Explaining Trump Devotion—and the Allure of Autocrats Throughout History

To find the answer, look at the followers—not the leaders

To many people not especially attracted to Donald Trump’s coarse persona,¹ his ascendancy in 2016 had to be one of the most bewildering events in American history. His increasing popularity—and especially the rabidness of his devotees—stunned the sober and grieved the judicious. Soon, it became clear that Trump was not just fetching the children of George-Wallace-voters. Many suburbanites and professionals were also jamming themselves into his rallies, standing shoulder to shoulder with deep-woods moonshiners and front-yard rabbit-meat sellers.  What a sudden, surprising, and mind-boggling sociological phenomenon.

I, myself, had always described it as akin to The Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which it seemed that certain of your friends and various people you respect would suddenly fall prey to a mind-virus overnight. And as they suddenly repeated the familiar Trumpian slogans or accusations, you would start to hear the slowly ascending violin of so many horror-suspense films.

Stunningly, Sam Harris has also repeated that same Body-Snatcher analogy regarding Trump (in his “Making Sense” Podcast, interviewing Bill Maher) —and so, presumably, many others must have felt precisely the same way:  

We look at these historical antecedents we see that there's a period where somebody like Hitler and the movement behind him, he just looks like a buffoon who's never going to do anything. And,  then, the ratchet keeps turning. You get these incremental gains all in the wrong direction, and at a certain point, real people with real reputations are making the sound that Donald Sutherland made at the end of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's just everyone's been captured and you don't have the society you thought you had.²

How did this dark national-hallucination occur? People have been trying to explain the allure of various dictators and cult-leaders for centuries—often referencing their charisma, cunning, animal magnetism, inspirational speaking, commoner-touch, reptile-brain, and/or a host of other factors. But as the insightful Canadian philosopher Norm Macdonald once pointed out, maybe there is more to the story: