Loyalty to Donald Trump: Is there a need to feel safer in a world of unpredictability and difference?
Loyalty is an instinct, evolved in humans over thousands of years, that draws people together through the safety of sameness.
Anxiety has evolved to “fight or flight” against anything that threatens that sense of predictability and safety.
Technology Has Made Our World Smaller
Over the past twenty years technology has brought us social media, cell phones, global transportation, and constant access to negative news stories. We now have daily exposure to cultural and ethnic diversity. We experience a daily flood of opinion and constant challenge to our values and beliefs. And when COVID-19 struck the United States in early 2020, fear and unpredictability increased furiously, resulting in emotional reactivity and detrimental social isolation. And when we can’t predict or understand something, we develop anxiety and fear, which fuels protective behavior.
While exposure to diversity offers vibrant challenges to stuck ways of thinking, those continual challenges to our values and beliefs can contribute to confusion, anxiety, and fear. I think of the television show from the 1970’s, Little House on the Prairie, which is about how shared values and beliefs help to establish a loyal community offering the safety of sameness. Like a child’s love of a cardboard box fort, people seek safety, predictability, and controllability.
Like a child’s love of a cardboard box fort, people seek safety, predictability, and controllability
What is Loyalty?
Does it make me feel safer?
Does it make my life easier?
Does it make my life better?
According to James Kane, these three signals tell us to begin the process of developing loyalty to another person, community, product, or political orientation.
He suggests that when those signals are affirmed, we move into the process of establishing a loyalty, which consists of three essential elements: trust, belonging, and purpose.
Trust
Trust can develop when someone else’s standards of competency align with our own. Mr. Kane explains that their competency needs to meet our standards before we can trust them, even if our standards are unreasonable. He states that the same holds true for their character (are they fair, moral, and ethical), their capacity to deliver what they promised, and their consistency of delivering that promise.
Mr. Kane noted that when we feel unsafe or threatened, we tend to trust subjects of loyalty rather the experts to whom we have less loyalty. Was this dynamic playing out when groups of Americans failed to heed the warnings of Dr. Fauci, the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, amidst the COVID-19 crisis?
My guest notes that in the process of developing trust, individuals must know the standards of their potential followers and must appeal to those standards. This speaks to the second element in the development of loyalty: Belonging
Belonging
Do followers of Donald Trump feel a sense of belonging in their community? To establish this sense of belonging it is essential that Donald Trump show that he has insight into the hopes and dreams of his potential followers. He needs to be sure that he makes them feel included, wanted, appreciated, and valuable. His followers want to be able to identify with him and for him to be someone to whom they can aspire and relate. This is an important piece in the process of developing loyalty to Donald Trump. His followers may be seeking solidarity.
Are people experiencing fear and unease because of increasing differences in American values? Is that difference driving people to seek out individuals, communities, and movements that will help them return to a place of safety and predictability? In my opinion, Donald Trump and his fellowship is a manifestation of fear that comes from challenges to American morals, values, and beliefs. Mr. Kane notes,
When a large group shares a common purpose the glue that ho...