A Nation of Children

I see and hear comments in the media, about how we have elected “a toddler” to the White House. Obviously what they mean to say is that our president behaves like a child – not imaginative and playful and innocent, but reactive and manipulative and narcissistic; not so much childlike as childish.

It does strike me as odd how long-standing Republicans and reluctant Trump supporters that I know are willing to overlook these traits. We would have been even worse off, they say, had we elected Hillary as president. Apparently Donald Trump was the lesser of two evils. While all politicians have a shadow – and of course we need to admit that each one of us has a shadow side as well – I wonder if Trump’s “dark side” is something our nation and the world can bear for very much longer.

Trump supporters frequently say they voted for him because he “tells it like it is” and that he’s not afraid to “take what belongs to him” – which presumably, with him acting on our behalf, will also translate into taking (back) what is ours. And that may be true … for wealthy, white, heterosexual male citizens and corporate executives in these United States.

That’s not all of us, for sure; indeed it’s only a very small percentage of our population. And the fact that Trump himself belongs to that exclusive and elite group doesn’t seem to matter.

Putting partisan politics aside, I’d like to analyze the rise of Donald Trump to the US presidency not in terms of political philosophies, moral values, or as the final ascendancy of capitalism (wealth, individualism, private ownership) over democracy (equity, communalism, public access) out of the historically creative tension of these two ideologies. Instead I will contemplate how this kind of person arrived at the helm of our nation’s leadership.

My theory is that Trump’s election is symptomatic of something going on in each of us – or at least in most of us, even if “most of us” (i.e., the majority) didn’t actually vote him into office. I’m thinking of our nation on the analogy of an individual human being: each of us has an animal nature (our biophysical body), an inner child where we process life experiences and respond emotionally, and a higher self that enables us to take a more rational perspective in constructing a larger and longer meaning of life.

Now as adults, the pattern of reflexes, moods, strategies, and beliefs that formed when we were children is still carried within us, in an emotional complex called our inner child. You know what I’m talking about. It’s that part of us that gets triggered by stress, illness, hunger, pain, and loss (or the threat of these). Our emotional inner child is oriented and motivated by a desire for security, that there is enough of what we need and we can trust those around us.

Because we weren’t in control of the world back then, we relied on our taller powers for what we needed. And because they had their own inner children that got triggered occasionally (or chronically), we had to devise means of getting our way when they didn’t deliver, interfered, or weren’t around to help.

These ‘adaptive strategies’ soon became our modi operandi when things didn’t go our way, and for the most part they worked, if not entirely or all the time.

As our strategies were really intended to manipulate the outer world in order to get what we needed and feel secure (safe, loved, capable, and worthy), I prefer to call them neurotic styles. It is these which partly make up that emotional complex of our inner child. When we feel threatened somehow, our insecurity is triggered and those old patterns turn on and take over. From the perspective of other adults around us, we are suddenly being childish, unreasonable, selfish, and neurotic. And it’s true.

When life is manageably stable and we have enough of what we need, our higher self can lead the way. We can take in the larger picture and see farther down the road. We can project alternative scenarios of the future, consider different sides of an issue, include others in our decisions, take responsibility for our actions, and be mindful of how our choices affect the systems to which we belong.

When our higher self is engaged, we tend to vote for candidates who demonstrate these same virtues of adult rationality.

But when our security is threatened, whether by changing conditions and actual events, or because some alarmist has triggered our fear response, it’s more challenging to keep our higher self online. Instead, our inner child takes over. The inner child of candidate Trump said just the right things to make a large swath of American voters believe that their America had been stolen from them and they had the right to take it back.

Back from China and its cheap tricks. Back from Mexico and its drug lords. Back from cheating trade partners. Back from Big Government regulators. Back from Blacks, from women, and from homosexuals. Back from the poor, insofar as they are freeloaders on our wealth and freedom.

Soon America will be “great again.”

His tantrums sounded bold and confident. He could be guilty of narcissism, if he didn’t have our best interests at heart. Finally, someone showed up who could speak power to truth and confirm what we had been afraid of all along. Does it matter that he says and does whatever it takes to get his way – what I coined “Trumpence”? Well, no (says our inner child); getting what you want is really all that matters.

So, my theory goes: The American people elected Donald Trump as president because – at least at the time, and probably still – we were a nation of (inner) children. Traumatic, global, infrastructural, and systemic changes had pitched us off-balance, prompting us to imagine any number of apocalyptic scenarios where we would never again get what we needed.

With our security threatened, what choice did we have? More of the same? Complicated plans that would take years to realize and all of us working together? Unacceptable! There’s no time for that.

Like other emotional terrorists, candidate Trump poked our insecurities and promised that we could get back what we (never) had. Our body was old enough to vote, but the part of us that penciled in the bubbles and pulled the lever was much less mature.