Prof. Barry Richards
Professor Emeritus of Political Psychology, Bournemouth University. Barry’s publications on the psychology of politics date back to 1984. He is particularly interested in the emotional public sphere, social cohesion and polarisation, freedom of speech, and political violence.
Email: BRichards@bournemouth.ac.uk
U.S. Election 2024
12. The campaigns’ pandemic memory hole (Prof Michael Serazio)
13. America’s kingdom of contempt (Prof Barry Richards)
14. Americanism, not globalism 2.0: Donald Trump and America’s role in the world (Prof Jason A. Edwards)
15. The politics of uncertainty: Mediated campaign narratives about Russia’s war on Ukraine (Dr Tetyana Lokot)
16. The U.S. elections and the future of European security: Continuity or disruption? (Dr Garret Martin)
17. Trump’s victory brings us closer to the new world disorder (Prof Roman Gerodimos)
18. Abortion: Less important to voters than anticipated (Dr Zoë Brigley Thompson)
19. Roe your vote? (Dr Lindsey Meeks)
20. Gender panics, far-right radicalization, and the effectiveness of anti-trans political ads (Dr Thomas J. Billard)
21. U.S. politics and planetary crisis in 2024 (Dr Reed Kurtz)
22. Trump and Musk for all mankind (Prof Einar Thorsen)
23. Guns and the 2024 election (Prof Robert J. Spitzer)
24. Echoes of Trump: Potential shifts in Congress’s communication culture (Dr Annelise Russell)
In 2018, the American academic and writer Mark Lilla’s book The Once and Future Liberal eloquently analyzed why Hillary Clinton had lost to Donald Trump in 2016. Lilla argued that for some time the influence of identity politics on the Democratic Party had driven it, as it had done with liberal opinion as a whole, further and further away from large sections of the American public. His was surely not the only such observation. Yet the scale of Harris’s failure in 2024 suggests that it has been little heeded.
Writing in the Sunday Times on October 3rd, 2024 the British-American commentator Andrew Sullivan said that he would reluctantly vote Harris, though he is a conservative who would not normally be a Democratic voter. The reason was his hatred of Trump: “this absurd man…utterly reckless,” he wrote. The main target of his angry article was, however, the Democratic Party, for its failure to build a clear winning majority. Sullivan listed three areas of policy in which the Biden administration lost voters. Other commentators, and Trump himself, have made much of the Democrats’ record in these areas, which we can refer to as WWW – wall, woke, and war. Unsustainable rates of illegal immigration, authoritarian “progressivism,” and U.S. military involvements lacking in clear purpose are all objected to by majorities of the American people, and seen as problems that the government has failed to address, let alone to fix. Against that backdrop, Trump’s second victory should have been no surprise.
Moreover, this is not simply a matter of the wrong policies. Elections are never straightforward contests about real-world issues and the rational comparison of policies. Feelings and fantasies are also deeply involved, even more than usual in this case since it involves a political party widely seen as having been taken over by a cult. Yet the majority of those who voted for Trump are not cap-wearing members of MAGA. The politics of WWW generate for many the sense of not only having their concerns ignored while “identity”-related agendas are foisted on them, but also of being related to condescendingly and even with contempt.
That may partly be a fantasy; people with low unconscious self-esteem may project that outwards, so that it is others who are seen as denigrating them. But even if that is part of the picture, perceptions of insensitive elites pursuing their own interests and scorning opposition could be well-founded. Biden had already enhanced Trump’s chances by choosing to run, and then to hang on for so long, but his “garbage” comment on October 30th was a disturbing moment. He responded to a comedian at a Trump rally describing the inhabitants of Puerto Rico as garbage, by seeming to say that the only garbage were Trump supporters. This may not only have lost consequential votes, but as an obvious echo of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” moment from 2016 it pointed to the destructive emotional dynamic of contempt that is a key part of the deepest fracture in American democracy. The White House had to suggest he had not spoken that way, but its re-interpretation of his remark was implausible. And perhaps Biden failed to censor himself and allowed that remark to slip out because contempt for Trumpism is out there, intense and common, amongst Democratic elites and their liberal constituencies.
Politicised contempt is not new nor unique to the U.S. It flows in both directions through the often nebulous but powerful sense of a socio-cultural status hierarchy, which is to be found helping to drive so-called “populism” in Europe. But something about American culture, perhaps the harshness of its competitive individualism (expressed in Trump’s life), may be especially hospitable to contempt.
Of course, Trump himself is the king of contempt; it is his default attitude towards most others who are not, at any given time, in his shining circle of supporters. But that seems to be precisely his appeal for many of his followers, those who feel themselves to be the object of contempt in society at large: he invites them to join him in his contempt for others. He inverts their world; he elevates them from contemptible to contemptuous. His complementary claims of love for them, those who feel unloved, are compelling, as much if not more than failures of policy or delivery.
Ideally, Democrats would avoid reacting to this tragic bond between Trump and his public, and to the pain of their own defeat, with more contempt. A lot of emotional effort will be required to sustain hope for American democracy, as that will involve finding respect for others, even for those in red caps so excited by Trump’s promises to them, as well as for those who, while less caught up in the exchange of contempt, may still prefer his professed respect for them to disparagement from the elites. It may be hoped that rational governance can and will proceed beneath Trump’s bombast. Perhaps it will, in parts, though to focus on that is somehow to have completely lost sight of the moral and cognitive collapse that Trumpism entails. Yet, to be fixated on that collapse, and on the bizarre pathologies of the man himself, will continue to feed the spiral of contempt. To break out of that seems to need a clear acknowledgement of the Democrats’ failures under Biden, and a radical reset of ethos and policy around WWW.