Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte (2016-22) was a nasty vulgar man devoid of redeeming qualities. His signature policy was murdering anyone even suspected of drug involvement. Many thousands were killed.
Yet he ended with 88% poll approval ratings. Are Filipinos depraved savages?
Most humans are very nice. In fact we evolved for sociability, a trait having great survival value for our early forebears. It helped a lot being good to one’s tribe-mates. But outsiders, not so much.
That’s a big explanatory clue for a lot of today’s seeming voter perversity. Those Filipinos saw the murder victims as abstractions, not fellow humans. Indeed, saw them as an alien tribe, whose killing would be desirable, a feeling bred into our ancient genes.
What’s great about civilization and enlightened modernity is how much we’ve actually moved beyond that archaic psychology, expanding the concept of one’s “tribe” to enfold many disparate peoples. Some even extend it to non-humans. Yet deep inside, your primitive lizard brain still operates, often hard to override. And people can be lazy that way.
Many Filipinos did not stop and consider that Duterte’s victims could include neighbors, friends, kin, loved ones. If asked, they might have denied knowing anyone involved with drugs. Similarly in America it used be that few people thought they knew any gays. So gays too were abstractions, part of some alien tribe, evoking no sympathy. But once gays started coming out of the closet in droves, attitudes changed; now they were friends, neighbors, and kin. Gay marriage was legalized sooner than we’d thought possible. Whereas trans people, though more common than we’d realized, are still too few on the ground to engender that effect; so Republicans otherize them for political gain.
Then there are migrants. Here again it turns out that when people come into personal contact, the otherness tends to melt away. Recognizing that we’re all just humans struggling along as best we can. And it’s so much harder for migrants.
(Trump pledges using the army to round up 11 million (many of them dreamers who’ve known no other home) into concentration camps awaiting deportation. The logistics are mind-boggling; recall the Holocaust did for “only” 6 million Jews. And removing all those workers from our already overstretched labor force would wreak economic havoc, turbocharging inflation. It’s completely insane.)
A peculiarity of American politics is how immovable most voters are. Compare Great Britain, where the Conservative Party won a landslide in 2019 but now faces annihilating defeat. Those voters are able to rethink. Why not Republicans?
America’s current political pathology — one could call it anti-social politics — is part of a more general sociality crisis, with other people becoming more abstracted. Explored in books like Robert Putnam’s 2000 Bowling Alone, Jonathan Haidt’s recent The Anxious Generation, and David Brooks’s How to Know a Person. The latter recaps statistics on fraying interpersonal connections, with all sorts of impacts on our mentalities. People are more lonely and disaffected. A case in point is the “incel” (involuntary celibacy) thing, some men feeling sexually ostracized.
More broadly, many “ordinary” people feel invisible, shorn of human dignity. Francis Fukuyama wrote of that as “thymos,” using an ancient Greek word, a human need that he believed modern democracy fulfills. It’s a need because of our biology as social creatures. Yet many people, it’s now apparent, feel thymotically deprived and lash out against who and what they blame.
There’s a concept of social capital that undergirds a society; a key aspect is social trust. The basic idea that you needn’t worry (much) that your neighbor will bash your head and grab your stuff. In America, trust has declined markedly in polls. Not that people have grown less trustworthy — it’s a belief that they have. Which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as we treat each other more suspiciously.
One arresting datum Brooks cites is that lonely people are seven times more likely than others to say they are active in politics. He writes that “For people who feel disrespected and unseen, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. Politics seems to offer a comprehensible moral landscape.” Properly hating those you deem properly hateful.
At bottom Brooks sees a failure of “moral formation” — “we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect.”
Only a basically jaundiced attitude toward society could make someone vote for the likes of a Duterte — or a Trump.
