Adam Smith on Donald Trump
Paul Sagar
11. Nov. 2020
J
oe Biden will be the 46th President of the United States. But for many onlookers, it was a shockingly close affair. Not just because the polls indicated a much more decisive win for the Democratic Party candidate than eventually transpired, but because to those who opposed incumbent President Donald Trump, he was an unspeakably awful figure whom no sane or reasonable person could vote for.
The lies; the unbridled selfishness; the nepotism and corruption; the vicious attacks on anyone and everyone who dared cross him; the repeated law-breaking; the support for white nationalists; the multiple allegations of rape and sexual assault; the wanton disregard for democratic norms; the sadly predictable attempt to deny the legitimacy of millions of American votes. And this isn’t even a complete list. How could anybody vote for that? Indeed, how could more people vote for that in 2020 than did in 2016?
This state affairs remains puzzling to many. But it won’t be to those who have paid attention to the writings of the great Enlightenment philosopher, economist, political theorist and historian Adam Smith.
In the first place, and as Smith emphasised, this is because wealth and power are sources of authority in human psychology. Smith agreed with his friend, the philosopher and historian David Hume, that all political power ultimately rests on ‘opinion’: the belief the ruled have that the rulers ought indeed to rule. A major source of authority rooted in opinion is wealth and the present-possession of power. Humans have a tendency to think that not only are the rich in their position of privilege because they are talented, but that this talent gives them a good claim on our political support. Back in 2016, Trump projected the image of a billionaire who would go to Washington and use the independence his wealth gave him to ‘drain the swamp’. It didn’t matter that this was all a lie: that in reality he was a serial entrepreneurial failure who inherited what wealth he did have, and has succeeded only in squandering most of it on bad investments, leveraging his reality TV personality status to keep the debt-collecting wolves from the door. Many people thought that he was spectacularly rich, and that got him an awful long way.
As Jacob T. Levy has emphasised in recent writings, however, the effect of established institutionalised political authority is that it can increase the level of deference to those who hold it, even when they do not deserve it. Trump’s four years in office not only normalised him, and made voting for him more acceptable than it might have been in 2016, the trappings of his office were likely to have made people more forgiving of his character failings than they were before. The effect is a sort of self-reinforcing impunity granted to those who have wealth and power. Smith warned of precisely this phenomenon when he wrote that ‘This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments’.
But it goes deeper than just the tendency of human beings to disproportionately admire the rich and powerful. After all, to many observers Trump was just so awful that he forfeited any claim to authority precisely because of the ways in which he behaved. So, again: how could anybody vote – in higher numbers the second time around! – for that?
Here we do well to turn to Smith’s moral psychology as put forward in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). In the first place, Smith emphasized that we were largely driven by ‘sympathy’, which for him was a technical term referring to the tendency to internalize the sentiments of others and treat them as our own. Insofar as we see another person behaving in ways that conform to the ways we think they ought (and that we would expect ourselves to behave), we get pleasure at this correspondence of sentiments. But if we see others behaving in ways that go against what we think proper, and exhibiting sentiments and behaviours that we are opposed to, this causes us psychological pain and distress. Trump’s opponents found his actions and character so dramatically out of line with what they take correct moral functioning to be that watching him was in many cases a literally painful experience. That pain often led to wild and frantic responses to anything and everything that the President did. Trump’s supporters mockingly came up with a name for the reaction he provoked: they called it ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. It was often an entirely accurate description.
What Trump’s opponents have long failed to understand (and this is itself in part a function of Trump Derangement Syndrome) is that Trump’s supporters simply do not react the same way: that they never have, and never will. And there are at least two reasons for this, both of which Smith can help us to understand. First, the prevalence of a certain love of domination in the human psyche. Second, the pleasures of sympathy that arise from agreeing on who the enemy is, and who one ought therefore to support in moments of political conflict.
In his dissection of the history of slavery in human societies, Smith argued that the practice was clearly economically irrational. Slaves cost more to keep than wage-labourers, and the quality of the work they did was guaranteed to be worse. Nonetheless, as he wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776), ‘The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to freemen’. This impulse to dominate others was strong. Only haltingly, over hundreds of years, had European societies managed to put a lid on it, through the evolution of complex institutional political measures.
Smith would have understood instantly that Trump is a dominator – and that insofar as others have unrealised aspirations of domination (whether they know it or not), to that extent Trump will appeal to them. This is especially true when Trump is dominating and attacking the perceived enemies of those who are already disposed to admire him. If you hate liberals, and the supposed political elites that Trump sends into a demented frenzy, then his egregiously dominating behaviour towards them does not repulse, it appeals.
Trump’s electoral appeal, however, extended well beyond those with aspirations to domination themselves. Many millions who in fact found the 45th President deeply odious nonetheless concluded that, when the chips were down, they had to vote for him regardless. Smith is again instructive here. For he points out that whilst most of us are disappointed if other people don’t like our friends, we can nonetheless live with this without too much distress. What we really struggle with, however, is others not joining us in our dislike, or even hatred, of our enemies, and not taking our side against them in turn. If somebody is our sworn opponent, it usually matters a lot to us that others take our side against them. Crucially, we are liable to forgive many flaws in others, so long as they take our side against whoever we are in conflict with.
This helps explain why so many ordinary people, who actually agree in finding Trump himself utterly abhorrent, were nonetheless able to vote for him. For example, to those who saw the Black Lives Matters protests as a dangerous assault on law and order, then what may have mattered most on election day was that Trump opposed the protestors too. Similarly, to rural, working class, or socially conservative voters who view the Democratic Party as a cabal of liberal elites attacking the foundations of decent American society, then what was most important was that Trump was the principal and sworn enemy of those ‘elites’. Smithean sympathy here thus plays a powerful psychological bonding role: the enemy of an enemy is a friend. And in situations of political conflict, that particular agreement of sentiments will often be more important in people’s judgements regarding who to support than even the very real flaws of a ‘friend’ like Donald Trump.
President Donald Trump speaking in Portsmouth (UK) at the 75th anniversary of the landing of Allied forces in Normandy. June 5, 2019. Copyright: Adam Guz/KPRM.
Off the back of the authority garnered by his (supposed) wealth, Trump was able to assemble two significant constituencies as part of his electoral coalition. First, those who wish that like Trump they too could dominate others in an utterly shameless assertion of power. In an America where old certainties about economic, racial, and gender hierarchies have been undergoing radical change, and where the losers in these processes now constitute a significant portion of the voting population, the appeal of a figure like Trump should never have been surprising. Second, and even more significantly, many millions may well have agreed in reviling Trump himself, but when they got into the ballot booth, the decisive factor was that Trump’s enemies were also their enemies.
In turn, there is no mystery as to why Trump increased his vote share amongst, for example, some Latino populations. It is lazy and naïve of Democrats to assume that minority groups will vote on stereotyped racial lines about which party (allegedly) best-serves their economic interests, or promotes ‘minority rights’, without paying attention to other cultural and psychological factors that may be in play. Assuming, for example, that Latinos in Florida must support BLM because they are ‘minority voters’ may well have missed other, more important, questions to those populations. For example, about preserving their status as ‘real’ Americans, as opposed to the ‘illegal’ Latinos that Trump promised to keep out with his aggressive border policies. Likewise, it should be no surprise that Trump saw only a very modest decline in support from Evangelical Christians. No matter how much church-goers may genuinely have despised Trump’s sinful ways, the abortion-enabling Democrats remained the primary threat – and so Trump easily prevailed as the least-worst option.
This, of course, is far from a complete explanation of why Trump – the worst President in American history, by a huge margin – could come so close to re-election. Questions over the economy, the weakness of Biden’s candidacy, the emptiness of the Democratic Party’s overall message, the role of the pandemic, and many more, are all vitally important too. But there should be no mystery as to why millions more people voted for Trump in 2020 than 2016, given the hyper-partisan nature of twenty-first century American politics. Being mystified here is a sign only of one’s own limited psychological horizons. To expand those, one could do much worse than reading Adam Smith.
Paul Sagar is lecturer in political theory in the department of political economy, King’s College London. He is the author of The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith (Princeton University Press, 2018).
