The psychology of being American: The death of the rational economic actor

Late last summer I took a trip across the United States by bus. Again and again, I ran smack into the cognitive dissonance that characterizes Election 2024.

How many examples do you want? There was the 28-year-old Black mother of six children between the ages of 3 and 9 who preferred Donald Trump. She’s living on her late husband’s military pension and has to find hundreds of dollars a week for daycare for her two kids who aren’t yet in school. Kamala Harris has a detailed plan to make daycare cheaper, whereas Mr. Trump has pretty much nothing but gas on the subject. Why would she vote for Mr. Trump? “I had more money when he was president.” Never mind that the inflation she decried has abated, or that one reason it lasted as long as it did was because Mr. Trump froze, terrified, when the pandemic hit.

There was the fortyish woman from Dallas, in recovery from a substance-use disorder, who is voting for Mr. Trump because he’s “tough.” She has relied on social services – medical treatments among them – that Mr. Trump’s brain trust may cut.

And there was the dairy farmer in Wisconsin, a smart, successful businessman who’s voting for Mr. Trump for tax breaks. The former president’s promise to expel undocumented workers will rain havoc on the dairy industry, half of whose workers are undocumented. That’ll solve Mr. Cow’s tax problem in a whole other way.

Many, many Republicans I met detested Mr. Trump’s incivility, and wished he’d “keep his mouth shut.” They detected the downside of what Ezra Klein, the American journalist, recently identified as Mr. Trump’s disinhibition. But they were still voting for him. A small minority were even proud of Mr. Trump’s coarseness, and his casual hatred for anyone and any institution (including the Constitution) that stands in his way. The traits were proof of his political independence.

All of which has been alarming to Democrats, and some Republicans, as they wonder why their fellow Americans are voting for Donald Trump. Even if you grant Mr. Trump his two main claims, that he controlled the border and inflation more tightly than Joe Biden did, both those problems have come under control as well under the watch of Mr. Biden and the Democrats. So why would anyone want to vote for Mr. Trump, when he comes with so much alarming extra baggage?

This is what no one can figure out.

But then an old pal, P. J. Keddy, a psychologist in Berkeley, Calif., sent me an essay. “The Plight of the Individual” is the first chapter in The Undiscovered Self, a book written in 1956 by Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist. Jung was 81 and worried that human society, sharply divided between evermore authoritarian communists and capitalists, wasn’t intelligent enough to handle democracy.

According to Jung, nothing would stop the spread of intolerance and tyranny “except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population.” To which he immediately added: “One should not overestimate the thickness of this stratum.”

Jung figured 40 per cent of the population was capable of voting rationally. He later admitted his figure was optimistic. Individuals, Jung wrote, can be capable of subtlety and contradiction, of insight and reflection, of holding conflicting ideas in their heads at the same time. But in a mob – such as millions of people gathered together in a silo on social media or basking in the glow of partisan media – subtlety disappears.

Without subtlety, without shading and second and third thoughts, the larger, cruder impulses of a crowd are amplified. Why did so many Germans support Hitler when he crossed the line into moral insanity? Why are so many Americans allegedly voting for Mr. Trump, whose actions are so unpredictable and anxious-making? The two leaders bear some similarities – I remind you of Ezra Klein’s word, disinhibition – but the similarities don’t fully explain why so many people want (aging) Mr. Trump again, this time surrounded by carefully selected “yes-men” who won’t keep his (nuclear-fuelled) impulses in check. Their decision doesn’t make logical sense.

Reading Jung’s essay brought me to a minor revelation, one that has at least helped me understand Republican America’s current boil-over. I want to pass it along. The revelation is this: You can’t understand the political motivation of the public through logic alone. A more revealing – and maybe comforting – way to understand American politics is through the clarifying lens of psychology.

For help, I called Vladislav Solc, a Jungian analyst, writer and thinker who lives in Wisconsin, just outside Milwaukee. He’s a member of the Jung Institute of Chicago.

“It’s almost like there’s this American narcissistic archetype, if I could call it that, that has been awakened by Trump,” Mr. Solc said right off the bat.

I asked him to clarify. Jungians tend to use esoteric vocabulary.

“There are so many things in the American unconscious, in the American Shadow, that weren’t processed, that were instead pushed down, out of consciousness. Like racism or xenophobia or chauvinism, or this macho mentality. Americans want to believe they resolved those issues and put them to rest, but it isn’t true.”

Jung defined a human being’s Shadow as the unacknowledged, and often ugly, aspects of his or her personality. These flaws of humanity – racism and misogyny and anger and greed and resentment and fear of others who are different or more fortunate, to list just a few – have simmered away, unresolved and often out of conscious view, Mr. Solc says. “And then Trump came and legitimized all that anger and all these emotions that people were not in touch with. Trump implied, ‘I give you a mandate to be a hater, it’s okay to put a woman down, to sexualize and objectify them. It’s okay to be a narcissist, essentially.’ And people said, ‘Wow, this is pretty good. I don’t have to do all that work, dealing with those emotions in a rational, conscious way. I can just be a jerk.’”

The human unconscious is a clever thing. It knows a good false front when it sees one. And so, in the same way that an oppressive religion permits itself oppressive acts in the name of God, the American narcissist enacts his unresolved emotions behind the shield of patriotism. They tell themselves, I don’t want to oppress people who aren’t the same colour or gender as me; I just believe in good old American freedom of expression.

“I think that’s what’s happening in America,” Mr. Solc said. “People then join an almost cult-like religion about Trump. ‘He’s just saying that,’ they say. ‘He’s not really that bad. He’s not going to deport immigrants.’ In their minds, they split the image of Trump: all those things that you actually can criticize him for, they minimize and rationalize.”

The problem with narcissists ignoring their own flaws is that they then desperately need to believe they are perfect to deserve the attention they require. The slightest nick in their defensive armour wounds them deeply. They can’t realistically or concretely confront the incomplete or problematic parts of themselves – flaws and failures we all have, as individuals and as nations.

“That’s what I mean by narcissism,” Mr. Solc continued. “An inability to accept responsibility, an inability to be vulnerable, an inability to look inside and see what feelings actually are informing my actions right now, why I’m so angry and so hateful, why my family is so divided.”

Underneath that crust of denial lies a swamp of shame, and the hard wading of owning up, consciously, to one’s mistakes and misperceptions. “It’s a very Christian idea. But that’s not how it works in many fundamentalist religions and ultimately in the political arena in the United States,” Mr. Solc said. “There, you always plead not guilty. You fight. You hire a lawyer.”

The Democrats have their own Shadow, of course – their impatience with difference and contradiction. “Democrats are better at being vulnerable,” Mr. Solc said. “They tend to be more self-aware in terms of their emotionality. But they can tear down the walls and open things up more than they need to be opened. They are not willing to patiently engage the other side. They have a tendency to slam down the phone and say that it’s too bad if you don’t like something: That’s the new reality. There’s not a lot of acknowledgment of the other side. I think a lot of Republicans find that emasculating.” You have complicated feelings about your son becoming a trans person, or about Gaza? Too bad, you’re a fascist.

All of these factors play out in American politics, never less acutely than in a presidential election year. An election is a kind of Rorschach test of where a nation is at: how transparent voters want to be, how angry they are and why, what moves them. Whether or not you support Donald Trump, certain facts about him are well-established and agreed upon: He’s a pathological liar, and an indefatigable boaster and inflater of his own accomplishments. He’s not afraid to invoke violence against his own people to get what he wants; he has little to no respect for institutions and less for women and the unfortunate, be they disabled or refugees. He’ll say anything. Oh, and his business ethics are stretchier than a pair of Arnold Palmer’s old underpants.

Seen through a psychological scrim, those are all qualities half the United States wants or admires. Why would the majority of a nation want to be led by such a flim-flam dude? Maybe so that it can con itself into not seeing its own deep flaws and wounds – a metropolis of homelessness, a wealth and equality gap as wide and deep as the Mariana Trench, four centuries of intractable racism, persistent and public misogyny, trenchant xenophobia, and nationwide drug addiction that originated when its most feared enemy (that would be China) decided to flood the United States with fentanyl, in what may have been revenge for the Opium Wars a century earlier.

“Trump’s trying to say we’re going to be stronger when we build this border,” Mr. Solc told me. ”As long as we run away from the truth and hide ourselves in this golden cage that he grew up in, it will be all good. But that’s not true. The reality of the world is such that there is global warming, that more migrants are moving around the globe more often, and so on.”

Which leaves a final question: What can Americans do to resolve their intra-cultural standoff, their mistrust and often furious distaste for their political opponents? (Canadians may soon experience our own behavioural solitudes if Pierre Poilievre is elected by his own often furious base.)

On my bus trip across the U.S., I found most people unwilling to talk about politics, for fear of retaliation – at least at first. But once I presented myself plainly – as a judgment-free Canadian journalist with no dog in the presidential fight and a genuine desire to understand how people were voting and how they reached their decision – they talked and talked and talked some more. Because it was impossible to have a wrong answer, better answers swam into view. If I questioned a fact, they acknowledged their frailty; if they challenged mine, I admitted to the jolt of confusion the challenge sent through me.

Mr. Solc believes a less dogmatic and more Socratic dialogue will have to evolve for Americans to recognize their mutual interests. “It’s better than presenting arguments as argument, especially when they’re very persuasive arguments, because that tends to shut people down.”

Most of all we have to learn to suspend our judgment, the fake strongman of the mind that shapes all the most addictive algorithms. “We have to teach our children how to communicate by being vulnerable, teach people active listening, teach people how to put themselves in somebody else’s shoes to see their perspective, which is essentially empathy,” Mr. Solc said. “We have to be able to look into our own darkness at what we could be, and who we really are in reality. It’s not moral judgment. What it really takes is courage. This is true for marriage counselling and addiction therapy and having a political dialogue.”

He thought for a moment and continued. “I’m an optimist. I believe we are learning as humans what we should be learning, and that eventually we will get there. But we have to actively do something about it. And it really begins in schools, in families and in the public arena. And that’s a long process.”

If we really want to fix our broken political conversation, in other words, we have to act as each other’s therapists. How many of us have the patience – or the stomach – for that?