Appetite for destruction: White America’s death wish is the source of Trump’s hidden support

[malaise]

http://www.salon.com/2016/05/11/appetite_for_destruction_white_americas_death_wish_is_the_source_of_trumps_hidden_support/
<snip>
Is an “October surprise” that could put Donald Trump in the White House already baked into the American electorate? That’s the frightening question one could derive from this week’s column by Thomas B. Edsall, one of the most useful (and least ideologically hypnotized) contributors to the New York Times. We can’t be sure how many people really support Trump, Edsall reports, since there’s considerable evidence that they aren’t telling pollsters the truth. Voting for Trump, it appears, is something white people do in the shadows. It’s a forbidden desire that is both liberating and self-destructive, not unlike the married heterosexual who has a same-sex lover on the down-low, or the executive who powers through the day on crystal meth and OxyContin. On some level you know the whole thing can’t end well, but boy does it feel good right now.

I have argued on multiple occasions that white Americans, considered in the aggregate, exhibit signs of an unconscious or semi-conscious death wish. I mean that both in the Freudian sense of a longing for release that is both erotic and self-destructive — the intermingling of Eros and Thanatos — and in a more straightforward sense. Consider the prevalence of guns in American society, the epidemic rates of suicide and obesity (which might be called slow-motion suicide) among low-income whites, the widespread willingness to ignore or deny climate science and the deeply rooted tendency of the white working class to vote against its own interests and empower those who have impoverished it. What other term can encompass all that?

Trump is the living embodiment of that contradictory desire for redemption and destruction. His incoherent speeches wander back and forth between those two poles, from infantile fantasies about forcing Mexico to build an $8 billion wall and rampant anti-Muslim paranoia to unfocused panegyrics about how “great” we will be one day and how much we will “win.” In his abundant vigor and ebullience and cloddish, mean-spirited good humor, Trump may seem like the opposite of the death wish. (He would certainly be insulted by any such suggestion. Wrong! Bad!) But everything he promises is impossible, and his supporters are not quite dumb enough not to see that. He’s a death’s-head jester cackling on the edge of the void, the clownish host of one last celebration of America’s bombast, bigotry and spectacular ignorance. No wonder his voters are reluctant to ‘fess up.

Normal public-opinion polls conducted by telephone, Edsall writes, have consistently shown Hillary Clinton well ahead of Trump in head-to-head trial runs, by a recent average of about nine percentage points. But online surveys compiled by YouGov and Morning Consult tell a different story, showing Clinton ahead by much smaller margins. The most recent YouGov/Economist poll of registered voters, for example, shows Clinton leading Trump by just three points (43 percent to 40 percent), well within the margin of error. Edsall quotes Kyle A. Dropp, who runs polling and data for Morning Consult, estimating that throughout the primary season Trump has gained a consistent advantage of eight or nine points in online polls versus old-fashioned telephone surveys.

[BeyondGeography]

1. It's a denouement of sorts, no question

A bloated, red-faced, white male taunter as standard bearer...feels like destiny to me. Maybe the October surprise is he pops a vein in the middle of a rant.

[FLPanhandle]

2. I wish it was a simple Death Wish

Although I have to point out that these aggregate definitions of what White people think or Black people think are silly (my own white family/friends don't have a single topic we can all agree on, but whatever...)

I don't think White Americans have Death Wish, it's worse. A death wish is fine but when the moment comes to throw yourself in front of the train, common sense usually takes over. If it was a Death Wish in the voting booth folks might let their hand hover over the lever for Trump, but pull away with a sigh of relief a second later.

The people in the article are worse. They are True Believers that the US will somehow go back to the 1950's. True Believers will fight to pull that Trump lever.

The good news is that there aren't enough of these people for him to win.

[cali]

3. Oh please. I hate facile generalisations like this.

I don't think a death wish has anything to do with it.

[BillZBubb]

4. Accusing AA Hillary voters of Stockholm Syndrome was bad, right?

Now accusing white voters of a death wish is OK?

People are voting for trump for a variety of reasons. A lot of it is economic fear. Choosing trump on that basis might be foolish, but it isn't a death wish.