Part II of II
Far from being a charismatic aberration to the GOP, Trump is the party base distilled into one person. Older. White. Paranoid. Frightened by uncomprehended change and patronizingly dismissive of actual experts who get it. Nursing countless grudges. Like his ardent base, he lives in a world of a collapsing U.S. with borders overrun by cartels, gangs, and terrorists, foreigners stealing all the jobs, Europe made into Saudi Arabia by secret al Qaeda and ISIS cells posing as refugees and creating no-go zones, immigrants imported
en masse to vote for an Illuminati takeover of America, and erasing the nation’s white population.
But commoners don't conjure that crap; it comes from commentators who, like Trump, capitalize on selling ideas to the people so incapable of explaining why their opinions find not universal approval that they turn to conspiracy theories rather than face being wrong. And that’s really what, IMO, it all comes down to. Conspiracy theories make people feel privy to secret knowledge “the sheeple” lack and precent the distress borne of having to alter one’s view by letting the believers say “I’m not wrong, it’s a lie perpetuated by a conspiracy against people like me!” Worse, a conspiracy theory gives its adherents an easy set of targets to blame for all their problems instead of having to navigate the slaty intricacies of ethics, law and economics.
Instead of being an impotent working stiff against the far too often greedy and reckless global elites who indirectly dictate one's fate and who have, over the past three decades, carefully created an all but uncrossable inequality chasm, conspiracy theory arms one with "the truth" to bring them all down in a burst of public rage and fury. Trump’s supporters thus find their bogeyman in minorities, SJWs, just as Know Nothings found it in Catholics and Irish immigrants, and -- abjuring
Gowdin -- as Nazi Party faithful found it in Jews and Marxists.
This false simplicity coupled with the lack of having to reevaluate one’s views is a compelling message sold by countless "Alex Joneses" since the invention of mass media. We’re just more aware of it today because we’ve pretty much perfected mass media delivery. Conspiracy voters are not the new, catastrophic, democracy-eroding menace pundits present them to be; they’ve been with us since the advent of democratic nations, and while scandalous, bigotry-spewing politicians like Trump and Berlusconi are treated as some bizarre anomaly, they’re nothing new to history. They’re just parts of history that rhyme. That said, the conspiracy vote also encouraged witch hunts, war, and economic malaise as populist rage pursued its bogeymen instead of fixing real problems, so merely dismissing them as a historical recurrence and leaving it at that is every bit as much of a disservice as treating them like a fifth horseman of the apocalypse.
Unsurprisingly, neurology and political science research has found that extreme conservatism tends to lead to such views.
Those who identify as more conservative tend to have a larger amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for processing fear and threat response. This tangentially corroborates what political scientist Oliver lays out in
Enchanted America, that conservatism tends to be a more apprehensive belief system, drawing heavily on fears of threat. He also notes that intuitionists often tend to come from more conservative homes and have more authoritarian dispositions.
End of opening post.