Both Republican and Democratic pundits tend to agree that Trump’s primary appeal to his zealous supporters has been based on their fear and anger. When interviewed and pressed to explain why Trump would “make America great again” the smarter of them go beyond mouthing Trump’s talking points, but they still don’t show any depth of reasoning. "He’ll bring jobs back,” they say, without understanding the reasons so many jobs were outsourced in the first place, and how impossible it would be to bring most of them back to America.
Bernie’s support doesn't come from fear and anger. His appeal is based on reason. Or at least that’s how it started out . Despite eight years of Obama, income inequality and the incredible concentration of wealth and influence in the upper 1% persists. While Hillary ran on her general qualifications, Bernie focused narrowly on a few iterations of the same message.
Bernie drew huge crowds who heard the same stump speech. Bernie rarely said anything new until now when he is using the DNC as a proxy for attacks against Hillary.
Until Trump came along with his unpredictable events and unscripted, unhinged outbursts, people went to rallies to “see” rather than to “hear.” They came to show solidarity, to add their bodies to the "numbers count" to send a message of support to the media, and to be part of a group of people like themselves.
While you don’t have to be a social psychologist to understand Trump’s emotional appeal, it is more difficult to understand why a significant percentage of Bernie supporters are saying that they would support Trump over Hillary. It makes no intellectual sense. We end up with a far more complex psychological conundrum to analyze, in fact, to psychoanalyze. That’s because the answer lays in a choice which leads this group to reject a female candidate who has beaten a male candidate, both of whom are old enough to be parent figures to any voter under 50.
The author and his Uncle Barney.
If Freud were here, he’d notice right off how Bernie comes across as a grumpy but lovable uncle, someone kids gravitated towards every time he visited. He’s a father figure who never had to discipline you. Just like my own Uncle Barney. We all had them.
How to characterize Hillary on the maternal scale without using a pejorative? How about saying that she isn’t the kind of neighborhood mother (like mine) who all your friends came to confide in because their own mothers didn’t have a surfeit of empathy.
What all this adds up to is a psychodynamic explanation of why some Bernie supporters are so angry at Hillary that, intellect be damned, they are going to teach her a lesson and vote for Trump.
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The author, a retired clinical social worker and psychotherapist, was a mental health center director.
