Mental Health

How Did He Possibly Get So Many Votes?

If you just can’t get your head around it — look at this way: this election gave us a picture of how much unresolved trauma exists in our country. And let’s not be confused. This is not about politics. This is about trauma (cultural, intergenerational, and personal).

In his podcast Making Sense, Sam Harris recently shared his view on The Key to Trump’s Appeal. He makes a case that Trump’s wild and unapologetic flaws make his base feel better (versus the Democrats pushing us to reckon with harsh realities like racism, science and math). Harris describes Trump as a ‘Punch you in the face, Grab you in the Pussy, Eat as many cheeseburgers as I want’ — Jesus. As if he is a savior absolving you of your sins by being so ridiculously terrible.

The thing is, we only need an absurd villain and his cheeseburgers to make us feel better about our own flaws when we are terrified to look at them ourselves.

I come from a culture laden with alcohol addiction. In a rare moment of clarity, a member of my family once said “I don’t like it when anyone else stops drinking, because then I feel like I have a problem.”

That person also happened to vote for Trump.

Many people survived harrowing cultural and individual trauma to become Americans. And tragically, the Trump campaign took advantage of that. Maybe you escaped the cultural revolution in China and you are terrified of information control by the media, and you feel safer with a radical leader who will stand up against that. Maybe you escaped an oppressive socialist regime in Cuba, and you think requiring the right to health care for every citizen is dangerous. These beliefs are only logical when we see them through the lens of trauma.

Even if you had the world’s most healthy family, our dominant cultures of white supremacy and Patriarchy are traumatic for everyone. And when we’re ready to reckon with the depths of our racial trauma and the emergency of our climate crisis we no longer need to protect ourselves from it — we can face it head on, and it becomes workable.

Thomas Hubl defines trauma as anything that was so overwhelming to our nervous system that we couldn’t integrate it, so we hardened off around it. This is a protective and intelligent response. The challenge is getting that hardened off part back — retraining it to feel safe enough to be present with reality. Trauma is like a time warp. It is frozen and stuck in the overwhelming event or series of events in the past— which leaves us unable to take in what is actually happening now.

To quote Brene Brown, “When we deny our history and pain, our history and pain own us. When we have the courage to own our stories of pain, fear, and oppression, we can write a new story.”

Until we do that work, we can actually believe the lie that most slave owners were loving and kind and treated their slaves like family. Because that lie is the only way you can sleep at night and still believe you are good Christian. Maybe you were physically abused by your parents, and constantly working your ass off to be a good dad who does not repeat that abuse with your own kids. Maybe that takes every ounce of energy you have.

That lie might help you cope, but it also walling you off from reality. And leads you to vote for Trump, who is clearly a racist (and a narcissist).

And if you allow yourself to see how Trump is a racist, then you might be too. And if the demonstrators are right, and we live in a country with systemic racism that needs to be adressed — then this whole sense of who you are is threatened. And you just can’t go there. You really can’t. That is not a conscious choice. That is an existential threat that would require you to deal with the painful emotions you have spent your life protecting yourself from.

If you are still reading this, I’m guessing you already know how hard and painful it is to turn towards our trauma. Whether that’s from your childhood of being raised in an abusive home, or from our cultural trauma of being raised in a racist society, or the millions of other possible harms— that move requires deep commitment and intrinsic motivation. And it’s the opposite of one and done — it’s a life long journey. And not everyone is ready to choose that path (yet). Trauma needs safety, care, empathy, love and a lot of space to heal and integrate. Given the right conditions this healing will happen naturally and slowly over time.

So let us never give up on anyone. Let’s believe in everyone and set a seat at the table for anyone who is ready. And let’s not be confused about what’s happening in this election. This is not about politics, this is about trauma — and there is absolutely no use trying to push someone who isn’t ready. And it isn’t kind. If they aren’t ready, they aren’t ready and not only will it not work — pushing can cause harm.

And it’s okay to take some space from our loved ones that aren’t ready. We can love them from a distance for a little while, while we move forward with what needs to be done.

We desperately need truth and reparations (and controls on social media). We need to make amends that are long overdue. And we need to prevent the next Trump from actually turning us into The Handmaid’s Tale.

Ta-Nehisi Coates offers Germany as a road map. For me the first crucial takeaway is knowing that we don’t need to wait until we all agree it’s a good idea. He cites the following statistics from the start of the reparations process:

We have to choose sanity and stop trying to convince anyone that isn’t ready. I’ll say it again: this is not about politics. This is about trauma.

And we can not wait for them. We just have to do the right thing, and let them catch up. That will take a long time for some, and for others that might be never — and in the meantime, we will create a generation who knows better.

I worked in Afghanistan for a long time. It took me many years to realize that the only thing we were fighting for was creating stable enough conditions for a new generation to be educated. And that is exactly what we need. More than 70 million voters, and the majority of our political leadership in the House and Senate has demonstrated that they are too bound up in Misogyny, Racism and White Supremacy to help us heal.

Our only reasonable goal is to shift our cultural consciousness over time.

Every German kid in every school is explicitly taught to reckon with the holocaust: We did this. It was enormously fucked up and we need to be extremely careful to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Can you even imagine what would be possible if at a minimum — we just stopped lying? If reckoning with the truth of racism and white supremacy and our climate crisis was basic education?

As Otto Scharmer said, in his recent piece The Darkest Hour is Just Before the Dawn, “this is the time to launch bold initiatives.”

And for kids, it’s easy. We can just tell them the truth. They will get it.

And there are enough of us — and we are ready.