The question of why good people support evil leaders has preoccupied me for the past twenty years. Never have I investigated a mystery so long without arriving at a solution that satisfied me. However, I believe that what follows goes to the heart of that mystery.
______________
One thing that continues to blow my mind is the people who support Donald Trump. I cannot think of anyone I’ve ever seen who repels me more—someone so full of the worst defects a person can have that he’d be the last person I’d be drawn to or wish to give power. And I believe that what I see is not some idiosyncratic perception, but something that should be obvious to any clear-eyed observer.
Yet for millions of my countrymen, this same man inspires a kind of fervent loyalty not generally seen in American politics. What especially deepens the mystery for me is that some of those supporters are people I have known as decent and even admirable in their morality — the “good” conservatives I knew in the Shenandoah Valley. How can such people see this same man so differently?
I’m trying especially hard to understand how it is that the “good” conservatives I knew in the Shenandoah Valley – people who seem even admirable, morally – could find in that same extraordinarily defective man someone to give their loyal support, and maybe even devotion.
One thing that continues to puzzle me is how differently the same man is experienced by different Americans. To me—and to many others—Donald Trump appears as a bundle of defects, someone one would instinctively recoil from giving power to. Yet for millions, including people I have known as decent and even admirable, he inspires loyalty and even devotion.
For a long time, I assumed this had to be a problem of perception—that if people could only see clearly what is so evident, they would reject him. But by now, so much has been revealed so plainly that it is hard to believe that simple “not seeing” is the whole answer. Nor do I think they are seeing something genuinely admirable that I have somehow missed.
The answer, I have come to suspect, lies elsewhere—within the people themselves.
Several patterns help illuminate this dynamic. What appears repellent to some can feel compelling to others, depending on what is activated within them.
First, attraction to dominance. Displays of aggression and rule-breaking that strike some as bullying or cruelty can register to others as strength and fearlessness.
Second, identity defense. When people feel their group is under threat, a leader who fights ruthlessly for “us” can become attractive even if his character would otherwise seem objectionable.
Third, permission and release. Trump openly expresses impulses—anger, resentment, contempt—that many people feel they must suppress. For some, that can feel liberating rather than disturbing.
Fourth, a conflict mindset. If politics is experienced as a kind of war, the question shifts from “Is this person admirable?” to “Will he defeat our enemies?”
In this light, the magnetism lies not in Trump alone, but in how he gives voice and power to parts of his supporters that are usually denied and suppressed.
What this suggests is that many people live with a divided inner life. On the one hand are the parts of themselves shaped by the moral demands of their culture—the “shoulds” they have internalized. On the other hand are parts of themselves that arise from their own inborn nature—the impulses and needs of the human animal that do not always fit comfortably within those imposed structures. Don’t fit comfortably– especially with the more stringent and demanding moralities to which some people are compelled to conform themselves.
While some people have some dark impulses either right on the surface, more or less in charge—like the Proud Boys, others have those forbidden impulses hidden inside them, not conscious. Such people can seem – to themselves, and to others – as if they are well put-together, of a piece, people of integrity. Like many good conservatives I knew in the Shenandoah Valley), but be vulnerable to being seduced into being ruled by dark desires in the political part of their lives.
So I am inferring about those “good” people — who are in the grip of “Evil” in their political lives – is that they find the destructive appealing. I can point out all the ways Trump tramples on the whole American order till I’m blue in the face. But there’s a part of these conservative “patriots” that feels so rebellious about submitting to order that they welcome a leader who demolishes that structure. Conservatives seem more tightly structured than liberals – “straight and narrow path.” But the demand that they submit to structure leaves a natural “self” of the human animal enraged: it wants to be free to be itself enough, and the structures imposed from outside arouse “rebel” forces to form.
The lack of reconciliation between external demands and basic freedom to express one’s real self leads to “rebel” forces that delight in someone like Trump, who continually does the forbidden.
And not just ANY forbidden, but those connected with the needs that are being suppressed. A lot of people who know how to behave very properly have loved in Trump that he insists on behaving Improperly at every turn.
And what’s striking is how each of these tendencies points to something broken within the person. What should be repellent becomes attractive. What a human being would resist if they were whole becomes something to be embraced.
A whole human being would want peace, not conflict. Yet millions of Americans are drawn to a politics that insists on making a fight over everything.
A whole human being would want to find ways to cooperate, to help make the world better. Yet people who are broken in this way show little interest in discovering how we might work together to serve purposes we share, even though inevitably we must find our way forward together. (That accurately describes the Republican Party of the past generation.)
A whole human being would honor truth. And historically, American political culture has placed a high value on whether a leader could be trusted to tell the truth.
Conservative America greatly admired President Eisenhower for his truthfulness, and were troubled when he’d told a single — defensible — lie. Consider how different that world has become now, when it has fervently supported a leader who cannot be counted on to have even the least regard for honesty or reality—whose trail of obvious and consequential lies includes the Big Lie about the election of 2020.
This embrace of the lie points to a particular form of psychological brokenness. If people have within themselves parts they have hidden—from others and even from themselves—then in some sense they are already “living a lie”: the lie is the pretense of presenting themselves as more fully aligned with their upright values than they really are. And those who cannot acknowledge the suppressed parts of themselves cannot be wholly committed to the truth.
To such people, a prodigious liar like Trump may not be regarded as despicable for his dishonesty, but might instead be admired as someone who gets away with fraud, just as they themselves, in a different way, have also been doing.
All of this points to a deeper dynamic.
People can have their psyches divided between two parts that are not on “speaking terms” with each other — one part that consists of the moral structures that their familial and cultural environment has compelled them to internalize, and another part that grows out of the inborn nature of the human being.
The structures that demand the upright path can govern most domains. But if the two parts have not come to good terms, the unreconciled part is still lurking, looking for a way to express itself. And it is from that unreconciled place that what might be called “rebel forces” arise—parts of the self that push back against the structures imposed upon them, that take pleasure in transgression, and that can be drawn to a leader who continually does what is forbidden.
This helps explain the mystery. People who are good and decent in most areas of their lives can, in some other realm of their lives — like the political realm — be governed by those rebel forces. They can find in Trump not the repulsive human being that others see, but rather a vehicle for impulses they otherwise keep caged.
*****
Horace wrote: “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.” You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she will keep coming back.
Crucially, that goes for human nature. Like reality itself, human nature is inevitably what we’ve got, and it can be denied or suppressed, but it does not disappear.
The inborn “self” of the human animal wants to be free to express its true reality and feelings. But if the demands made by the culture on the growing human being are excessively demanding, then even if the child submits to the internalized moral regime, a “rebel force” will form, the natural needs and desires that have not accepted the harsh order that has been imposed. (And the conservative side of a culture tends to make the most stringent demands on those it shapes.)
A part of the psyche goes underground, carrying what has been denied expression. And those desires that have been frustrated can become inflamed with a rage that comes from that frustration, directed at the forces of order that have imposed that suppression.
That rebel force can take delight in a leader who speaks with wild and reckless abandon, saying anything at all, breaking all the rules, and vandalizing the structures that impose the hated order.
So, to paraphrase Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure of integration”—a psyche divided between the part that has submitted to the imposed order and the part that has not.
*****
The Proud Boy types are “bad boys,” and have never bought into the straight and narrow. But America doesn’t have enough bad boys to enable someone so dark and destructive as Trump to get elected President of the United States.
To get there, it was necessary for the fascist force to get hold of the Republican electorate. The fascistic political forces accomplished this through propaganda. Through consistent manipulative messaging, they seduced those “good” conservatives by seizing hold of that underground part that is filled with a passion to overthrow the structure to which they had grown up compelled to submit.
Thirty years of Republican propaganda – since the rise of Gingrich and Limbaugh, and then Fox News as well – has led people into a place where they were fully committed to a kind of politics like the Republicans have practiced for a generation.
Over time, this messaging has not just shaped opinions, but has given that buried, unreconciled part of the psyche a place to come to the surface and take power—in the one realm on which the propagandists focused their efforts: the political realm.
This is the best answer I have found to the mystery I’ve seen so often in “good” conservatives. In most of their lives, they are so good and decent, even stellar in character, while in their politics they are governed by the force aligned with their forbidden impulses.
Nature comes back, not only with the original suppressed impulses, but transformed by the accumulated frustration of being kept caged. What might have been simple human needs returns in a more distorted form. The frustration infuses rage into the “rebel forces,” and people whose psyches have been divided into warring parts come to relish a politics in which that inner conflict is waged against an external enemy.
The political passions released then express themselves as hatred toward the other side and a lust to dominate. Every issue becomes something to fight about (even a global pandemic!), and no issue gets addressed through cooperation to achieve common purposes.
The more injurious the irreconcilable developmental process, the less the “rebel forces” will represent liberation, and the more it will become sheer vandalism.
Fascism came to power by seducing mostly “good” people into finding in politics a place to express all the evil and destructive impulses they otherwise suppress so well.
*******
We tend to imagine that we humans are all of a piece. But none of us is fully integrated, and in some people the divisions are deeper and more consequential; such people are therefore more vulnerable to being drawn into serving forces that oppose what they believe to be their own deepest values (because they are not only the part of themselves they identify with).
This, I believe, goes to the heart of the mystery of how “good” people can support evil rulers.
But it also leads to a deeper question: Why are so many people divided in this way to begin with?
The following piece will take up that question, and offer an answer that connects with the deepest dilemma faced by our civilization-creating species.
A Mind-Blowing Collaboration Between a Human and an AI
My Op/Ed Messages
Andy Schmookler’s Podcast Interviews
The American Crisis, and a Secular Understanding of the Battle Between Good and Evil
None So Blind – Blog 2005-2011 on the rising threat to American Democracy
How the Market Economy Itself Shapes Our Destiny
The Sacred Space of Lovers
The River and Its Channel: Bottom-Up (Flow) and Top-Down (Control) in Fostering the Good
Ongoing Commentary to Illuminate the American Crisis
What’s True About Meaning and Value
Andy’s YouTube Channel
The Fateful Step
How the Ugliness of Civilized History is not Human Nature Writ Large
Major Relevant Essays
Healing the Wounds, Inflicted by the Reign of Power, that Drive Us to War
Our Life-Serving Inborn Experiential Tendencies
A Quest to Bridge America’s Moral Divide – 1999
The Heirloom Project
Knowing What’s Right to do Is Not a No-Brainer
When “Good” People Support Evil Leaders
The question of why good people support evil leaders has preoccupied me for the past twenty years. Never have I investigated a mystery so long without arriving at a solution that satisfied me. However, I believe that what follows goes to the heart of that mystery.
______________
One thing that continues to blow my mind is the people who support Donald Trump. I cannot think of anyone I’ve ever seen who repels me more—someone so full of the worst defects a person can have that he’d be the last person I’d be drawn to or wish to give power. And I believe that what I see is not some idiosyncratic perception, but something that should be obvious to any clear-eyed observer.
Yet for millions of my countrymen, this same man inspires a kind of fervent loyalty not generally seen in American politics. What especially deepens the mystery for me is that some of those supporters are people I have known as decent and even admirable in their morality — the “good” conservatives I knew in the Shenandoah Valley. How can such people see this same man so differently?
I’m trying especially hard to understand how it is that the “good” conservatives I knew in the Shenandoah Valley – people who seem even admirable, morally – could find in that same extraordinarily defective man someone to give their loyal support, and maybe even devotion.
One thing that continues to puzzle me is how differently the same man is experienced by different Americans. To me—and to many others—Donald Trump appears as a bundle of defects, someone one would instinctively recoil from giving power to. Yet for millions, including people I have known as decent and even admirable, he inspires loyalty and even devotion.
For a long time, I assumed this had to be a problem of perception—that if people could only see clearly what is so evident, they would reject him. But by now, so much has been revealed so plainly that it is hard to believe that simple “not seeing” is the whole answer. Nor do I think they are seeing something genuinely admirable that I have somehow missed.
The answer, I have come to suspect, lies elsewhere—within the people themselves.
Several patterns help illuminate this dynamic. What appears repellent to some can feel compelling to others, depending on what is activated within them.
First, attraction to dominance. Displays of aggression and rule-breaking that strike some as bullying or cruelty can register to others as strength and fearlessness.
Second, identity defense. When people feel their group is under threat, a leader who fights ruthlessly for “us” can become attractive even if his character would otherwise seem objectionable.
Third, permission and release. Trump openly expresses impulses—anger, resentment, contempt—that many people feel they must suppress. For some, that can feel liberating rather than disturbing.
Fourth, a conflict mindset. If politics is experienced as a kind of war, the question shifts from “Is this person admirable?” to “Will he defeat our enemies?”
In this light, the magnetism lies not in Trump alone, but in how he gives voice and power to parts of his supporters that are usually denied and suppressed.
What this suggests is that many people live with a divided inner life. On the one hand are the parts of themselves shaped by the moral demands of their culture—the “shoulds” they have internalized. On the other hand are parts of themselves that arise from their own inborn nature—the impulses and needs of the human animal that do not always fit comfortably within those imposed structures. Don’t fit comfortably– especially with the more stringent and demanding moralities to which some people are compelled to conform themselves.
While some people have some dark impulses either right on the surface, more or less in charge—like the Proud Boys, others have those forbidden impulses hidden inside them, not conscious. Such people can seem – to themselves, and to others – as if they are well put-together, of a piece, people of integrity. Like many good conservatives I knew in the Shenandoah Valley), but be vulnerable to being seduced into being ruled by dark desires in the political part of their lives.
So I am inferring about those “good” people — who are in the grip of “Evil” in their political lives – is that they find the destructive appealing. I can point out all the ways Trump tramples on the whole American order till I’m blue in the face. But there’s a part of these conservative “patriots” that feels so rebellious about submitting to order that they welcome a leader who demolishes that structure. Conservatives seem more tightly structured than liberals – “straight and narrow path.” But the demand that they submit to structure leaves a natural “self” of the human animal enraged: it wants to be free to be itself enough, and the structures imposed from outside arouse “rebel” forces to form.
The lack of reconciliation between external demands and basic freedom to express one’s real self leads to “rebel” forces that delight in someone like Trump, who continually does the forbidden.
And not just ANY forbidden, but those connected with the needs that are being suppressed. A lot of people who know how to behave very properly have loved in Trump that he insists on behaving Improperly at every turn.
And what’s striking is how each of these tendencies points to something broken within the person. What should be repellent becomes attractive. What a human being would resist if they were whole becomes something to be embraced.
A whole human being would want peace, not conflict. Yet millions of Americans are drawn to a politics that insists on making a fight over everything.
A whole human being would want to find ways to cooperate, to help make the world better. Yet people who are broken in this way show little interest in discovering how we might work together to serve purposes we share, even though inevitably we must find our way forward together. (That accurately describes the Republican Party of the past generation.)
A whole human being would honor truth. And historically, American political culture has placed a high value on whether a leader could be trusted to tell the truth.
Conservative America greatly admired President Eisenhower for his truthfulness, and were troubled when he’d told a single — defensible — lie. Consider how different that world has become now, when it has fervently supported a leader who cannot be counted on to have even the least regard for honesty or reality—whose trail of obvious and consequential lies includes the Big Lie about the election of 2020.
This embrace of the lie points to a particular form of psychological brokenness. If people have within themselves parts they have hidden—from others and even from themselves—then in some sense they are already “living a lie”: the lie is the pretense of presenting themselves as more fully aligned with their upright values than they really are. And those who cannot acknowledge the suppressed parts of themselves cannot be wholly committed to the truth.
To such people, a prodigious liar like Trump may not be regarded as despicable for his dishonesty, but might instead be admired as someone who gets away with fraud, just as they themselves, in a different way, have also been doing.
All of this points to a deeper dynamic.
People can have their psyches divided between two parts that are not on “speaking terms” with each other — one part that consists of the moral structures that their familial and cultural environment has compelled them to internalize, and another part that grows out of the inborn nature of the human being.
The structures that demand the upright path can govern most domains. But if the two parts have not come to good terms, the unreconciled part is still lurking, looking for a way to express itself. And it is from that unreconciled place that what might be called “rebel forces” arise—parts of the self that push back against the structures imposed upon them, that take pleasure in transgression, and that can be drawn to a leader who continually does what is forbidden.
This helps explain the mystery. People who are good and decent in most areas of their lives can, in some other realm of their lives — like the political realm — be governed by those rebel forces. They can find in Trump not the repulsive human being that others see, but rather a vehicle for impulses they otherwise keep caged.
*****
Horace wrote: “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.” You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she will keep coming back.
Crucially, that goes for human nature. Like reality itself, human nature is inevitably what we’ve got, and it can be denied or suppressed, but it does not disappear.
The inborn “self” of the human animal wants to be free to express its true reality and feelings. But if the demands made by the culture on the growing human being are excessively demanding, then even if the child submits to the internalized moral regime, a “rebel force” will form, the natural needs and desires that have not accepted the harsh order that has been imposed. (And the conservative side of a culture tends to make the most stringent demands on those it shapes.)
A part of the psyche goes underground, carrying what has been denied expression. And those desires that have been frustrated can become inflamed with a rage that comes from that frustration, directed at the forces of order that have imposed that suppression.
That rebel force can take delight in a leader who speaks with wild and reckless abandon, saying anything at all, breaking all the rules, and vandalizing the structures that impose the hated order.
So, to paraphrase Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure of integration”—a psyche divided between the part that has submitted to the imposed order and the part that has not.
*****
The Proud Boy types are “bad boys,” and have never bought into the straight and narrow. But America doesn’t have enough bad boys to enable someone so dark and destructive as Trump to get elected President of the United States.
To get there, it was necessary for the fascist force to get hold of the Republican electorate. The fascistic political forces accomplished this through propaganda. Through consistent manipulative messaging, they seduced those “good” conservatives by seizing hold of that underground part that is filled with a passion to overthrow the structure to which they had grown up compelled to submit.
Thirty years of Republican propaganda – since the rise of Gingrich and Limbaugh, and then Fox News as well – has led people into a place where they were fully committed to a kind of politics like the Republicans have practiced for a generation.
Over time, this messaging has not just shaped opinions, but has given that buried, unreconciled part of the psyche a place to come to the surface and take power—in the one realm on which the propagandists focused their efforts: the political realm.
This is the best answer I have found to the mystery I’ve seen so often in “good” conservatives. In most of their lives, they are so good and decent, even stellar in character, while in their politics they are governed by the force aligned with their forbidden impulses.
Nature comes back, not only with the original suppressed impulses, but transformed by the accumulated frustration of being kept caged. What might have been simple human needs returns in a more distorted form. The frustration infuses rage into the “rebel forces,” and people whose psyches have been divided into warring parts come to relish a politics in which that inner conflict is waged against an external enemy.
The political passions released then express themselves as hatred toward the other side and a lust to dominate. Every issue becomes something to fight about (even a global pandemic!), and no issue gets addressed through cooperation to achieve common purposes.
The more injurious the irreconcilable developmental process, the less the “rebel forces” will represent liberation, and the more it will become sheer vandalism.
Fascism came to power by seducing mostly “good” people into finding in politics a place to express all the evil and destructive impulses they otherwise suppress so well.
*******
We tend to imagine that we humans are all of a piece. But none of us is fully integrated, and in some people the divisions are deeper and more consequential; such people are therefore more vulnerable to being drawn into serving forces that oppose what they believe to be their own deepest values (because they are not only the part of themselves they identify with).
This, I believe, goes to the heart of the mystery of how “good” people can support evil rulers.
But it also leads to a deeper question: Why are so many people divided in this way to begin with?
The following piece will take up that question, and offer an answer that connects with the deepest dilemma faced by our civilization-creating species.