Folie à Millions-- Nearly Half The Voters Looked At The Last 4 Years And Decided They Want More Of The Same

 

The Sound Of Music Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

As Charlies Pierce noted in his Esquire column on Wednesday, "He Got More Votes Than Last Time. Almost half of the country looked at the way Donald Trump has functioned as president since 2017 and said, definitively, that they wanted four more years of it. Yesterday, while writing about Kushner and other predatory landlords working towards evicting hundreds of families in the middle of a pandemic, I stumbled across a horrifying pattern of statistics: Trump's support had grown over the last 4 years, at least in the 13 states with the worst COVID caseloads per capita.

This morning I decided to see if that was holding up in other states as well. Obviously, as the vote counting continues, there will be changes, especially since many of the votes coming in are absentee ballots that are overwhelmingly Democratic. Maybe we'll have to look at this again in a couple of weeks when the dust has settled. But here's what we have so far just as Biden is about to be named president-elect. (I'm only including states where at least three-quarters of the vote-- 75%-- is already counted, so no Alaska, Maryland or New Jersey).

• Alabama- 62.3%, down from 62.8%
• Arizona- 48.5%, down 48.7%
• Arkansas- 62.7%, up from 60.6%
• California- 33.0%, up from 31.6%
• Colorado- 42.2%, down from 43.2%
• Delaware- 39.8%, down from 41.7%
• Florida- 51.2%, up from 49.0%
• Georgia- 49.4%, down from 50.8%
• Hawaii- 34.3%, up from 30.0%
• Idaho- 63.7%, up from 59.3%
• Illinois- 43.0%, up from 38.8%
• Indiana- 57.0%, up from 56.8%
• Iowa- 53.1%, up from 51.1%
• Kansas- 56.7%, up from 56.6%
• Kentucky- 62.7%, up from 62.5%
• Louisiana- 58.5%, up from 58.1%
• Maine- 43.3%, down from 44.9%
• Massachusetts- 32.4%, down from 32.8%
• Michigan- 47.9%, up from 47.5%
• Minnesota- 45.4%, down from 44.9%
• Mississippi- 59.7%, up from 57.9%
• Missouri- 56.9%, up from 56.8%
• Montana- 56.7%, up from 56.2%
• Nebraska- 58.7%, same as 2016
• Nevada- 48.5%, up from 45.5%
• New Hampshire- 45.4%, down from 46.6%
• New Mexico- 43.6%, up from 40.0%
• New York- 40.4%, up from 36.5%
• North Carolina- 50.0%, up from 49.8%
• North Dakota- 65.0% up from 63.0%)
• Ohio- 53.3%, up from 51.7%
• Oklahoma- 65.4%, up from 65.3%
• Oregon- 40.3%, up from 39.1%
• Pennsylvania- 49.3%, up from 48.2%
• Rhode Island- 39.2%, up from 38.9%
• South Carolina- 55.1%, up from 54.9%
• South Dakota- 61.8%, up from 61.5%
• Tennessee- 60.7%, same as 2016
• Texas- 52.2%, same as 2016
• Utah- 58.5%, up from 45.5%
• Vermont- 31.7%, up from 30.3%
• Virginia- 44.5%, up from 44.4%
• Washington- 38.0%, up from 36.8%
• West Virginia- 68.6%, up from 68.5%
• Wisconsin- 48.8%, up from 47.2%
• Wyoming- 70.0%, up from 67.4%

Only 9 states saw Trump's proportion of the vote go down: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New Hampshire. This is generally a function of less interest this year in third party candidates. But, look at Texas (where 97% of the votes are counted). Trump got 5,876,777 votes do far. His total in 2016 was 4,685,047. Or take Vermont, where 95% of the vote is counted. In 2016 Trump got 95,369 votes. This year he got 111,131 votes. Read 'em and weep.

Yesterday, John Pavlovitz spoke for many people when he wrote, "The fact that it was even close, the fact that more people voted for him a second time, the fact that a higher number of white women inexplicably affirmed him-- it is all confirmation that whether we remove the very visible, unsightly symptom or not, the pervasive disease is still horribly afflicting us... I was certain we were better than him, but we are not."

Numbed by a cocktail of optimism and ignorance, many of us imagined this was a sick, momentary aberration; a temporary glitch in the system that would surely be remedied: after so much ugliness, such open disregard for people of color, such inhumanity toward migrant children, such a sickening failure in the face of this pandemic-- sanity would surely come to the rescue.

We were certain that we would collectively course-correct; that the pendulum that had so wildly swung toward inhumanity would come roaring back to decency in these days; that we would presently be basking in the glory of a radiant dawn referendum on all this bloated bigotry.

We thought we would be dancing on the grave of fascism.

We thought, of course the good people of this nation would come to their collective senses, leaving behind political affiliations and superficial preferences and ceremonial ties, to rescue us from a malevolence that had proven itself unworthy of its position and toxic to its people.

We were certain there would be a mass repudiation of the racism that this man has revealed and the violence he’s nurtured, because for all its flaws we really believed America was better than this.

We were wrong.

...We believed the best about this nation and we were mistaken.

To many oppressed and vulnerable communities, to people who have long known the depth of America’s sickness because they have experienced it in traffic stops and workplace mistreatment and opportunity inequity and the bitter words of strangers-- this may be less shocking news than it is to those of us with greater privilege and more buffers to adversity and the luxury of naiveté.

But this is the sober spot in which we stand now: realizing that our optimism about the whole of this nation was misplaced,
our prayers for the better angels of so many white Christians were unanswered, our childish illusions that people were indeed basically good and decent, seared away in their reaffirmation of something that the rest of the watching world finds reprehensible.

Brandy X Lee is an author and psychiatrist working at Yale, a specialist in violence prevention. Yesterday, writing for Raw Story, she predicted that "The coming weeks and months will be the most dangerous period of this presidency" and noted that there's a sickness in America that goes beyond just Trump. "'What is wrong with 68 million Americans?' is a question many are asking the day after the election. Why should the race even be close? Why did 48% of voting adults choose to remain with a president who leaves a trail of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, the nation bankrupt, children in cages, and our natural habitat under existential threat? It makes no rational sense-- unless we correctly identify the problem. For almost four years, mental health professionals have been urging the nation to bring a mental health perspective to a mental health problem, instead of assuming that everything is political. All substitute approachess have failed, just as the best pandemic control comes from infectious disease specialists, not from a radiologist or economists. We have also anticipated the current situation as a product of having mental pathology in power for a prolonged period.

In mental pathology, where higher functions are impaired, an individual taps more easily into “the primitive brain,” which is irrational but very powerful, as it is survival-driven. Illegitimate power is like oxygen to the narcissistically- or sociopathically-disordered mind, and such a person would be driven to do anything-- including annihilate himself and the world-- for his psychic survival. Losing an election would, therefore, not at all be like a healthy person’s experience of defeat. In fact, we know how much Donald Trump fears it through his readiness to call others “losers” and “suckers”, in order to separate himself and to disavow qualities he cannot tolerate.

Many of his followers will equally experience his downfall as a life-or-death matter, since he has conditioned this into them. Their bond is pathological to start, based on developmental wounds or regression to an earlier stage of development under stress, which led them to seeking a parental figure. They are thus vulnerable to someone manipulative and exploitative enough to say he will take care of them and protect them in unrealistic ways that defy reality. And once they do,  they often give up their agency and rationality. Recent footage of his followers chanting, “Fire Fauci!” is disturbing in its depiction of their conformity, loss of personality, and alignment with Donald Trump’s thinking-- to suggest proactively that he remove the reminder of his unwanted reality: the pandemic. Delusions, paranoia, and violence-proneness are among the most contagious symptoms, and we see all these tendencies in his followers.

Under these emotional bonds, his followers will likely experience any threat to his position as an existential threat to themselves, which is why negative facts about him only activate defensive denial and disavowal, rather than abandonment. Abused children rather blame themselves than the parent as a survival impulse, for the parent is their lifeline, and it is easier to believe that he or she could never do wrong-- and the more untrue this belief, the more insistently they cling to it.

“Shared psychosis” or “folie à millions” (madness by the millions) has been well-documented by renowned mental health experts such as Carl Jung and Erich Fromm. This contagion of symptoms dissipates when exposure to the primary person is reduced, which is why Donald Trump holds rallies as if his life depended on them-- psychically, it does. It is also the reason why he cannot leave the presidency-- in addition to the possibility of prosecution.