So, why did 70M people vote for Trump?
The inner dimension of turbulent change no one's talking about.
Hi friends, if you’re new to this newsletter, it’s part of a resolution to take more risks with my voice as we navigate radical change together. I’ve appreciated the feedback that previous posts were too much to digest, so I’ve dialed back the emotional intensity. And I’d be grateful for any help in connecting with editors / writers at places like Vox & Harper’s as I’ve been challenged to write for bigger audiences! (Shout out to Pete for sending last week’s piece to folks at The Guardian!) Love, M.
Phew. That. Was. Close.
And yet it’s also looking like the election was too close to fully exhale. Trump’s not conceding.
So fasten your seatbelts! We’re going to be experiencing a lot of turbulence until we land at our destination — Inauguration Day. In fact, this may be the rockiest flight Air Democracy has ever flown. (In the meantime, in-flight entertainment may include attempted coups!)
How did we get here? What motivated 70M+ voters to choose Trump?
Pundits have already spilled a lot of ink on these questions — pointing mostly to external factors like demographics and the economy. But the biggest factor that no one’s talking about is the impact of the accelerating pace of change on Americans’ inner lives.
The thing with change is that we usually expect it to be linear. It’s what our brains evolved to expect over millions of years. For most of human history, people largely stuck with the same group of people, and mostly lived the same way from one year to the next. The things learned in youth largely held true in old age.
Challenge is that’s not the world we live in anymore. Change today is exponential. Even in my lifetime as a millennial, we’ve gone from using rotary phones to now carrying devices in our pockets more powerful than the computers that first sent humans to the moon.
And if change was just limited to technology, that’d be one thing. But the changes we’re being asked to make are at the level of our worldviews. The paradigms that help us make sense of the world are being disrupted.
This. Is. Hard.
Unlike my immigrant grandfather (who I wrote about last week) — who chose to uproot his life — most Americans today are navigating disruptive shifts that few consciously signed up for. These are shifts at the level of:
culture — e.g., from majority white to majority minority;
social structure — e.g., from post-industrial to emergent; and
identity — e.g., from insider to outsider.
Any one of these leaps is hard. Combined, they’re overwhelming.
Plus, the narratives that have guided American culture since WWII increasingly no longer hold true. Many Americans can no longer expect to be better off than their parents, to rely on the people living around them to look like them, or to trust that growth is endless.
And when we can no longer rely on old certainties about how the world works, the uncertainty is terrifying. It confronts us with our vulnerabilities.
My grandfather, for example, felt blindsided by my mother when she married into the family. Growing up in an agrarian Chinese culture that valued men because they could shoulder more physical labor, women in my grandfather’s world were naturally second to men. As a result, he assumed that he would be the undisputed patriarch of his family. But my mother, armed with a MBA and her own career, refused to play the role of dutiful Chinese daughter-in-law.
Not knowing how to handle my mom because she didn’t fit into his worldview, in their long simmering cold war, he once signed a family card on her behalf with the Chinese words for “Rubber Stamp” (instead of her real Chinese name). If he wasn’t going to get her to comply, he was going to declare it by fiat.
Said another way, when my grandfather’s identity as a man was challenged, he had no idea what to do. There was no playbook for this in his worldview. And shame arises when social norms we deem valuable get violated. Neuroscience studies now show that the brain filled with shame cannot learn.
So in the face of change, he became even more fixed. He doubled down on the worldview he knew because it was the only way he knew how to re-regulate his nervous system.
It takes a lot of energy and genuine curiosity to hang out in situations that challenge our worldviews. And developing the capacity to handle complexity and uncertainty isn’t something that happens on its own.
It’s not like the physical changes of adolescence that reliably move us from childhood to adulthood. It requires building a set of skills around learning to work fluidly with emotions (vs knee-jerk reacting), questioning assumptions to help us see the worldview we live in, and taking the perspectives of others to understand the worldviews they live in.
My grandfather had neither the support nor the bandwidth to integrate the complexity that my mother posed to his worldview. He was mostly just trying to eke out a living. So to deal with the emotional load, my grandfather reflexively tried to simplify things. He was trying to rubber stamp my mom into a worldview he understood.
So as we see a turn away from science, a turn away from diversity, a turn away from new gender norms in parts of American society — most people aren’t consciously seeking to cause harm, it’s just that it’s exhausting and psychically overwhelming to live in a world of exponential change.
For many, voting for Trump may have been a vote to relieve the tension of navigating a complex world that feels unrecognizable. Voting to “Make America Great Again” may have been a vote to return to a previous, simpler time where it felt possible to confidently navigate life.
Navigating rapid change requires that we become intimate with our inner world. Our inner complexity needs to be at least equal to the complexity of the outer challenges that we face. And given that we’re facing vast global challenges like climate change, developing nuanced inner lives is the work that we all need to do.
I’m curious — where are your worldviews being challenged in these turbulent times? Where do you find yourself reaching for a simple story in the face of polarization?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Shoot me an email, or drop a note in the comments.
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PS, This post is part of a series. See Part 1 here. And see the full archive of past posts here.