Trumpism and the Status Anxiety of Abusers

Trumpism is a movement of men who beat their wives. It's not that every Trumpist is a wife-beater, obviously. Or that every wife-beater is a Trumpist. It's that the core ideology of Trumpism is "I should get to abuse others." I should get to dominate them. I should get to hurt them. I should get to grind them down because I don't like them, and what are you going to do about it?

Here's how novelist Kelly Barnhill put it in a Bluesky post about the unsurprising news of widespread abuse in ICE detention centers:

Barnhill is correct. But the draw of Trumpism is to a particular sort of abuser: the guy whose abusive urges or actions are bound up in a feeling of status anxiety. Trumpism appeals to men who don't like that others (women, minorities, immigrations, LGBT people) are rising, because they know, even unconsciously, that they're not good enough to compete. That they're getting shown up. Exposed as mediocre, or worse.

During a live recording of The UnPopulist's Zooming In podcast I hosted last week (and which should release soon) at the Liberalism for the 21st Century conference in Washington, DC, journalist Radley Balko said something that was clarifying about this central attitude of Trumpism: To mediocre guys who attained success and power because the system was stacked in in their favor, a move to meritocracy feels like discrimination against them. They like to believe they are owed success because they are better (more skilled, more able, more intelligent) than the people who historically have had less of it. And when the barriers keeping those historically less successful people out of their domains of success break down, they rage. Not because, with scattered and rare exceptions, they're actually being discriminated against, but because these new entrants, perhaps because they had to be that much better to overcome those barriers, frequently outperform them. These men, who for decades have been the loudest about America needing meritocracy, discover they don't do as well as they anticipated when it more fully arrives.

Thus abuse. In this worldview, America is filled with people who are taking from you. People who are responsible for your declining status, in their unjust and unearned seeking of their own. So you want to strike out. You want to degrade the people you blame for making you feel smaller. And by degrading them, by abusing them, you can feel bigger and more powerful, even if you can't claw back a feeling of actual success. Being an abuser means, if nothing else, you're above the abused. And if you can abuse everyone except the people most like you, then it means you and the people like you are at the top. Which is all the MAGA movement has ever wanted. People like them getting to dominate, getting to inflict abuse without consequences, is what it means, ultimately, in their minds, for America to be great.