The most typical Trump supporters are members of a recurrent demographic.  I refer to those who first raised him up, who were drawn to him instinctively early in the primary.  By May, Trump was pulling in other demographics, but this likely was due to extraneous factors: his being the front runner, the astonishing amount of press coverage, and the unfolding capitulation of the Republican establishment.  There also had been, by then, time for party loyalty and social  groupings to kick in and overshadow policy.  But why was Donald Trump in position to benefit from these factors?  That question requires earlier data and analyses that can be found here, here, and here.  They give the following profile for the most typical of Trump’s original supporters:

poor, less educated, white males with feelings of powerlessness, anxious over a changing culture, and in search of an authoritarian figure to lead them.

Being poor is hard.  Being uneducated as well means having little hope of ever not being poor.  Together, these factors generate the feelings of powerlessness.  They also engender a sense of vulnerability that insinuates against uncertainty or change.  Finally, they instill a sense of victimhood.  The demographic tends to attribute its low state to interlopers, the “takers,” the “others:” other races, other nationalities, other religions, other ethnicities, other cultures.  From this sense of victimhood comes the wish for an authoritarian figure who will raise them up and pull down the outsiders. 

What does not follow directly is the factor of race.  Poverty, lack of education, feelings of powerlessness, and anxiety over change are not visited only or even excessively upon whites.  And were members of this demographic able to see past race, there are actual and discernible sources that could correctly be blamed for their situation.  Getting that right might even allow for improving their situation.  So why do poor white males consistently align themselves with wealthy white males who never have shown any inclination to spread the wealth or to share power? 

I previously have speculated about this question in terms of “tribal politics.”

“We evolved in tribes: small, competing bands of hominids some of which became small competing bands of Cro-Magnons.  But those ancient hominids still haunt us.  When threats arise, we impulsively retreat upon the tribe.  Unfortunately, the tribes are defined by those same ancient impulses.  Were we a better adapted species, tribal associations would be set by our frontal lobes.  We just are not that far along, and that makes us vulnerable to the worst among us, to the practitioners of tribal politics.”

As a tribal marker, it’s hard to outdo race.  This is conjectural evolutionary-biology, of course, but I have yet to find a better explanation for racism.    

This demographic is neither new nor specific to our time and place.  Being poor is the prime mover.  In modern America, the associated hopelessness comes from being also uneducated.  At different times or in different places, it might come from a dysfunctional state or a totalitarian state or a moribund economy.  “The other,” the outsider to whom is attributed the tribe’s misfortune, also varies with location, time, and circumstances, as does even the tribe.  The base profile, then, is poor, with poor prospects of betterment, and part of an identifiable tribe who share a rationalization: their condition results from tribal outsiders who have victimized them. 

In Italy after World-War I, inflation, downturns, and collapses in the industrial and financial sectors crippled the economy.  Among the hardest hit were veterans.  They had helped win the most horrific war in history.  Now, they were poor in an economy that offered little hope of betterment and in a society that was not the one they had left when going off to war.  They were a natural tribe for a fellow veteran claiming to be the only man capable of restoring order to a country in shambles.  With an appeal to nationalism, he unleashed vitriol and violence against the “others” at hand: foreigners, Slavs in particular, “inferior” races, and leftists of all kinds. 

The same process happened in Germany – just a bit later.  As the Great Depression and continuing reparations crushed what economy the Weimar Republic had, Germans turned “toward radical anti-democratic parties whose representatives promised to relieve their economic hardships.”  The initial tribe, again, was veterans (who had been “stabbed in the back”).  The “others” included Communists, Socialists, and non-Aryans, especially Jews and Slavs — especially — Jews.

Notably, in the Great Depression, we had FDR to turn to.  The harshest of times seem to produce either the best of men or the harshest of men.  The process is not predetermined, but, when it holds, there are similarities. 

Having pushed through The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and The Voting Rights Act of 1965, LBJ predicted that the process was about to play out again, if to a lessor effect.  Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan proved him right.  Both were forerunners of Donald Trump.  Republicans have been constructing, molding, and feeding this demographic, not to mention feeding off it, ever since those two.  (Jon Perr documents this, including Nixon’s and Reagan’s roles, in all its ugly detail.)  But they have lost control.  Now, this demographic is the Republican base.  Now, Donald Trump is the price Republicans pay for reshaping Ronald Reagan from a racist to a saint.

Trump has no concept of any of this, of course.  His occasional attempts to invoke Reagan are tone-deaf pandering, similar to the tweet of himself eating a “taco bowl” to show solidarity with Hispanics and Latinos.  And I doubt he discovered this demographic by a shrewd dissection of human nature or of political trends.  Most likely, he stumbled upon it at a time when it was resurgent.  Regardless, he openly courts it with racist diatribes, hateful intolerance, and his stunning embrace of violence.  Racism has intrinsic violence, of course, but Trump openly courts violence as political speech.  This feeds the image of an authoritarian who won’t hesitate to identify “threatening outsiders” and who will pursue “aggressive policies to destroy them.”

Consider, then, one more example of this demographic (one of many).

Fareed Zakaria, in his CNN special, Why They Hate Us, traces current Islamic violence back to 1949 and Sayyid Qutb, a colossal prig with a repressed sexuality greater than that of the entire Catholic priesthood.  Sixty some odd years later, we have al-Qaida and ISIS to remember him by.  Speaking to the current situation, Zakaria says,

“It’s not theology, it’s politics. Radical Islam is the product of the broken politics and stagnant economics of Muslim countries ….”

Radicalism, he concludes, is driven by lack of economic opportunity made worse by backward governments and anxiety about the influx of Western culture.  Change the tribe from Arab or Egyptian or Pakistani or African males to American white males.  Change backward governments to a lack of education.  Change the influx of Western culture to an influx of cultures into the West.  You now have a Trump supporter: the same generalized demographic differing only in how the particulars are realized. 

I do not mean by this comparison to marginalize true suffering.  Trump’s demographic is poor and feels trapped in its poverty, but it does not face anything near the extremities reached in post-WWI Italy and Germany and certainly not in the modern Middle East and Africa.  Perhaps that is why we are dealing not with an actual strong-man but only with a narcissistic, over-indulged, immature, and exceedingly insecure blow-hard.

Nor do I mean to ignore other factors behind jihad, such as our having supported the brutally repressive Shah of Iran and House of Saud and our behavior at Abu Ghraib.  There also is the religious priggishness that caused Qutb to go off unhinged and the innate susceptible of some to religious zealotry, both of which were present in the atrocity in Orlando.  Thus, Zakaria is wrong when he says, “It’s not theology….”  But he likely is right to say that the masses, the tens of thousands that flock to jihad, would not be there if jobs were plentiful and if day-to-day life offered more than squalor.

Fascism is not Wahhabism, but the rise of both depended on and exploited the same aspect of human nature, the very aspect that Donald Trump depends on and exploits.  Any difference is of degree, not of kind.  That a blustering, boorish buffoon has come to prominence here in the same way as did fascists in post-WWI Europe and ISIS in today’s Middle East does not make him any less of a buffoon.  It does, though, admonish the rest of us.  

“It’s the economy stupid.”  It’s always the economy, and it’s not the economy at the top that matters, except in when and by how much it extracts from the economy at the bottom.  When the word “revolution” is tossed around like some harmless charm in presidential campaigns and gets favorable responses in polls, plutocrats and oligarchs ignore it at their peril.  We ignore it at our peril: once events are set in motion, control will be ephemeral.  Nihilists and reactionaries would be as likely winners as would revolutionists.       

The demographic always is there, awaiting only a trigger that will give it cohesion and direction.  There is almost a physics type of symmetry to it.  It is invariant under translation in tribe or in time or in place.  Degree matters but not lineally.  The invariant is human susceptibility, under stress, to hate, irrationality, and demagoguery.