Elections; 2024
POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Friday, November 21, 2025 00:12
VIEWED: 206031
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Another Theory of the Trump Movement
By Elizabeth Bruenig | November 20, 2024, 12:48 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/11/maga-trump-psycholog
ical-appeal/680722/
In the decade since Donald Trump began to define American politics, critics have struggled to understand his massive appeal. They have perhaps sensed by now that Trump’s support comes from someplace underneath conscious and rational political analyses. Who else but Sigmund Freud to help explain? “The past few years,” the academic and critic Merve Emre wrote in an essay for The New Yorker this past June, “have given us a Freud for the pandemic, a Freud for Ukraine and a Freud for Palestine, a Freud for transfemininity, a Freud for the far right, and a Freud for the vipers’ nest that is the twenty-first-century American university.” History has now given us another iteration: a Freud for the Trump movement.
Consensus on the causes of Trump’s sweeping electoral victory has formed around the idea that voters were responding to Democratic performance on material matters, namely inflation and immigration. But the Trump movement has never been, to my mind, strictly concerned with tangible issues; part of the allure is immaterial by nature, addressed to elemental human urges. Trump offered something special on that count from the beginning—a politics consisting not mainly of a positive vision but rather of a series of opportunities to own the libs. In this project, rational policy details aren’t a priority and are sometimes absent altogether; the point is domination of one’s enemies, a libidinal desire.
Consider the recent post-election slogan “Your body, my choice,” also engineered to upset and humiliate liberals: It’s an overt statement of sex and dominion. And Trump draws that out in people. “Disinhibition,” the New York Times writer Ezra Klein wrote recently, “is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength.” Trump is in touch with the impulses and desires that run counter to social norms, and he invites his audience to put aside the usual internal barriers to acting on or voicing them. This moment is an opportune one for a revival of Freud, whose work, with its signature focus on subterranean inner worlds, helps make sense of these tendencies and their implications for politics.
The temptation to psychologize one’s political opponents typically wins out after defeat, the political theorist and professor Corey Robin told me recently. (An easy claim to test: Among the surge of post-election takes is a subgenre of explanatory pieces evaluating the psyches of unexpected Trump voters—suggestions that Latinos are wedded to political strongmen, or that conservative wives cast their votes for right-wingers purely out of fear or submission.) In those periods, “Freud is mobilized to explain why the left failed—not because of institutions or specific forms of economic power or the Cold War, etc., but instead because of psychic structures that the left never really touched,” Robin said. Freud offers something more than simply assigning diagnoses to opponents: “an archaeology of the mind,” Robin told me, that aims to unearth emotions and desires that people aren’t necessarily aware of themselves.
That sort of excavation can be useful. Freud helps in forming an account of what people are drawn to in Trump—what pleasure, what gratification. Gary Greenberg, a writer and psychotherapist, argued in a 2018 Guardian essay that Trump is a figure who beckons America back to prior states of development—an indicator that the death drive is at work. Trump, Greenberg wrote, “urges us all to shake loose the surly bonds of civilized conduct: to make science irrelevant and rationality optional, to render truth obsolete, to set power free to roam the world, to lift all the core conditions written into the social contract—fealty to reason, skepticism about instincts, aspirations to justice.” Trump is, in other words, an atavist, inviting citizens to satisfy all of their hungry drives, all of their libidinous instincts: His America is a place for malign
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Yeah buddy. You just keep right on smelling your own farts and writing articles just like this one for the next 4 years.
Methinks you're getting colder.
I'll leave you two geniuses alone with your theorizing. Looks like you've still got work to do.
Perhaps you can get a collab with Allan Lichtman put together?
I'm sure all three of you shitheels combined could come up with a better theory than the gals at The View could when they're not trying to destroy local Jewish businesses that have been around for 150 years.
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Trump is fine.
He is also your current President. 
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You are all terrible, terrible people.
And now... ever since the election.... most of you are destroying each other.
It's because none of you can stand each other any more than the half of the country that didn't vote for Kamala Harris can stand you.
Don't take my word for it...
Ask serial intern rapist and murder Joe Scarborough and his bitch wife Mika about what they did this week.
That isn't the type of behavior one would expect from two people who truly believe that Trump is Adolf Hitler and that his Presidency will be the end of Democracy, now is it?
They are pure trash, but they're smarter than your average talking-head asshole. They ran as fast as their little feet could take them straight to Trump's front doorstep with little fucking bows on their heads so they could kiss the ring.
Joe and Mika aren't sitting there fighting over bullshit non-reasons why the Democrats lost inside of the echo chamber.
They left the chamber. They went to Mar-a-Lago.
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Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.
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POPULAR VOTE:
76,741,825 for Trump (50.0%) / 74,207,529 votes for Harris (48.3%).
Total votes counted: 150,949,354
Trump's lead: 2,534,296
COMPARED TO THE 2020 ELECTION:
The 2020 results were 74,223,369 for Trump and 81,282,916 votes for Biden*
The total EXACT vote count in 2020 was 155,506,285.
The total amount of votes less in 2024 compared to 2020 is down to only 4,556,931 now.
Trump now has 2,518,456 more votes than he did in 2020.
Harris now has 7,075,387 less votes than Biden* did in 2020.
States with votes left to count (States below 99% according to Google's map)
California: 3% left
New York: 3% left
Oregon: 3% left
Colorado: 3% left
Maryland: 2% left
Utah: 2% left
Mississippi: 2% left
HOUSE:
We're still at 220 R / 213 D.
D13 is 98% counted and the Republican has a .2 lead. As I stated yesterday, the Republican had a 1.2 point advantage until 90%, and then at 92% the lead shrunk only to .2 point lead. In the 6% counted since yesterday, that .2 lead is still in place.
D45 is 92% counted and the Democrat has a .2 lead, which means that no votes were counted here since yesterday.
I expect both of these to be recounted. Hopefully they get investigated as well.
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Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.
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How do the popular vote numbers change if you take California out of the equation and it was a 49 state race?
Currently there are 14,981,489 votes counted in California.
9,080,964 for Harris, and 5,900,525 for Trump.
Total Popular Votes (Excluding California): 135,967,865
Total Trump Votes (Excluding California): 70,841,300 (52.1%)
Total Harris Votes (Excluding California): 65,126,565 (47.9%)
Trump's National Popular Vote Lead (Excluding California): 5,714,735
Yes. That is correct... Trump's national popular vote lead more than doubles if the 10% of the national electorate in California isn't included.
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I see that THUGGERY stopped by to post a turkey day gif. Not sure what that is for, Canada had a turkey day last month, I think.
Anyhow, I don't see any post from him in this thread.
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No. He ran away for a few weeks and refused to take his lumps or admit that he was wrong about anything.
A day or two after the election he popped up in the tag section so I knew he was okay. He's since posted several more times there and even here in the RWED in several threads.
I'm sure he'll ease his way back in here more when the Legacy Media figures out where it's going next with its programming.
It's been nice not being called a Nazi everyday in the meantime.
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Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.
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Quote:You are a little Nazi, but now that Fatso Hitler has been elected, Nazi optimism grows.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
It's been nice not being called a Nazi everyday in the meantime.
Republican economic optimism is skyrocketing already
The Michigan index of consumer expectations (not current consumer sentiment) is doing its usual thing in the wake of the election.
As usual, Republicans are considerably more partisan about the economy than Democrats. After Joe Biden's election their expectations dropped about 75 points while Democratic expectations rose 30 points. This time around Republican expectations are already up 27 points compared to a Democratic drop of about 16.
This is a partisan dynamic we see frequently, and I don't know why. Are Republicans just more partisan? More scared of Democrats than Democrats are of Republicans? Is it media driven? Some enterprising grad student should look into this.
https://jabberwocking.com/republican-economic-optimism-is-skyrocketing
-already/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Donald Trump and the tyranny of the uninformed
The Democrats’ finger-pointing about why Donald Trump won the presidential election continues. Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, thinks it’s because Democrats are out of touch with the economic issues that matter to working-class Americans.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said. That’s a pretty patronizing take for someone who claims to be a champion of workers.
Sanders believes that Kamala Harris lost the election because Democrats didn’t speak to the working class with enough empathy and concern. But these voters aren’t five-year-olds who have to be cajoled into behaving themselves. When you respect people, you also hold them responsible for the choices they make.
This election wasn’t about policy. It was about fundamental principles, and voters knew exactly what they were voting for. This was a clear choice between a candidate who pledged to defend America’s founding values, democracy and the rule of law and a populist demagogue who pandered to a sense of grievance and promised to bring down the price of groceries.
It’s infantilizing to assume, as Sanders does, that the working-class voters he champions aren’t or shouldn’t be interested in things like America’s democratic traditions. America’s founders were largely self-educated farmers and tradespeople. George Washington had almost no formal education at all. The Federalist papers — there were anti-federalist papers, too — were debated by ordinary people in coffee houses, homes and public meetings. It’s often said that the working class built America, but they also helped lay its intellectual foundation.
We’ve remained true to that tradition for much of our history. The generations that fought two world wars to defend democracy would have booed a candidate like Donald Trump off the stage. They certainly would never have elected him president.
Now, things are different. Voters elected an authoritarian because they were upset about the price of eggs. That is unsustainable. If a majority of Americans are willing to trade democracy for the promise — especially the illusory promise — of a little economic security, then the American experiment is over.
Nonetheless, there may be hope. I said earlier that voters knew exactly what they were voting for. They certainly could have known if they had made a little effort to find out. But maybe they didn’t.
In a recent survey, despite two years of often-spectacular growth, 56 percent of voters believed we were in a recession. Half of voters thought the unemployment rate was at a 50-year high when, in fact, it is at a 50-year low. Half of voters thought the stock market was down for the year even though at the time of the survey it was up over 25 percent.
In other words, Americans live in two different worlds complete with different facts.
To borrow a phrase from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), we can all live together happily in a country where everyone has their own opinions. We cannot live together in a country where everyone has their own facts.
More at https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5002590-trump-election-uninformed/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You are a little Nazi,
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
It's been nice not being called a Nazi everyday in the meantime.
Oh. I meant to say it was nice not being called Nazi everyday by a human being.
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Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.
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