Putting Right-Wing Populism on the Couch

We shouldn’t ignore the psychological sources of American discontents

President Donald Trump introduces Ken Wilson, an employee of H&K Equipment, to supporters at a rally on January 18, 2018 in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

Many conservatives are fond of saying that politics is downstream from culture. My old boss at First Things magazine, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, liked to add that theology is further upstream from culture, and economics further downstream from politics, giving us a causal chain that looked like this:

• Theology -> Culture -> Politics -> Economics

Then there are the more intellectually ambitious right-wing populists and Catholic integralists of today like Adrian Vermeule—the kind who daydream about seizing control of the administrative state, rather than deconstructing it like a libertarian would try to do. These Vermeuleans sometimes muse about reversing the causal order at the center of the chain, placing politics before everything except theology.

• Theology -> Politics -> Culture -> Economics

That gives those who wield political power the capacity to shape, change, and improve culture.

When I was on the right, I diverged from most of my colleagues in viewing every alternative line of unilinear causality with skepticism. Those realms of human life exist and can be separated out for the sake of analysis, but they don’t influence one another in a set order of operations. Each influences the others in endlessly recursive feedback loops. My conviction about this point always made me more of a pluralist than a monist, and more of a liberal than a conservative.

But let’s set that conversation aside for now in favor of a different question that has stayed with me ever since I was first introduced to these proposed causal sequences: What about psychology? Where does an individual’s psychological/emotional disposition fit in? Doesn’t it often precede her judgments about all the other realms and the proposed relationships among them by shaping how she views the world at a more fundamental level?

An American Story

Consider the following story: A 24-year-old man named James lives in a small town in rural, eastern Ohio about 30 miles outside of Youngstown. The man’s father, Robert, graduated high school and worked in a factory with a decent wage and benefits until a few years after James was born, when the factory closed down, putting him out of work. Odd jobs followed for a few years, until Robert started drinking too much and sustained an injury that made it impossible for him to remain employed.

Before long, Robert was addicted to pain killers and began spending most of his days watching sports, playing video games, and napping on the couch. Sometimes, when he ran out of pain meds, he would return to drinking. When James bothered him too many times while he was drunk, Robert would hit him hard—sometimes with the back of his hand across the face, but other times with a belt.

James’ mother Mary, who was a good student in school, started out as a stay-at-home mom. But after Robert dropped out of the labor force, she tried for years to hold the family together financially by taking a job as an assistant manager at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in a Youngstown suburb. That helped for a while, but then it closed down, leaving Walmart as the only significant employer in the area. Mary worked there for several years, doing a range of tasks but making less per hour than she used to. She also gained weight and eventually threw out her back. Now she collects disability benefits and finds relief in the same pain killers as her husband.

In recent years, the couple has stopped going to church and their house has fallen into disrepair, with junk collecting outside. When James comes to visit, he notices the clutter inside and out, and finds himself disgusted by the smell. He usually leaves in a rage after a fight with his parents that usually begins with James making potshots about them being lazy.

James is often angry—with his parents, but also when he’s at work at a repair shop attached to a Shell station in town, and when he goes out drinking with a handful of equally angry male friends who were raised in the town and seem to have no good prospects for the future. None of them attended college or plan to. None of them seriously considers moving away from their part of Ohio. None of them has sustained a romantic relationship longer than a one-night-stand, and all of them spend an hour or more every day watching porn. They routinely engage in misogynist banter, attributing their difficulty finding women who are interested in them to “feminist bullshit” that supposedly poisons their brains.

When James and his friends were 18, Donald Trump held a campaign rally nearby, which they and his parents attended. After that, the whole family went full MAGA. Not that politics plays a big part in their lives. But when it comes up, they routinely blame NAFTA (“shipped our jobs overseas”) for what’s become of their families and the surrounding community. They also sneer about the “east coast elites who think they’re better than us” and repeat slogans popularized by the 45th president, many of them having to do with voter fraud and the evils of the liberal media. The only news they ever see, in dribs and drabs, comes from Fox News and Daily Wire articles that show up in their social media feeds.

The Sources of James’ Anger

The first thing to be said about this narrative is that it illustrates why I don’t write short stories for a living.

But beyond that, I think it serves as a multi-layered Rorschach test related to the question: Why is James angry?

Usually he blames things outside of himself: economic policy (NAFTA), cultural shifts (the town’s decline, feminist bullshit), and political trends (east coast elites, the liberal media). The form of politics Trump brought to their area in 2016 encourages this emphasis, channeling the deep-seated anger and frustration of young men in this small town into the act of voting for Republicans, beginning with Trump himself but extending down-ticket as well.

But this reading of things is hardly exhaustive. It leaves James’ psyche entirely out of the picture.

Why, I wonder, does he constantly get into fights with his parents? Given the other facts and assumptions at play in this scenario, wouldn’t you expect James to feel solidarity with mom and dad about their struggles? If James is entitled to blame economic, cultural, and political trends for his personal unhappiness and lack of direction and accomplishment in life, aren’t his parents equally a victim of those same forces?

Yet James directs some of his anger toward mom and dad—calling them, or insinuating that they are, lazy. This implies that part of him thinks their plight is a result of their choices, their character. They could live differently if they tried. But they don’t. Instead of cleaning up their house and selling it, getting in better shape, overcoming their addictions, moving to another place, and finding new jobs, they stagnate, declining in social and economic status over time, sinking ever-deeper into poverty, lethargy, and ill-health.

Instead of inspiring empathy, this makes James mad, and he openly expresses that anger to them.

One could imagine another scenario in which James is moved to intervene, helping his parents to get their lives back on track, nudging them in the direction of helping themselves by making a series of changes.

In yet another reality, James gets angry at mom and dad but channels his disgust-fueled rage at their plight into making changes in his own life that keep him from continuing the family’s downward generational spiral. This James might move to a different part of Ohio, or the country, with more economic opportunities. Or he might commit himself to finding a romantic partner, even if it required changing some of his attitudes toward women. Or he might enroll in a vocational program to learn a skill that would make it possible for him to compete for a better job.

There are many possibilities within personal reach. But James doesn’t take them. He prefers, instead, to stay where he is, doing what he’s doing, and blame impersonal forces and macro-level trends over which he can exercise no direct control. Trump promised “I alone can fix it,” and at a certain level James believes it. Or he prefers to, because then his own contribution to his plight is minimized. He’s excused from having to take responsibility for, and reflect deeply on, his own decisions—including the decision not to make decisions that might alter or improve his future prospects.

Sometimes it almost seems as if James actually relishes his … stuckness, even though it keeps him angry—at those impersonal forces and trends, at his parents, at women, and (at a deeper and less obvious level) at himself. The beatings his father used to give him had powerful, subterranean effects over the shape of James’ life. It turned dad into a terrifying, unpredictable menace, a force beyond James’ control that would inflict pain as a punishment for mysterious, ill-defined transgressions.

This led James to begin hating his father and fantasizing at a semi-conscious level about murdering him. But it also led James to conclude those punishments must somehow be deserved. Why else would his father have inflicted them, and his mother done nothing to protect him from them? James also came to believe at a deep level he barely permits himself to acknowledge that his own murderous, vengeful feelings toward his father confirm his own unworthiness of success and love.

As a result of all this, James lives out his young life under a shadow of intense self-loathing that manifests itself in the anger he directs outward and in self-subversive behavior that guarantees he will achieve little in life. As he ages, this failure will make him angrier, while also confirming that he’s been right all along to believe he is unworthy of doing better.

Taking Psychology Seriously

My point in sketching these various interpretations of James’ life isn’t to imply that the psychological account is the only true one. Economics matters. Culture matters. Politics matters. Theology can matter, too. Each contributes aspects to James’ world—his experience, struggles, perception of present and future possibilities, and his own interpretation of where that range of possibilities came from in the first place, and how to respond to them (positively or negatively) when they present themselves.

But psychology also matters—especially in determining how the individual perceives his own options, and the sources of his problems. Looking outward, to the cultural, political, economic, and theological realms, is important. But so is looking inward. Which isn’t to say we should be sending legions of psychodynamic psychotherapists into the American heartland to put James, Robert, and Mary on the couch or prescribe them SSRIs. Therapy and pharmaceuticals aren’t the solution to our toxic politics or all of our personal discontents.

But greater self-awareness just might be the beginning of such a solution—along with a greater appreciation for the role that intense but misdirected emotions play in determining how we see the world, how we decide what’s wrong with it, and who or what we blame for its failings.

---

UPDATE: Some readers have reached out to see if the fictional story of James and his family in this post was intentionally modeled on JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy and/or intended as a commentary on it. Not at all. I agree the parallels are uncanny in places, but they were unintended.