Explaining Trump's Support

THERE IS BEGINNING TO EMERGE, quite predictably, a considerable body of literature, consisting mostly of magazine articles, exploring the question and attempting to explain the support for Donald Trump. Those who say they support him because he says what he means also tend to defend him by claiming that he doesn't mean what he says. Conspicuously, his support resides within the most conservative, religious segments of the American demographic. It is noteworthy that political conservatism and devout Christianity tend to go together in the United States. The obvious explanation is that both are predicated on veneration of tradition. Trump, by espousing nationalism and eschewing internationalism, by parroting traditional values, fills the bill. Racism, contempt for immigrants and foreigners, disregard for mandated equality, a preference to allow various forms of inequality, economic, social, gender, are traditional American values, the idea being that society should be left alone to manifest as the sum total of individual preferences, without any artificial adjustments based on pressure from government or social activism. Whether racism is repugnant isn't the issue: the salient fact is that people should be free to be racist, without being shamed into abandoning it. Liberals and conservatives are "hard wired" in fundamentally different fashions, studies indicate. Conservatives are more responsive to fear, and see the world as a far more threatening place than do liberals. Trump, by constantly talking about threats, appeals to conservatism. The rapid rate of change in American culture during the past several decades has created the notion among conservatives that all traditional values are under attack, including capitalism and Christianity. This is true, in that the percentage of Americans who disavow religion and capitalism is increasing, and has among millennials reached a high percentage, well over half. Although socialism has long been popular (in both the elections of 1920 and 1932 more than one million people voted for socialist and communist candidates for president), and is of course the means of production and distribution of most basic goods and services, including police and fire protection, and streets and highways, it retains, despite its long tradition in the United States, the stigma of being "radical", liberal. Conservatives seek order, conformity, and transparent explanations. Liberals show a preference for the ambiguous, and for innovation. That we live in an ambiguous, innovative culture bodes well for the continuation of a historical trend which could be called a law of cultural nature; that society inevitably discards all traditions, and tends to move from away from deeply established cultural norms, and towards change, away from today's conservatism, and towards today's liberalism, which eventually becomes tomorrows conservatism. this does not bod well for enduring support of Trump, and seems to indicate that his current popularity, though quite limited even now, will wane greatly in the near future, and that Trump will eventually be among the most reviled figures in American political history.