The changes in the American political scene following Barack Obama’s departure from the White House and Donald Trump’s arrival have been so abrupt and dramatic that there’s been a tendency among Americans to view Trump’s rise to power as a rare anomaly.  But when considered from the standpoint of the Eight People-Oriented Ways of Explaining Today’s World, his ascendancy represents surprisingly little that is actually new.

In many ways, Trump’s style and appeal are simply elaborations on George W. Bush. For starters, Trump demonstrates a similarly improbable ability to tap into today’s mood of anti-establishmentism despite his own highly privileged status.  Trump has aptly been called a poor man’s idea of a rich man, doing things like flying around in not just a small private jet, but a giant commercial airliner emblazoned with his name, which most wealthy people today would consider tacky to a cringeworthy degree.  But the more that sophisticated people roll their eyes at this kind of behavior, the more people far below his economic status love Trump for it.

Also like Dubya, Trump capitalizes on our ambivalence toward celebrity.  Although when he launched his presidential bid he’d been on television long enough that virtually everyone in America knew his name and face, with the lack of respect he’s been shown at high levels of society, ordinary people readily identify with him as a spurned outsider.  This sense of shared rejection, combined with Trump’s being in a position where his voice is big enough to be heard, can make him seem like the perfect champion.

When it comes to embracing idfulness, The Donald exhibits another Bush 43 trait—only to a degree that makes  Bush’s rowdiest wild-hair experiences seem more like the occasional hijinks of a choirboy.  Bush may have been prone to raising a bit of hell in his younger days, but having been reared according to his dad’s strict patrician standards of good manners, it’s inconceivable that he could have bragged to Access Hollywood about treating women the way Donald Trump did

Trump also follows in Bush’s footsteps in tapping into frustration over devalued manhood, casting himself with remarkable success in the role of a “man’s man.”  This has actually been no mean feat for a guy who, in attempting to demonstrate machismo, habitually uses the extremely recent and decidedly girly expression, “punch him in the face” (as if getting into a fight would normally involve hitting a guy in the shoulder, or elbow, or someplace else similarly inconsequential—or that a physical altercation would likely end with the throwing of a single punch that didn’t knock anybody out.)  This expression sounds more like a coda to stamping a foot and hissing “I’m so mad I could spit”:  “I’m so mad I could…I could just punch him...punch him in the face!” It speaks volumes about what’s happened to men today that a lot of us are able to take such a statement as a sign of toughness.

Contemporary Americans’ proclivity for cognitive cocooning has likewise helped Trump in the same way it did George W. Bush.  The difference again is just in the extraordinary degree to which Trump has elevated techniques for playing on this tendency.  Instead of simply relying on Fox News to shield his supporters from facts that might make him seem less appealing, Donald Trump goes out and essentially makes up his own news—a kind of alternate reality that many people have shown themselves not only willing, but eager to accept. While this phenomenon can be unsettling to watch, it is in another sense unremarkable.  When huge segments of the electorate have already willfully blocked out all information that doesn’t support the views of the world they find emotionally satisfying to hold, what other kind of politics could reasonably have been expected to result?

The kinds of reports people now choose to listen to or block out reflect, in turn, another contemporary phenomenon: identity through sub-groups.

And what drives people to derive their sense of self in this manner?  It would be difficult to find a better explanation than feeling small and insignificant. Living in a world whose scale dwarfs us all, making our greatest personal accomplishments feel inconsequential, while immersed in an environment where almost everyone around us is a stranger, and therefore unable to appreciate us for our personal attributes, it is no accident that people today feel devalued—and deeply resentful of it.  In reaction, they affiliate with all manner of groups that perceive themselves as similarly disrespected, but are at least big enough to make their rage about it heard.  Thus we find ourselves in a toxic stew of angry neo-tribalism, where everyone’s core message seems to boil down to “I might not amount to much, but you’d better not mess with my tribe!”  

What makes this trend especially ominous is that it is by no means only a Trumpian, or even American, development.  For example, a contemporary citizen of Russia recently expressed the core feeling tellingly when he observed that (I can only quote loosely) in the Soviet era, “There wasn’t enough toilet paper, but everyone was afraid of us, so we were happy.  Now we have plenty of toilet paper, but no one is afraid of us, so we’re unhappy.”

Politics based on neo-tribalism is becoming the order of the day in countries around the world.  Most of us have heard by now of a resurgence of fascist-style aggressive nationalism in France, Germany, and Italy, but an Ethiopian friend tells me that sadly, it’s happening in his country, too.  And I’ve recently read that it’s become well established in Poland and Hungary.  In Hungary’s case, what’s especially instructive is the way that xenophobic rage has been raised against a subgroup that doesn’t really exist in that country:  Muslims (and more particularly, Syrian refugees)

Where all this may lead on the global stage, no one knows.