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Will Those Lacking Meaning in Life Vote for Trump or Biden?
Right-wing authoritarianism may protect people’s sense of meaning in life.
Posted November 3, 2020 Reviewed by Matt Huston
Erich Fromm saw it all coming. We modern people are free to live our lives according to our own choosing. You can choose your goals in life, you can choose your values in life, you can even change your religious beliefs, like those 42 percent of Americans who currently have a different religious affiliation than they did in childhood.
Fromm noted how we modern people are “freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society.” However, while many celebrate this liberation from the shackles of tradition, Fromm realized that the cultural framework provided by tradition was what gave most people a robust sense of meaning in life. It helped us to put things into a larger framework and gave us clear direction and values. Absent that framework, the modern person is “anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds.” Instead of liberated, many people feel abandoned. And, in their desperate search for certainty, comprehension, and direction, they are willing to surrender their freedom to the first authoritarian leader who comes in and provides simple answers to complex problems.
Erich Fromm, who wrote his Escape from Freedom just after the Second World War, saw the anxious search for meaning caused by too much freedom as one of the root causes of the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, the atrocities of which are all too well known. In recent years, many have returned to Fromm to try to understand the rise of populist right-wing leaders in the USA and across Europe.
Also, empirical psychology has paid heed to the topic. Jake Womick from the University of Missouri and his colleagues examined people’s political ideologies and found out that conservatives, on average, experienced more meaning in life than liberals. More alarmingly, they also found that people endorsing right-wing authoritarianism—characterized by submission to a strong leader, conformity to traditional values, and aggression towards out-groups—experienced an even stronger meaning-in-life surplus compared to others.
Moreover, it seemed that right-wing authoritarianism may have protected people’s sense of meaning in life: While feelings of anxiety, loneliness, and existential isolation were related to lower experience of meaning in life, for those endorsing right-wing authoritarianism, this relation was weaker. Right-wing authoritarianism thus might have worked as an “existential buffer” that protected one’s sense of meaning from the ill effect that anxiety and loneliness otherwise can have.
Sociologist Richard Sennett argues that a growing number of American people feel that they have been left behind. Hard-working people with strong work ethics, they’ve noticed that while the rich have gotten richer, their life has not significantly improved in decades. This is visible in the statistics that show how, after adjusting for inflation, the average hourly earnings of U.S. employees peaked in 1973. Since then, whatever gains there has been in the economy and productivity have mostly gone into the pockets of an increasingly narrow elite. Add to that the rising costs of college and health care, and many U.S. citizens seem to feel that the system has betrayed them and that their hard work is not rewarded. They may further feel, in the words of Sennett, that the ruling elite is “in collusion against decent, hard-working Americans like themselves.”
Attempting to navigate the increasingly volatile and insecure job market, they’ve lost touch with the American Dream that animated people in the post-war decades. Because of this, their sense of purpose, meaning, and identity are threatened. Looking for a way to regain a sense of dignity and value, and lacking trust in the mainstream political leaders, many are highly receptive to the message of an authoritarian leader promising to "make America great again" by pointing out enemies (immigrants, China, etc.) whose fault everything is. Unity, dignity, and purpose through having a common enemy and feelings of superiority from being part of the chosen group — the appeal is strong for those whose traditional sources of meaning have failed them.
Regaining the trust of this group of people, making them want to vote for the system rather than against the system, is not going to happen through pointing out the flaws of their chosen leader. The leader is just the channel through which they can express frustration that has boiled for decades. What is needed to win them back is real change in the system. Only when they start feeling that their labor is rewarded with better life conditions, when they feel more secure and able to support their families, will the tide turn.
Even if Biden wins the short game of gaining the presidency, Trump supporters—an estimated 30% of Americans—will not disappear. To regain their trust, words are not enough. The long game may be won by the politician who is able to put in place policies that ensure that people no longer feel left behind but feel that the fruits of the economic gains benefit them. Giving people better reasons to feel a sense of dignity and purpose is the only long-term solution.
References
Womick, J., Ward, S. J., Heintzelman, S. J., Woody, B., & King, L. A. (2019). The existential function of right‐wing authoritarianism. Journal of Personality, 87, 1056–1073.
Fromm, E. (1965). Escape from freedom. Avon Books.
Martela, F. (2020). A Wonderful Life: Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence. Harper Design.
Kay, A. C., Whitson, J. A., Gaucher, D., & Galinsky, A. D. (2009). Compensatory Control: Achieving Order Through the Mind, Our Institutions, and the Heavens. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(5), 264–268.
