Conformists

Time and again over the past four years—weekly, daily, it seems—we have watched as the president said or did something vile, obscene, offensive, scandalous, vicious, cruel, and altogether odious. And then we have headed over to FiveThirtyEight to check the man's approval rating. And, once again, we see it hover at a steady, immovable, 40% of the population. Who are these loyal foot soldiers? we ask. What could possibly undergird such stubborn apathy? 

What makes it all particularly strange is that Trump's brand of awfulness takes such myriad forms. If it were as simple a matter as only offending one value system, or of always attacking the same stigmatized groups, then the craven partisanship that some people feel toward him would be easier to explain. But in the course of his time in office, Trump has separately transgressed the ethical framework of every constituency one might expect to back him. 

Pick a "principle" we used to think that some group of conservatives cared about: we will find that Trump has violated it. The military? Viz. his actions and comments, both public and private, on John McCain, prisoners of war, the Russian bounties, veterans with disabilities, military cemeteries, etc. "Sexual morality"—the one-time rallying cry of the Christian Right? Viz. Trump's unapologetic philandering, "his open infidelity, his shameless robberies and swindling" (to steal a line from Barry Lyndon). 

And yet, time after time, his support among this 40% of the population does not budge. We cannot account for it. Perhaps we have met and spoken to some members of this section of the public, and the mystery only deepens. It would be strange enough, after all, if these people defended the president's unconscionable behavior. Even weirder, though: they don't defend it. They don't condone it. Yet they support him anyhow. 

"Well, I don't care for everything he does," one hears them say. Or worse: "I don't think he really means it when he talks that way about immigrants." Or: "Well, I don't personally feel that way about immigrants," they reply—as if that were the question. Why, oh why then, we ask, do you still vote for him? 

Why do they insist without evidence that he does not mean the things he is on record saying; but they believe that Democrats do secretly believe and should be blamed and punished for things they have not said: indeed, that they have publicly disavowed? What could Trump possibly have done to justify this outlandishly vast benefit of the doubt?

A line from Alberto Moravia's classic anti-fascist novel The Conformist stops somewhat short of explaining this phenomenon, but it manages to illustrate the pig-headed logic of it, at least, in a vivid way. Moravia's protagonist, Marcello, a member of Mussolini's secret police, has just reported for duty and is awaiting a chance to meet with the Minister and receive his orders. 

He happens to observe, while he is waiting, that his superior is distracted by a sexual dalliance that flies in the face of Marcello's own rigid moral code—the very unthinking distaste for "disorder" and "degeneracy" in all forms that led Marcello into the ranks of Fascism in the first place. Yet, in spite of this glimpse into the hypocrisy at the heart of the cause he serves, Marcello's devotion does not waver. As the author reflects, describing his protagonist's thoughts: 

"[Marcello] felt that this intrusion of [the Minister's] erotic life into his official one was highly improper. But none of this affected Marcello's political faith even minimally. It was the same when people he trusted told him about other important public figures—that they were stealing, or incompetent, or using their political influence for personal ends. He registered this sort of news with almost gloomy indifference, as if these kinds of things had ceased to concern him from the moment he made his choice, once and for all[.]" (Calliope trans.)

 Marcello himself may not be self-reflective enough to understand why he has internalized this intractable and irrational loyalty. Can we, as a reader of the novel as a whole, attempt to decipher it? Moravia seems to suggest that his Fascist protagonist is drawn to Mussolini's banner for psychoanalytic reasons. A violently abusive father, an episode of attempted sexual abuse as a youth, an inattentive and self-involved mother: these things operate as predisposing conditions for his later desire for absolute order and authority. 

Some similar psychological account might perhaps be reconstructed in Trump's own case. The distant and emotionally abusive father turns up in accounts of Trump's childhood. As a youth, Marcello in the novel longs for precisely the sort of military boarding school that Donald apparently found such a fit setting for the development of his own proto-fascist temperament. 

I don't often have a lot of patience for this kind of absolving psycho-history, however—the "How Father beat him" school of biographical exoneration (to borrow a line from Auden). It seems to me the human psyche is too individual and various to be explained by any such direct causes, and that for every case of a neglected youngster who turns out vicious, there is another who is a boon to humanity; and for every villain who can be explained by early deprivation, there are others who started off with every advantage. 

Perhaps, in the end, Fascism is less the mystery to be explained than the reasons some people oppose it. Total authority, orders from on high, domination of one group at the expense of another—these things make direct appeals to the interests of those who stand to gain from them. The fact that conscience is not strong enough in all people's characters to keep it at bay is perhaps not so impossible to understand. 

Moravia too—for all the use he makes of psychoanalytic methods in his novel—would not necessarily deny this. His Marcello is ultimately drawn to fascism for the simplest of reasons, however nourished they may be by the details of his biography: in the end, he does not want to be alone. He is afraid of the possibility of his own differentness: what he calls his "abnormality." 

There are times in the course of the novel's events, after all, in which his conscience betrays him. He displays a morose awareness of how his deeds must appear in the eyes of morality. 

When he is ordered to betray a former professor of his to be assassinated, for instance, he remarks on the similarity of his case to that of Judas. The moment of the final betrayal comes alongside a tolling clock at a restaurant named for a rooster: elegantly evoking the circumstances surrounding Peter's three-time denial of Christ. Yet even when Marcello puts himself and his cause in the role of Judas or Peter, however, he notes something he thinks amounts to a moral difference: Judas operated alone. He didn't have a crowd of chanting followers behind him; whereas Mussolini does. 

As much as this 1951 novel is infused with Freudian psychoanalysis, after all, it also displays the concerns of that other great postwar intellectual fashion: Existentialism. Marcello operates in the end as if he lived already in the nightmare future Sartre imagines in a famous line from his "Existentialism is a Humanism": the future in which fascism has replaced all other worldviews, and has therefore become the truth of humankind. 

Marcello believes that if he can lose himself sufficiently in the group, and if the group proves numerous enough to displace all others, then it will be sufficient to cover over his crimes: indeed, to make them no longer crimes at all. "What he needed," writes Moravia, "was the complete success of that government, that society, that nation; [...] Only in this way could what was normally considered a common crime become, instead, a positive step in a necessary direction. In other words, thanks to forces that did not depend on him, a complete transmutation of values must take place; injustice must become justice; betrayal, heroism; death, life." (Calliope trans.)

Perhaps this is what best explains the drive toward persecution and genocide that all fascist regimes eventually undertake—the "radicalizing" tendency that Robert Paxton observed to be inherent in the anatomy of all fascisms. As the regime persists in committing crimes, an awareness of their own guilt mounts. The sense of reproach they feel from their victims makes them want all the more to extirpate them, to wipe out their political adversaries, to eliminate the possibility of holding a condemnatory moral judgement upon the regime—because only by eliminating all alternative moral worldviews can they claim at last a moral victory. 

This underlying belief that the size of the crowd alone can save them is perhaps what explains Trump and his followers. This is why the president seeks to avoid debate or serious questions from journalists, taking to the rally stage at every opportunity to hear the roar of the approving mass. This explains his visceral disgust and contempt for physical infirmity, disability, ill health, old age, intellectuality; his mechanical pursuit of conventional status markers and macho dominance; his need to stigmatize and scapegoat out-groups; his profound terror of anything that might render him different than others: "abnormal" in any way, to use Marcello's phrase.

As Marcello discovers, however, in the very act of seeking to conform to a group that is engaged in evil, one takes the taint of their actions upon oneself. The sense of one's own strangeness, criminality, "abnormality" deepens in the very act of purging it. One can therefore only hope that the group will have a total triumph, of the kind Marcello envisions. Extirpate all others, eliminate the possibility of resistance or an alternative view.  

But when one starts to lose, when the tide of opinion changes, then the fascist has nothing: no crowd to justify his actions, and yet with the stain of guilt and evil still upon his conscience. 

Unless they can mend their ways, the people who showed unthinking loyalty to Trump out of a spirit of conformity are therefore in for a rough psychological future. They will find that history condemns as aberrant and obscene the very things they took at the time to be markers of their "normality," of their 100% American-ness. They think for now, "I'm just doing what everyone else is doing." In the eyes of history, they will be seen for what they are: people who enabled one of the most criminal and dangerous presidential administrations in our history.