Donald Trump: Two Americas

Analysis by Tyler Jimenez (University of Missouri)

“…what better way to forge a nation into a unity, to take everyone’s eyes off the frightening state of domestic affairs, than by focusing on a heroic foreign cause?”

—Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil, p. 98

This advertisement for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign compares two hypothetical American futures. The first, with Hillary Clinton as President and presented as “rigged against Americans”, is one in which illegal immigrants consume social security benefits, and terrorists, implicitly linked to Syrian refugees, threaten the security of everyday Americans. The second, with Donald Trump as President, boasts secure (i.e. closed) borders that keep the American people safe. The guiding message is simple; the solving of domestic issues is as simple as detaining, deporting, or otherwise punishing foreign out-group members. This is not a unique strategy; though perhaps the most famous example of the political use of scapegoating is the blaming of the Jewish people for problems faced by interwar Germany, more recent targets include China (Chen, 2010) and African-Americans (Krugman, 2007). Why is this technique so popular? An application of Ernest Becker’s work to this blaming of American issues on illegal immigrants and Syrian refugees reveals it is not a mere rhetorical trick; scapegoating appeals to our deepest concerns about our existence as an animal that has to die and knows it.

In his masterful Escape from Evil, Becker applied the final thesis from The Denial of Death, that humans create symbolic systems of meaning to allay existential anxiety rendered by knowledge of inescapable mortality (Becker, 1973), to the problem of human evil. He merged Marxist materialism with psychoanalysis, in keeping with the tradition of the Frankfurt School, to arrive at an existential dialectic in which history unfolds as a series of ‘workings out’ of existential concerns on others (Becker, 1975). Scapegoating is one such of these ‘workings out’. Before we get in too deep, let’s unpack Becker’s basic dynamic.

The recognition of death’s inevitability creates anxiety. To manage this anxiety, humans construct and adhere to symbolic systems of meaning, or cultural worldviews, that provide answers to the “big” questions of existence, e.g. Where did we come from? What is the correct way to live? What happens after death? These cultural worldviews also provide avenues for self-esteem maintenance. Together, cultural worldviews and self-esteem mitigate death anxiety by convincing people of their status as contributing members to a symbolic, and thus eternal, world of value and meaning. So, even if physical death is inescapable, one may live on through contributions made to their culture (Becker, 1973). This, however, does not completely solve the fundamental problem, as “the terror of death still rumbles underneath the cultural repression” (Becker, 1975, p. 5). So what does this ‘rumbling terror’ influence? Enter scapegoating.

Here is Becker’s basic explanation of scapegoating: guilt is projected onto the other to be destroyed. According to Becker and other existentialists, guilt develops from existential concerns such as the responsibility of self-creation, the loneliness and danger of individuality, and the limitations and fate of an animal body (see his perceptive passage on the nature of guilt in Escape from Evil p. 32-37). These issues arise from the heart of human existence and have been thusly labeled “ontological” (p. 35) and “metaphysical” (p. 103); simply, guilt is an inherent component of human existence. Guilt is also a very abstract concept that must be concretized in order to be managed. This is accomplished by projecting personal guilt onto out-group members that can then be destroyed, giving the person power over death and allaying their own existential concerns.

Recent social psychological experiments have exemplified this process in a nice way. Sullivan, Landau, & Rothschild (2010) found that exposure to external dangers increased attribution of influence to an enemy figure. In this experiment, and scapegoating in general, disparate dangers and anxieties are focused upon a single target, which can be destroyed, and the problems “solved”. Another study confirmed this grim conclusion; news of out-group deaths minimized anxiety following an existential threat (Hayes, Schimel, & Williams, 2008). We can now see why the use of scapegoating in political advertisements is so widespread and effective; it mitigates the guilt and anxieties of a conscious existence.

References

Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press.

Becker, E. (1975). Escape from Evil. New York: Free Press.

Chen, D. (2010, October 9). China Emerges as a Scapegoat in Campaign Ads. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/us/politics/10outsource.html

Hayes, J., Schimel, J., & Williams, T. (2008). Fighting death with death: The buffering effects of learning That worldview violators have died. Psychological Science, 19(5), 501-507.

Krugman, P. (2007, November 10). Innocent mistakes. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/innocent-mistakes/

Sullivan, D., Landau, M., & Rothschild, Z. (2010). An existential function of enemyship: Evidence that people attribute influence to personal and political enemies to compensate for threats to control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(3), 434-449.