The Trump effect: strongmen and the erosion of fundamental cultural institutions

Donald Trump now has nearly 50% of the GOP electorate in recent national polls (here and here). Whatever else this means (and there's a lot that it means), one thing we can be sure of: Trump has done serious damage to the already fragile expectation that we should all aspire to civil public discourse.

It's well established in research, common sense, and recent experience that if enough people in a group elect to behave in a certain way, then the specific behaviors (or cultural solutions) that they have adopted will become the standard for the rest of the group, and for future generations. This is how culture changes, and this is how I've been talking about it in recent posts (see the last one).

But not all cultural solutions are the same. Some are vulnerable. Some are rock solid. Some we wouldn't want to change even if we could. Others have no real impact on our lives at all, and will twist and fade like snowflakes in a blizzard.

I've tried to organize these categories in the table below, with examples. I built a 2-by-2 matrix (a favorite of ex-consultants) that organizes cultural solutions based on (1) whether they would have high significance/impact if they were changed, and on (2) whether the solution itself is hard to change.

Main categories of cultural solutions, with examples. 

Conventional cultural solutions are adopted solutions that everyone agrees to, that no one wants to change (high cost to switch), and which are no better or worse than their alternatives. For instance, if everyone in the US were to suddenly learn to read, write, and speak French, and then did so exclusively, then there would be very little difference in how the country functioned. That's not to say that it would be easy to make the switch, which is why these are called conventions.

Transient cultural solutions are what most people call "culture." Often the word "culture" is used in a a very limited and often derogatory sense, to imply that the object of study is transient and interchangeable. This is a shameful way to treat this subject, and I think the blame rests both on the accusers for failing to see transient cultural solutions in a broader context and on the students of "culture" for not fighting for it's inclusion in that broader context. Transient cultural solutions include things that are very easy to change (or which could in many cases change with high frequency), and which have no real implication for the group in general if they were to change. Billboard Top 40 is a great example, where the songs listed on the chart are here today, gone tomorrow.

Fundamental cultural solutions are really cultural institutions that have absorbed a great deal of social capital in order to act for the general good. Changing these institutions would have wide-ranging, significant implications for the group. Furthermore, they are hard to change. The group will have built their lives around these institutions, and there will be broad consensus that, although the institutions don't come cheap, they are acting in everyone's interest. Of course, they never act in everyone's interest; that would be impossible. But individual deviations from these fundamental cultural solutions are met with resistance by the group, which sees its own broader interests threatened by apostasy. So to the extent that diverging options are relatively isolated, and if only a few others see a benefit (or at least the lack of a loss) to adopting those diverging opinions, then they will remain on the fringes.

Fragile cultural solutions have succumbed to disruption among a sizable segment of the group, with wide-ranging implications for everyone else. The interplay between fundamental and fragile cultural solutions is where it's at. What Trump has been doing, among other things, is systematically plundering the social capital of civil discourse for short-term, narrow political gain (the "strongman effect"). Normally this is really hard to do. The conditions need to be right, and there almost always needs to be a catalyst in the form of strong, determined leadership to focus contrarian public opinion across a sufficiently broad segment of the group. Twenty years ago, if a politician were to say something off-color (like Trump's comments about Mexican rapists), the media would strike him down where he stood within hours. Game over. Today, someone says "Heil, Hitler!" at a Trump rally and the candidate can't quite get himself to take a stand against institutional racism and the accelerating rise of the white supremacy movement. This is how Trump catalyzes the change. He legitimizes racist and xenophobic discourse beyond the dog-whistle, so that those who would otherwise stay quiet due to what most people would call standard norms of decency (but which Trump and others call "political correctness") are now empowered to speak up and join the ranks. And the ranks have swelled. And the more they swell, the risk of loss associated with being a public racist becomes much smaller when you're among your millions of newly minted fellow public racists.

This one-time massive self-outing of indecent behavior will have implications in the United States for generations to come, as children growing up in Trump households see their parents and elders modeling behavior and speech that would make the founding fathers shudder.

What does Trump get from this? He gets a base that is defined by its indecency, and therefore immunized from arguments made by the other side. In other words, he tears down the idea of civil discourse (both in words and in practice) to yield himself a massive short-term gain.

A final note on the matrix: you probably noticed that the content of the upper two quadrants is the same. This is on purpose. What I mean to show is that there is a battle taking place between the strongmen, who plunder the accumulated institutional wealth of everyone else for their own narrow gain, and the grassroots, a broad coalition of social and political interests aligned around the common good. The extent to which the bullets belong on the left or the right is mostly a function of "who's been winning lately". Unfortunately the battle is not symmetric. Fundamental cultural institutions are not stable. They survive on broad majoritarian or institutional impediments to their destruction. There is always someone who could benefit from tearing them down. And despite their size and momentum, if they are perceived by a large enough segment of the population to no longer serve their interests (or even cause them harm, e.g., undocumented immigration), then they can be torn down. In contrast, they are very hard to put together. Very special conditions must exist to establish these institutions, with broad agreement (the "grassroots effect").

NB. Labeling the two top arrows "strongman effect" and "grassroots effect" implies a judgment that the disruption caused by the leftward pull into the Fragile box is always a bad thing, or that the rightward pull into the Fundamental box is always a good thing. That's not strictly true (you could imagine renaming them something like "disruption" and "institutional investment", respectively), so some day I'll have to refine this matrix. I'll leave it as is for now.