Why do so many people feel no revulsion towards Trump?

I recently performed a mind experiment to give me a sense of why millions of citizens are emotionally blind to the president’s corruption, immorality, concreteness, cruelty and narcissism. The experiment featured my 1968 self, age 17. I was a dedicated Libertarian then, believing in ultimate political freedom: private property is sacrosanct; government is not our provider and we are not our brothers’ keepers. No welfare, no coercive taxation, no mixed economy. In a society unshackled and disarmed of the government’s gun, people’s natural benevolence would return and charity would flourish. All this wasn’t merely the Libertarian ideal. It was the program, the platforms and the policies.

In my experiment, I imagined a Libertarian president or candidate with the character of Donald Trump. He would have the most arrogant attitude possible, mocking all things liberal, denigrating the bleeding-heart ooze bags, spewing ribald, sarcastic and unintelligent insults, lying like a sociopathic con artist. Being, pretty much, a disturbed adolescent in an adult’s body.

I realized that I would, as I listened to his speeches and watched that incongruously punk face grinning, be fully on board with him and admiring of everything he said. It would all be good, all be right, all be bright and shining and powerful, the power of the one truth. But also the power to obliterate all the enemies and shaming I had ever felt in my life. Those raucous and acidic words would avenge me and clear the way to the kind of superior feeling and happiness that Ayn Rand promised in her novels about John Galt the polymath and Howard Roark the anti-hero, in her nonfiction about the virtue of selfishness and the right aesthetic sensibility.

How could a teenager who had no capacity for violence, who had tears for Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees” and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” and a warm and anxious heart for a girl who was quite beyond his reach, be stirred by a heartless, lordly fool? How could character qualities that most people find repulsive and antihuman be smiled upon by so many others?

The answer centers on the failure of empathy, the failure of its formation in childhood. Empathy is not binary, where you either have it or you don’t. Some of this natural quality will be freed up if pain deeply held from long ago is finally released. But that’s a matter of quantity, and so is empathy. Somehow (and I believe no scientific research has been done in this area), if in our earliest years we were never understood as we actually were, never valued as we actually were – if we never received empathy – we will be too “empty,” too needy of those gifts to be able to give them, and too shut down (repressed) to access what little we may have. Here is how Karen Horney, a generation after Freud, described the parents’ failed role:

But through a variety of adverse influences, a child may not be permitted to grow according to his individual needs and possibilities. Such unfavorable conditions are too manifold to list here. But, when summarized, they all boil down to the fact that the people in the environment are too wrapped up in their own neuroses to be able to love the child, or even to conceive of him as the particular individual he is. . . . (my emphasis). (Karen Horney, M.D., Neurosis and Human Growth, W.W. Norton & Co., 1950, p. 18)

Empathy has generally been described as a simple quality, the ability to “put oneself in someone else’s shoes,” the ability to grasp and share another person’s feelings. But if that definition were sufficient, it would include the happy rage that Trump inspires in his followers during his rallies, as they harmonize with his hates and denunciations of individuals, entire countries and abstract ideologies. But no. Actual empathy is not to be triggered to feel what we already are – angry or bitter, happy, superior, prideful, shameful. If it were that, then someone triggered to road rage would be a model of empathy! Real empathy exists in a person whose emotional (and physical) needs were met early, who is “complete” and not hurting and hungry for the supplies that were never given. There will be an openness and even serenity in the person, and no peremptory push of pain that blocks his reception of another person’s feeling. Empathy can be likened to seeing another through clear not scratched or tinted lenses.

One principal fact of psychology, learned from years of doing therapy, is that people’s ideas of themselves are as likely to be self-medicative and delusional as they are to be accurate and reality-based. “My father used to beat the hell out of me, but it just made me stronger.” No, it didn’t: You beat your own children. “I love my old mom to death, but for some reason I never get around to calling or visiting.” No, you don’t love your mother to death. Your feelings are ambivalent and there is poison in them. One belief most people would probably claim is empathy and selfless care for others. It’s a cold moment when this conceit is proven false. A “codependent” woman may be a server of people to experience a substitute for self-esteem. A husband may love his wife, but truth be told, only on his own terms. A Narcissist will insist he loves yet have no capacity to mean it, he is so wounded at the core kernel, “the psychological birth of the human infant,” Margaret Mahler’s description of the well-known separation-individuation phases of infancy.

We can be substantial persons without experiencing empathy. Human beings are gyroscopic: We may hold our head upright while the body, with its feelings, suffers injury. One loses a leg and maintains stability by means of a prosthetic. One loses mother’s love that makes life and growth possible and holds herself up by hopeful thought, by redefining need as love, life as striving and struggling. Thinking becomes our new truth, our prosthetic.*

Our fellow men and women who do not suffer the harmonic vibrations of Trump’s character toxicity, but rather find their reflection in them, lack the basic empathy that comes from early love and acceptance. That is a structural deficit that does not rule out positive feeling in many spheres: enjoyment of nature, the exhilaration of a Rachmaninoff concerto, love of or dedication to a spouse, love of a pet that has never frustrated your need for unconditional acceptance. A critical problem in our country today is that lack of empathy has been co-opted to the service of a cruel and destructive leader. Those of us who do know empathy should, adapting the parenting bromide, hate the acts condoned but not the persons condoning them. We are all deplorable in different ways.

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* This paragraph was substantially lifted from my earlier (2013) post, "Our thinking".