Neoliberalism and the Sociopathy of Trumpism

Opinions are for cell phone brands and pineapple on pizza. When it’s about hundreds of thousands dying of COVID or kids in cages, ripped from their parents’ arms, there are deeper moral issues involved that reflect on character. When a person supports and defends those responsible for such crimes against humanity, it tells me who they are as a person, whether they are at all trustworthy or not, whether my life or your children’s lives have more worth to them than their car or their television set or their freedom to choose their pizza toppings or to wear a mask.

So, why do 30–40% of Americans support a sociopathic narcissist like Donald Trump? Why are they so ready to dismiss everything but Fox News and Breitbart as lies? It might be easy to say they have surrendered their reasoning faculties to a cult with its closed system of thought, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.

Neoliberalism, that economic philosophy promulgated in the late 1940’s says that only three values are “natural” for humanity: competition, private property and individualism. Anything collective or collaborative should be treated as unnatural and abhorrent. Friederich Von Hayek created the core ideas that became neoliberalism in the 1930’s to combat the rise of socialism in Germany and Austria in the midst of the Great Depression. Conservatives and Trumplings still reflexively drag out the “socialism” trope whenever anyone discusses how we might be responsible for each other or how people need to contribute, according to their ability, for the common good. (The other historical root of the “socialism” epithet being racism, going back to the Post-Reconstruction era of the 1880’s South.)

In 1981, Ronald Reagan in the U. S. and Maggie Thatcher in Britain simultaneously adopted Hayek’s treatise on neoliberalism as the state philosophy of their respective parties, with Thatcher infamously declaring, “There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women.” This may well explain why the U.S. and Britain are the outliers among governments in protecting their populations from COVID.

Neoliberalism explains why so many people seem to be acting on the basis that their freedom of choice, comfort and enjoyment are more important than other people getting to stay alive, that they are only responsible for themselves and nobody else. Our Nation, our culture, our values have been pickling in this toxic, alien brine of neoliberalism for at least two generations, long enough for many people to accept that competition, private property and individualism, instead of cooperation, generosity and community are the natural state of humanity.

But neoliberalism has been nothing more than a convenient lie all along. Looking at history, cultures all over the world, or simply very small children, it is easy to conclude humanity really doesn’t function very well that way. The troika of individualism, private property and competition are actually quite unnatural, alien in the sense that they reverse and pervert the healthy development of attachment, bonding and community that has been the human way of life for millennia.

Inculcating children into neoliberalism, which schools do with their individual achievement standards, hierarchical ratings and exclusively competitive athletics, actually creates trauma, damages children, teaches them to distrust their intuition, abandon their personal talents, their gentle and caring ways for fear of being attacked, humiliated and exploited both by peers enforcing neoliberal norms and authorities as well. Driven into their psyches from early enough in children’s lives, such trauma, possibly combined with genetic factors, can lead to diagnosable sociopathy, the profound inability to empathize or understand and share in the feelings of others.

Am I saying that the 30–40% who support Trump, who tolerate his fire hose of lies and celebrate his predatory meanness are sociopaths? Not…quite. But sociopathy is not an all or nothing orientation. There is another factor that functions to bring out the sociopathy: living in an inherently sociopathic social and economic environment.

Since the Reagan era, our economic system has become dominated by shareholder value capitalism, where stock prices and dividends have become all that matters for corporations. Rising incomes, health insurance, other benefits of collective prosperity in the Post-WWII period from 1950 to 1980 all evaporated after 1980 in the interest of the “maximization of investment potential.” All increases in productivity after that went to the investor class, the ones who supported and developed neoliberalism to protect themselves from “socialism”. Wages and family incomes for the past two generations have barely kept up with inflation. Families of wage earners spent their entire lives one crisis away from living on the street.

I actually think that support of someone like Trump results from a convergence of trauma from indoctrination into neoliberalism from early childhood on the inside, activated by constantly struggling to survive in a sociopathic economic environment, where there is no daylight at the end of the tunnel, no future to look forward to in the person’s relationship to their world.

Which points to the following concluding thought: getting rid of Trump will not solve the problem. Until leaders and politicians directly confront the twin blasphemies — yes, strong word, but from the long view of human social evolution, appropriate — of neoliberalism and shareholder value capitalism, other sociopathic demagogues will emerge to activate the damaged moral cores that follow Trump.