Loyalty to Donald Trump: Is there a need to feel safer in a world of unpredictability and difference?
Loyalty is an instinct, evolved in humans over thousands of years, that draws people together through the safety of sameness.
Anxiety has evolved to “fight or flight” against anything that threatens that sense of predictability and safety.
Technology Has Made Our World Smaller
Over the past twenty years technology has brought us social media, cell phones, global transportation, and constant access to negative news stories. We now have daily exposure to cultural and ethnic diversity. We experience a daily flood of opinion and constant challenge to our values and beliefs. And when COVID-19 struck the United States in early 2020, fear and unpredictability increased furiously, resulting in emotional reactivity and detrimental social isolation. And when we can’t predict or understand something, we develop anxiety and fear, which fuels protective behavior.
While exposure to diversity offers vibrant challenges to stuck ways of thinking, those continual challenges to our values and beliefs can contribute to confusion, anxiety, and fear. I think of the television show from the 1970’s, Little House on the Prairie, which is about how shared values and beliefs help to establish a loyal community offering the safety of sameness. Like a child’s love of a cardboard box fort, people seek safety, predictability, and controllability.
Like a child’s love of a cardboard box fort, people seek safety, predictability, and controllability
What is Loyalty?
- Does it make me feel safer?
- Does it make my life easier?
- Does it make my life better?
According to James Kane, these three signals tell us to begin the process of developing loyalty to another person, community, product, or political orientation.
He suggests that when those signals are affirmed, we move into the process of establishing a loyalty, which consists of three essential elements: trust, belonging, and purpose.
Trust
Trust can develop when someone else’s standards of competency align with our own. Mr. Kane explains that their competency needs to meet our standards before we can trust them, even if our standards are unreasonable. He states that the same holds true for their character (are they fair, moral, and ethical), their capacity to deliver what they promised, and their consistency of delivering that promise.
Mr. Kane noted that when we feel unsafe or threatened, we tend to trust subjects of loyalty rather the experts to whom we have less loyalty. Was this dynamic playing out when groups of Americans failed to heed the warnings of Dr. Fauci, the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, amidst the COVID-19 crisis?
My guest notes that in the process of developing trust, individuals must know the standards of their potential followers and must appeal to those standards. This speaks to the second element in the development of loyalty: Belonging
Belonging
Do followers of Donald Trump feel a sense of belonging in their community? To establish this sense of belonging it is essential that Donald Trump show that he has insight into the hopes and dreams of his potential followers. He needs to be sure that he makes them feel included, wanted, appreciated, and valuable. His followers want to be able to identify with him and for him to be someone to whom they can aspire and relate. This is an important piece in the process of developing loyalty to Donald Trump. His followers may be seeking solidarity.
Are people experiencing fear and unease because of increasing differences in American values? Is that difference driving people to seek out individuals, communities, and movements that will help them return to a place of safety and predictability? In my opinion, Donald Trump and his fellowship is a manifestation of fear that comes from challenges to American morals, values, and beliefs. Mr. Kane notes,
When a large group shares a common purpose the glue that holds them together becomes stronger.
Purpose
Mr. Kane suggests that the larger the group that shares a common purpose the stronger the conviction of its members. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. When members believe that they stand for something larger, and when they sense that the leader is committed to that common purpose, their desire to remain loyal to that following is much greater.
But what would happen if members of the community no longer experienced a sense of shared purpose and belonging? What if members of the Trump fellowship began to recognize that those that they stood beside as they broke down the doors of our nation’s Capitol represented values, morals, and ethics that were vastly different from their own? I will return to these questions shortly.
Summary: What Creates Loyalty to Donald Trump?
Reflecting on my discussion with Mr. Kane, I believe that Donald Trump was able to establish a community in which its members feel safer and that their lives are better as a result of the decreased threat of diversity under his leadership. One of Donald Trump’s campaign promises was to build a wall to protect us from the threat of diverse values and beliefs. He promised to put America first and to keep out anyone that might threaten the way American values. He promised to return America to when it was “great,” to when it felt like home. And Donald Trump proceeded to fulfill that promise by attempting to drain the swamp that enabled the diversity of thought, values, and morals that enlivened a sense of unpredictability and fear.
Donald Trump has also shown a years-long consistency in his “brand” of morals, ethics, and values. He presented in his Presidency as he did on The Apprentice years before. His consistent values and his authoritarian, strict-father morality seemed to appeal to those who sought the safety of a family in which the parents are firmly in charge. He promised a secure base into which they can retreat under the threat of diversity. He created a community that fostered a sense of belonging and purpose.
The Capitol Riots
Even groups of the same contain their own diversity. And James Kane suggests in this interview that those in attendance at the riots on the steps of our Capitol represented the previously unseen plurality of the pro-Trump community. But what if the coming-together at our Capitol revealed a fellowship whose own unforeseen diversity of values and behavior violated the sense of safety that is essential to loyalty? This is exactly what Mr. Kane suggests would begin to break down the loyal community of followers of Donald Trump. Do members now see that their fellowship of sameness is as diverse as America itself?
Donald Trump knows that by dismantling an establishment’s internal sense of safety, purpose, belonging, and trust he can dissolve the loyal fellowship, allowing him to rebuild an America on the back of his rendition of greatness. And he nearly succeeded.
But have the events at our nation’s Capitol backfired? Have the riots dissolved the sense of safety, belonging, purpose, and, ultimately, trust that is essential to loyalty to Donald Trump? Is it possible that the whole is no longer greater than the sum of its diverse parts?
(The above is the post-interview reflection of Greg Kovacs, LMFT and does not represent the opinion of James Kane.)
