Bad parent memoirs are a big literary genre. Recently I read a very different kind of book, about guided psychedelic experiences. Many who undergo them have problems to work through. Most commonly issues relating to their childhoods. So this book too was full of bad parent stories.
Parenting can be hard. You’re thrown into it with no training, normally with a ton of other stuff on your plate. Many are also compromised by the bad parenting they themselves received — often replicating it in their own parenting. Maybe it’s a wonder we don’t raise more monsters.
Yet can so many parents really be so bad? Mine weren’t, and I don’t personally know of any such situations. But then, I have no exposure to Middle American Christian families. Not to say those are necessarily problematic. But it’s easy to understand why many might be. Certainly often repressive. And as that book suggested, harboring childhood resentments does seem disturbingly widespread. This includes familial sex abuse.
Could this be at least a partial factor in America’s toxic politics? People’s childhood traumas and resentments bleeding into their politics? Wouldn’t that seem inevitable?
Of course we’re really talking here about the Trump cult. A study of correlation between it and lingering childhood psychic damage would be interesting. One can readily see how that would manifest in so many aspects of Trump support — the deep distrust and even antagonism toward the conventional institutions of society, drawing tribalistic lines of us-against-them, hating and fearing the “them,” as opposed to communitarian solidarity, empathy, and compassion.
And there is certainly a very great degree of correlation between Trump support and having been parented by Middle American Christians. Especially Evangelicals, 80% of whom idolize Trump. Theirs is the highest octane Christianity, all full of the most repressive moralism — or, at least, what they convince themselves is moral. Making, in turn, for the kinds of repressed childhoods we’ve been talking about. No wonder so many of these people are so screwed up in how they relate to civic culture.
On the other hand, bad parenting certainly existed in all past eras, during which politics was nevertheless normal. If anything, parenting has improved, with more enlightened ideas proliferating. So how can Trumpism be blamed on bad childhoods? Maybe it’s that he opened a Pandora’s box, giving people a newfound opportunity to act out their worst impulses. Trump providing them an outlet that never existed before. Enabling a lot of previously buttoned up social pathologies to surface.
Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, posited that civilization keeps in check the base impulses rooted in our unconscious. Trump has loosed the dogs of Hell.
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