The York Politics Review

Punishing the Other: The Dark Turn in American Politics of the Subconscious Sadist

By HORATIO HOLLOWAY

Note: This article was written on Monday 4th of November, before the 2024 Presidential Election

It’s no secret that the American electorate has become so sectarian these days that the DUP have started to take pointers, but here’s a few stats to hammer the point home: 

1. US voters trust their “out-party” (the party they tend not to vote for) less than half as much to have their best interests at heart as they did in 1980.
2.  In 2021, only 11% of Republicans in the U.S. trusted any news site not named FOX to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly, compared to 68 percent of Democrats .
3. 47% of Americans believe a civil war is either likely or very likely to break out in the next few years.

These tidbits are three among hundreds of depressing reminders how deep the division goes. Indeed, the very nature of these stats, which separate their participants into binaries, determined by their apparently immovable political party affiliation, unintentionally affirm the insurmountable gap emerging between the aisles. But this isn’t news. It’s a pattern that’s been near decades in the making, with many observations, opinion pieces and deep dives to boot, all trying to uncover why so many voters decide their facts on the basis of their opinion. They’re unwilling or incapable to hear not just the opposing view, but any opposing account of reality. But as time passes, it becomes harder and harder not to get caught up in this whirlpool. Because this isn’t another case of simple disagreement, or overblown partisan hysteria. Both sides aren’t right. Trump is categorically dangerous so are his facilitators, coat-tail riders and whatever kind of an organism JD Vance is. They’re indifferent to democracy, willing to sacrifice it at the altar of a twisted, prejudiced, financially and morally decrepit ideology. They deserve no air time, no sympathy. The division is not between two extremes. It’s between a very flawed party and an evil choir of sycophants content to manipulate the under-educated for their own gain. This every widening chasm is on them.

But who is “them”, exactly? Some of the aforementioned politicians certainly harbour blame for widening the gap, but the fact remains that Trump has a very good chance indeed of winning (and may indeed have won by the time of publication). A good 45% of the electorate are apparently willing to put a tick next to that name. 45% of the American electorate don’t believe abortion should be banned in all cases. 45% of the electorate don’t believe the election was stolen, and even fewer did after January 6. There are a good proportion of extremists – enough to give you a fright, make you facepalm, grimace or groan with dismay at them calling Trump a divine prophet – but there’s not enough of them to win an election. If Trump wins tomorrow, it will be because of another demographic. The ones willing to look the other way. 

Every successful candidate has benefited from the “lesser-of-two evils” vote, albeit to varying extents, but to be in this camp one has to overlook evils unprecedented since open racists like George Wallace stopped running for office. He has said he’d used the FBI to arrest political enemies. He’s welcomed the potential murder of the press. He’s called the ‘enemy within’ a bigger threat than Putin or China. He expressed regret for (barely) handing over power in 2021, and insisted he wouldn’t make the same “mistake” again. He’s a convicted felon. He’s in cognitive decline. His own ex-secretary of defence says he’s the first president that “doesn’t even pretend” to want a united USA, but rather openly sows the seeds of division. This isn’t someone who good old boys could hold their nose for and dismiss as “just a little on the crass side” so long as their taxes were cut, this is a wannabe despot, a totalitarian fantasist, and yet so many Americans, despite not admiring this behaviour, are willing to put up with it all. Why? 

Policy is one suggestion. Life was better under Trump, his voters might say. Inflation was down. The border was secure. He doesn’t want to take our guns, or teach our children gender ideology and critical race theory. He’s the only real American on the ticket. 

Every one of these views, like his election fraud claims, lack hard evidence in their favour, but there isn’t a problem with the essence of this vote. Immigration, economy, social policy: these are the issues on which a vote should be cast, debated between two candidates who, like Nixon and Kennedy sixty-four years ago, insist that the issue isn’t what to achieve, but how to. Who would concede a just loss and wish their opponent success. But Trump isn’t like them. He’s not an issue candidate, it’s not in his DNA. He’s not a politician attached to a face, he’s a face scrupulously attached to whatever belief he thinks will elevate said face back to the highest stage in the land. And it’s one that’s openly stated it’s willingness to put American democracy and it’s treasured constitution on the chopping block to achieve that. And yet, there’s at least 10% of the American electorate who, knowing all this, and not necessarily endorsing it, nevertheless intend to vote for him. This stubbornness and cognitive dissonance needs a maintaining underbelly; a core proposition or desire which facilitates overlooking, justifying or ignoring the many authoritarian threats or unevidenced claims Trump makes. It can’t just be a matter of policy conviction, or Trump wouldn’t have trounced his way to the GOP nomination. Nikki Haley wanted tough borders too. But she wasn’t Trump, and that’s what mattered. She couldn’t offer the special skill that he does. Pain. Or rather, the capability to cause it. 

But Trump isn’t like them. He’s not an issue candidate, it’s not in his DNA. He’s not a politician attached to a face, he’s a face scrupulously attached to whatever belief he thinks will elevate said face back to the highest stage in the land

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi said in a speech when he was first rising to power in 2014 that “there’s a new brand of voter- they don’t vote for themselves they vote to punish others”. This was notable in the sectarian and caste resentments that often threaten to engulf Indian politics, but Modi didn’t seem to reduce this emerging demographic to his country alone, and indeed, nor should he have. Because this is the voter that holds the fate of the US election in their hands: the subconscious sadist. 

After one of his more egregiously authoritarian battle cries, Trump’s campaign mobilised into a quick defence, but in doing so tipped their hand to this very effect. “The former president was simply trying to trigger the left and the media with his dictator comment”, they said: he didn’t really mean it. This, if we take a step back, is absurd. Not even ten years ago, proposing such an explanation to excuse a Presidential gaff would have had you laughed out of the building. However, the depressing realisation that we’ve reached an age where it’s considered acceptable for former Presidents to threaten dictatorship notwithstanding, this press release reveals the essential reality of Republican America: that sticking it to the left (and their many supposed arms and institutions) is a political pursuit worthy of the President’s time. To many, it’s the priority. Jason Aimone outlined in 2017, as Trump’s first term got under way, the growing electoral practice of what they dubbed “Altruistic Punishment”. But don’t be fooled, this practice has nothing to do with kindness and compassion. Rather, the “altruism” stems from a willingness to sacrifice one’s own material needs or policy positions so long as ‘they’, whoever‘they’ may be, get the message. “Many voters are willing to engage in voting as a form of punishment, even when voting is costly and the voter has no monetary stake in the election outcome”; a sadism which, as Trump’s campaign comments suggest, has slinked its way up to the very top, or, perhaps, since 2016, trickled down from up high. Suppose there’s a first time for everything.

However, Aimone’s conception of punishment stretches only as far as the candidates themselve, even if you still prefer their policies or stand to benefit from them, which is a far cry from this wider, existential rage, traceable to the 2020 protests, the mid 2010s online radicalisation pipeline, perhaps even to The Red Scare. The emerging sense that inside your country are millions of enemies who want to take away everything you hold dear. The middle school bully snapping your rose-tinted glasses in half. These people, as Donald helpfully summarised, are “scum”, and they’re about as American as Ivan the Terrible. Smug, screeching, godless lunatics. And they must be not just stopped, but eradicated. Punished, at the ballot box or elsewhere.

America’s history is defined by various notions and oppressions of the perceived “other”, but the narrative has always been crafted to construct these others as barriers to destiny; not targets. Racist myths like ‘The Vanishing Indian Theory’ attempted to justify oppression against the other as a by-product of natural evolutionary progression. Despite the horrors they’d go on to engender, they nevertheless attempted to categorise oppression of ‘the other’ as an unfortunate consequence of the progress and self-actualisation of (white) American citizens. This approach to ‘the other’ echoed the Hegelian conception of the other; a mechanism of defining one’s own identity. But increasingly, an alternative, alienating element of othering is being weaponized: the base prejudicial instincts of our nature; fear of the unknown dressed up as hatred. 

Such fear is a central and well-documented element of human nature, developed as a defence mechanism back in the age of shadowy figures in the dark who could be either wolf or wife. Michael Shreiner categorises this evolutionary fear as “human narcissism in its raw, unadulterated form… an effective rule of thumb to remain safe in a tumultuous, often hostile world. But, like all cognitive biases”, he argues, “it often leads to catastrophic breakdowns, to irrationality, to inaccurate judgments, to flawed perceptions”. Indeed, this “irrationality” often emerges in our current, comparatively less hostile existence, at any perceived threat to the progress we’ve made in regards to our safety and sense of belonging, and, like any form of irrationality, can be whipped into a whole host of shapes. Without the bedrock of some empirical certainty, one’s perspective can be moulded into any form and pointed in any direction, especially towards any supposed quick-and-easy solution to this threat. Trusting Maslow’s infamous hierarchy, the irrational and afraid demographic will prioritise the perceived solution to their fear no matter its potential drawbacks and vices, because safety and ‘shelter’ takes priority over higher concepts like morality, rigorous logic and empirical evidence. Thus, anyone who solidifies the validity of this fear, then convinces the irrational and afraid voter that they are the only one who can satiate it, becomes a flame to the proverbial moth, even if their means of satiation involve curtailing democracy or scapegoating potentially innocent parties. The subconscious sadist thus emerges in response to this kind of fear-exploiting rhetoric, because it convinces them that crushing the perceived enemy is the essential first step from which all personal self-actualisation will invariably follow. If  we get rid of them, the rhetoric goes, then everything good you remember and/or dream of will come your way – financial stability, equality, opportunity – but we have to deal with those others first. Because they are the ones standing in the way of it all. It’s much easier to translate primal fear and distrust into core, unassailable beliefs than it is to shape one’s political ideations around cerebral, intellectual matters like tariffs or tax brackets. So lies the cynical genius of a campaign based on hate. Beliefs on the danger of immigrants invading our territory, or the communists trying to steal our freedoms and values, is much harder to shake than any nuanced, reasoned conviction.

This tactic, exploiting fear to gain political trust, is nothing new; indeed, it’s one of the oldest plays in the book. But what’s new is this negative manifestation, the transformation of fear into resentment and resentment into active vitriol. It’s no longer “vote me, and I’ll protect you from these people”, it’s “vote for me, and you’ll torture the people who want to prevent me from doing so”. Your safety cannot be achieved without their eradication. Peace cannot be granted without war. We get this: swathes of the American electorate willing to overlook evidence and secondary disagreements (including those around democracy itself) so long as their core primal desires are satisfied. 

The Democrats are not blameless in engendering this, granted. As Robert Kuttner notes, “the Democrats have become the party of educated, cosmopolitan bicoastal professionals, and have paid too little attention to the plight of ordinary working people, in small towns, rural areas, and once-thriving communities deserted by footloose factories”. They certainly set some of the groundwork, but their rhetoric, at least initially, was not defined by denigrating the other. They haven’t manipulated primal fear into destructive hatred and directed it on the most vulnerable demographics in the nation. The same cannot be said for the Republican campaign, who’s othering rhetoric, if compiled in totality, would make War and Peace seem like Where The Wild Things Are. As such, I’m going to narrow my scope of evidence to where the wild things were, six days ago: Madison Square Garden. The following are quotes from speakers at that campaign event: 

“Kamala Harris is The Devil. She is the devil. She is the antichrist” – David Rem

“What a sick-son-of-a-bitch. The whole fucking party, a bunch of degenerates, low-lives, everone of them” – Grant Cardone 

“They’re the enemy of the people. The press.” – Donald Trump, who the next day said he would not “mind that so much” if reporters were shot. 

“We need to slaughter these other people” – Cardone, again. 

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” – Trump. He later said immigration and leftists are “poisoning the blood of our country”

Biden responded to all this in turn, foolishly, by labelling Trump’s facilitators “garbage”; a response to a heinous ‘joke’ about Puerto Rico at said rally, but nevertheless an illustration of how everyone’s been dragged down into the mud fight. And if the polls are to be trusted, then the majority of the electorate isn’t disgusted by a little mud either. Many on the right gleefully echo Trump’s sentiments. Every Trump rally is adorned with accusations of “the radical left”, this untraceable, undefined other who are ‘turning children trans’ and ‘forcing them to adopt an illegal immigrant as a school project’ or whatever. The new GOP have stoked these flames into a fireball. They have exploited the very worst of human nature for their own benefit, transforming America from an idealistic idea with unfortunate consequences to a despotic state that belongs “to Americans only”, and they shoulder the brunt of the blame for this horror, a horror which, no matter what happens this election, isn’t going away any time soon. 

It might be true that since its inception, America has been, as V puts it “structured for meanness… a place of winners and losers, (people) who matter and those who can be disposed of”. But the supersedence of personal self-interest to outward-facing vitriol represents a nasty change to American identity, where pride in the rugged individual now comes second to hatred toward the collective other. A greater proportion of the electorate are content with losing so long as ‘they’ lose too, whoever or whatever ‘they’ may be. And so long as that’s the case – so long as these seeds of division continue to be sown – then we’ll keep on cultivating arable land for the next generation of bitter wannabe despots, who’ll weave those seeds into a flag which will one day come to symbolise another tragedy which we swear, this time, never to forget. 

Citations are available if requested